A fake bowl for the fake flowers

 I finished the coffee filter hydrangeas that I was making. Since I was using paper and paint instead of coffee filters and food coloring, I found that I had to paint each side of each cutout separately. And I air-dried them, instead of using an oven at low heat.

When I bundled them together, I just used a paper clip at the bottom of each bunch, and left the leaves loose. I have some spools of fine wire, but I didn’t need them.

With the flowers finished, I looked around the house for a good bowl to put them, but didn’t find anything suitable. So I ended up taking paperboard from a saltine box, and using strips from it to make a “bowl”.  The quotation marks are because it has no bottom, and is actually only a ring.

I made it by taking two long sides from the box, and making interlocking slots at each end. Putting them together made a shape that was more like an eye than a ring, so I did the same thing with the other two long sides of the box, and slipped the second eye inside the first, rotating it so that the whole thing was reasonably round.

I glued on some scrap paper to cover and hold down the protruding tabs, then I painted the outside with craft paint. The unprinted side of the paperboard soaked up most of the water in the paint, so I did the second coat right away, and from there went straight into applying white puff paint in a geometric design.

The puff paint dried with a shine, while the craft paint didn’t, and the shine contrasts with the non-shiny flowers, so I’m glad I used the puff paint, even though it did run downward a little on the vertical surface. Otherwise, I would have added a coat of something clear like Mod Podge for shine, since the bookshelf the bowl is going on has almost nothing shiny on it, and could use a little sparkle.