I don’ t know if it’s the spring weather, the fact that we just had a bunch of dead trees cut down or our lack of landscaping…but whatever it is, I’ve been obsessing over flowering trees and branches lately.  I nearly run myself off the road when I get to gazing at the blooming crabapples and layered dogwoods. 

I like to bring elements of nature indoor to decorate.  But I certainly can’t bring a full grown tree inside.  So, I decided to put a decor spin on my current obsession:  DIY bloomin’ branches.  I gathered a bunch of interesting sticks from the yard, scoped out my craft closet for unused silk flowers, bought some tacky (meant as ‘sticky’ not ‘trashy’) craft glue and brought out the scissors (um, yes, the kids’ safety scissors because they were the first I found).

I set to work snipping each individual flower at the stem.

Then I simply pulled the stem from the flower and was left with this on the backside…

A dab of craft glue was all it took to adhere the de-stemmed flowers to my branches.  After a few flowers were attached, my first stick looked like this…

I quickly learned it was easier to glue the flowers to places on the sticks where tangent branches came out (the little “Y” where secondary branches were/had been) versus a random straight part.  Many glued flowers later, my sticks were lying out to dry.

Once dry, I placed my newly bloomin’ branches in a large vase (that I already had on hand).  A little bit of sand in the bottom helped to keep the branches placed after I loosely arranged them.  I displayed them on our dining console.

The branches may be a little more autumn-ish than springy, but the good news is they’ll still look like this come fall since they’re fake.  (If they were real, there’s a pretty good chance they’d suffer the kiss of death from my black thumb.)  The best part?  This DIY project only set me back $1.60!  (Somehow, I didn’t own any craft glue.  Weird, I know.)

The boys seem to like the new arrangement!