A DIY Mother's Day

So I know Mother's Day was a while ago, but I'm really lazy and just getting around to uploading all of the pictures. I wanted to do something special, more than just the greeting card and dinner route, but since I don't have a lot of money to spend, I got creative.

One of the bees (Miss Plum, I believe?) posted a cute little craft segment involving pens, fake flowers and a flower pot. Since I can't see my mom with a frilly collection of flowery things, I decided to tweak it a little to suit her tastes.

So instead of using flowers, I used... CAT TOYS! My mom is crazy about her cat Puck. Seriously, the cat can do no wrong, and when he does, it's only because of the "bad influence" her other cat Rocky (now our cat Rockstar) had on him. At any rate, I figured it would be cute to tweak the project a bit to suit her needs.

(Because of my lack of originality, and because Jason's mom is a teacher, I made her gift out of the regular flower/pot combo.)

All of my materials:

Flowers, flower pot, pen cup, floral tape, cat toys, paper clips, glue sticks, glue gun, basic pens.








First, you have to take all of the little ends off the pens. Eventually, the lids too.






Next, put a good amount of hot glue into the open end of the pen. You can feel the heat through the plastic, so be careful not to burn yourself! You don't have to fill the entire body with glue, I filled about 1/4 to 1/3 of the way down. The most important thing is that there's enough glue where the toy and the end of the pen meet. Quickly press a toy (or flower) into the warm adhesive and hold tight for a few minutes while the glue initially sets. You have to be careful with the round toys, because if you set the pen down before the toy is set it will roll right off the end of the pen!



Since some of the toys were a little large, I reinforced the bond by putting a layer of glue around the base of the toy/pen. This will be mostly covered up later, and it's better to have the hold too strong than too weak. On several of the toys that didn't have a good surface for sticking straight onto the glue, I threaded a paper clip through them, then glued the entire clip into the barrel of the pen. You can't see the paperclip and it's really good for reinforcing the strength of the bond.

After the glue has completely dried and the bond is very tight, take a piece of floral tape and, starting at the top, wrap it down and around the entire base of the pen. Since I went with both blue and black pens for a little variety, I stopped taping at the part of the pen that shows what color it is, since having toys or flowers on top won't necessarily indicate the ink color. I secured the floral tape at the bottom with a tiny bit of glue, just in case.



That's pretty much the gist of it. I then put the cat toy pens in a pink pen cup (Mom loves pink) and the flower pens in a little glazed flower pot. If you wanted to get really creative, you could even decorate the pot yourself.

The finished products:

Voila!!!