Ballard-Inspired Grass: The $5 Challenge

Lindsay, of the fabulous blog Living With Lindsay, is hosting a "5 Dollar Challenge" on her blog. The mission? To create Spring decor using only $5 worth of materials from the Dollar Tree.

I left for the Dollar Store with several ideas in my head, but I hadn't been to the Dollar Tree in months so I had to look around for a while to see what my options were. I put a bunch of stuff in my cart, waiting for inspiration to hit. As I went by the fake flowers, I noticed "Onion Grass" (chives to me!) in the selection. *Ding - light bulb! :)

I immediately remembered this picture from the Ballard Designs March catalog:

Notice the onion-grass display on the table? It's not even for sale (that I know of), but I circled it immediately because I knew that was something I eventually wanted to attempt. (I'm not even gonna try to pretend that mine looks as good as theirs, but I only had the Dollar Tree to work with, remember!) J

I picked up two packages of onion grass (the last two they had), a square floral foam, and.....
confectioner's sugar.

That's right! I searched every aisle of that store for a low, rectangular container and could.not.find one. I really wanted the project to have angles and not be in a round container. You should have seen me in there, holding up my onion grass to all sorts of different shaped boxes, trying to make it work. I'm sure the employees thought I was bonkers.

To complete this project, I also used burlap (left over from this and these) and a scrap piece of ribbon I had that was wrapped around my box of Target baby-shower thank you cards (I always save ribbon I like - you never know when it will come in handy!).

I cut the top of the box, took the sugar out, and painted it a uniform shade of brown (it's not the shade that matters; I just didn't want bright yellow and blue showing through the burlap). The next few pictures are kinda yellowy because they were taken during Mommy's happy hour(s) - Luke's bedtime! :)

I also took some of the cut-out cardboard and used it to bulk up the sides.

Once it dried, I simply tucked and folded the burlap in and hot-glued it.

In process (it's not supposed to look pretty inside!):

One of the tucked in sides:

Here's what it looks like when finished:

I waited until after this point to cut the floral foam, since I didn't know how much fabric would be on the inside, bulking up the box.

Once I had cut the floral foam to size, I started snipping off about 2 or 3 inch sections of grass to insert. Since the grass is not very wide on its own, it really helps to insert several pieces at the same time so that you can ensure that it will stay.

Here's what it looks like when you start:

Here's how it looks after one stalk was in:

And in its finished state. I hot-glued the ribbon around it for a little something extra.
I thought about trimming the grass to the same length,
but I decided that I liked the natural look.

And there you go! Ballard-inspired grass for only FOUR dollars!

Check out Lindsay's blog for other $5 inspiration! J