DIY: Floral Cake Topper

DIY floral cake topper

I love a pretty cake topper, I mean who doesn’t!? :) I also understand that not everyone has a budget to spend $50 plus on something that makes it into a few great photo ops then sits in a box for the rest of eternity. So, today I have a great alternative from our rad DIY contributors, Jessica + Garett over at Wednesday. With a little time and about $15 dollars you can have a very swoon worthy cake topper too!

DIY floral cake topper supplies

Needed Supplies:
• Green pipe cleaner
• Green and pink fabric
• Little fake flowers
• Little plastic birds (I found mine in the dollhouse section at a crafting store)
• Glitter
• Moss
• Hot glue and gun
• Fabric stiffener
• Ribbon
• String
• Scissors
• Modepodge
• Base (I used a thin slice of wood, but a mason jar lid could be a great alternative)

Step One: To start, make a small 90 degree angle on both ends of your pipe cleaner. Then take the pipe cleaner and curve it from the middle so that it looks like a horseshoe. Smother the two little angles you made on the ends of the pipe cleaner in hot glue and glue them on the top opposite ends of the base. You may need to add additional glue around the piper cleaner for it to stay, but it’s okay, you’ll cover up that ugly glue mess in the next step. Hold the ends of the pipe cleaner to the base until it’s completely dry.

Great now you should have something that looks like St. Louis’ Gateway Arch! Now cover the base of the topper in modgepodge and add moss over it. Press down on the moss so it stays well.

DIY floral cake topper

Step Two: Now comes the fun part of working on the details that will decorate the cake topper and the part where I think glitter goes on everything:

• I cut out tiny leaves out of fabric and covered them in fabric stiffener to make them less flimsy. You can find fabric stiffener at nearly any craft store in the fabric section. Just follow the directions on the back for the proper way to stiffen the paper. Once my leaves were stiffened I lightly brushed the edges with modepodge and dusted them with a little glitter to add to the detailing.

• I also lightly brushed the little pink fake flowers with modgepodge and applied a little glitter.

• Oh, and I bet you can’t guess what I did with the little birds? Yes, I also modgepodged them and covered them in glitter.

Once everything has dried and is sufficiently smothered in glitter, it’s time to hot glue each detail to the pipe cleaner!

DIY floral cake topper

DIY floral cake topper

TIP: a little hot glue goes a very long way on this project. When you are putting the leaves onto the pipe cleaner it is important to only get a hair of glue on the edges of the leaf that will be attached to the pipe cleaner.

The placement of the flowers, birds and leaves is really up to your personal preference, however, don’t feel like each side needs to be symmetrical.

What you put in the middle of the arch is completely up to you. If you two met a concert then stand your two ticket stubs up in the middle, or if you play dominos every night then put a small stack of dominos in the middle (Domino’s?! You know you are culturally irrelevant when that’s your example!) We just added simple bunting that was made by gluing little strips of ribbon to string and gluing it to the arch near the birds.

Ta-Da! By the time you are finished no one even has to know that you started with a pipe cleaner!

DIY floral cake topper

DIY created by Wednesday exclusively for Green Wedding Shoes

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