Gift Card Bouquet

I've been wanting to make a gift card bouquet for a long time. I decided my sister-in-law's birthday was just the occasion. A fun fact: Teri was born on February 29, so three years out of four, her birthdate does not appear on the calendar. While she's been alive for 35 years, she celebrated 8 3/4 on March 1. It's a neat coincidence that Trevor is also 8 3/4 this month, just like his Aunt Teri!

Here is the gift card bouquet I made for her. I'm really happy with it. 

I started with an empty pickle jar. (Trash to treasure!)

I put a disc of Oasis floral foam into the jar. It was a tight squeeze, which was perfect. Then wrapped the jar with this interesting metallic twist stuff. It untwists to exactly the right size for the jar! I attached it with Glue Lines, then wrapped white duct tape around the rim to attach it more securely to the jar.

I dug out the Little B Pull Flowers from my FaveCrafts Blogger swag box and made three yellow roses and six garden mums. As I completed each flower, I tied it off but did not snip the ends of the strings. 

I readied the gift cards and some kitchen skewers....

... and tied the flowers to the cards and dowels. There were five gift cards, so four of the flowers didn't have a card.

With all the skewers prepped, I put them into the floral foam. As I worked, I cut some to different heights, just the way I'd cut the stems of actual flowers if I were arranging them. I added a white bow, which hid the white duct tape. The final step was fluffing the flowers just right and adding a strategic Glue Dot or two to pull a flower to better cover a gift card. You can see a slight difference between this photo and the one at the top of the post.

Here's the back. 

As I headed down the stairs with the bouquet to show Steve, I yelled, "Be ready with a compliment because I spent a lot of time on this!" He, of course, gushed about it like the excellent husband that he is. Then he said that it was so nice that we should postpone the planned birthday gift for his mom until Mother's Day and instead give her a birthday gift card bouquet too. I agreed, despite the fact that I didn't have extras of most of the materials I just used. Fortunately, I have a very well-stocked craft room ("well-stocked craft room" sounds so much better than "hoarding problem"), so I was able to make a different version of the gift card bouquet. I'll show it off tomorrow.