Monday, October 22, 2012

A Manly Bouquet

My boyfriend's birthday was about a month ago and I had been planning his gift for months. I usually hate getting gift cards for people because I think it's a cheap way out of buying an actual gift. I {love} giving gifts and I usually spend a lot of time planning them out. So I knew exactly what I wanted to get him, but because I didn't know the right sizes and I was afraid of getting the wrong ones - I got him a gift card to American Muscle. This, to me, was super lame, so I had to dress it up and make it special.

Enter the Manly Bouquet
I searched the internet and came across this blog (from Connoisseur of Creativity) that does a great job explaining the steps to make a pretty awesome bouquet of your man's favorite things. It included liquor as well as other goodies, but my guy likes candy.  A lot. I got him a ton of candy. I think that was his favorite part...at least until he opened the birthday card and found the gift card. :)

Some of the stash
I had originally planned to use a vase as the base, but decided against it because I thought the mug idea was much better! Don't read too much into the random stuff here, a lot of it has to do with inside jokes. The bare necessities include: styrofoam, a vase/giant mug, tape and some kind of skewers.

Tape your goodies to the sticks
I had my doubts as to the strength of the tape holding everything up, but I had zero problems!


I bought the mug from Spencer's and at 50 ounces, it is ridiculously big and heavy. This definitely helped keep everything from toppling over, so it was a good investment.

Line with tissue paper and fill with styrofoam
Now comes the fun part! Arrange your goodies like you would a bouquet of flowers, or if you're not gifted in Ikebana, just jam the sticks into the styrofoam any way you like. I'm sure your guy won't really notice the arrangement anyway because he will be too excited about (in my case) CANDY.


And here's another view!


In case you're wondering, he loved the bouquet and tore it apart in minutes. The candy is long gone, but the mug isn't far from sight and it serves as a reminder that sometimes silly ideas can be quite fun!