It will be a shock to absolutely no one to hear that we love Christmas decorations. This year I wanted to make something to pretty-up what I call the ‘Pass The Party Wall’ in my living room, so called because it’s been painted with plain white ceiling paint to make an easy, low reflection backdrop for our package photos. It also makes it a bit of a sad blank space when we’re not using it! So this year to adorn the 'Pass The Party Wall' for Christmas I made a super easy floral Christmas hoop, using a simple hula hoop. Here’s how you can make one too…

You’ll need a few tools;
-hula hoop
-the faux flowers you want to use
-wire (florist wire or similar is good, I used copper wire my brother helpfully stripped for us)
-wire cutters
-ribbon for hanging
For my hoop I used gorgeous faux Poinsettias from The Christmas Hut here in Christchurch, and some white roses I already had onhand.

Step 1: Prepare your hoop. Depending on what you what you want your finished product to look like, this will most likely mean spray painting your hoop. A couple of quick tips on that, run a bit of sandpaper over it first to rough the surface up, this will help the paint stick a bit better, and when you’re spraying the hoop, to avoid drips do a few light coats of paint rather than one heavy one. My hoop was from a previous project, so it was ready to go.

Step 2: Trim the flower stems to about 20-30cms, this will give you enough of a stem to gather the flowers together, but not so much that they’re sticking out the end of your arrangement. As you’ll see in the photos the roses were about the right length anyway, so they didn’t need trimming. At this point you can also put a bend in the stems, roughly at a right angle, so that the flower will sit nicely once in place. Most faux flowers have wire through the stems so should bend relatively easily.

Step 3: Start arranging your flowers. Gather two together, get them into a position you like and using the wire, wrap the stems together to keep them in place. If you haven’t done this before, it can make things easier to get a buddy to help you wrap the wire, while you hold the flowers.

Step 4: Repeat this process over and over until you’re happy with your arrangement. You’ll need to turn some of your flowers around the other way, so that the stems are going in the opposite direction. That way you won’t end up with a bunch of stems sticking out the end.

Step 5: Once you’re happy with your floral arrangement, it’s time to secure it to the hoop. Making sure you position your arrangement to cover any seam in the hoop, use more wire to wrap around your hoop and the stems, behind the flower heads. The flowers should cover the wire so that you don’t see it on the finished product.

Step 6: Use the ribbon to hang your hoop, or you can also use fishing wire if you want to create a floating affect.

Step 7: Take a photo and post it online so everyone can marvel at your amazing handiwork! Don’t forget to tag passthepartynz so we can see it too.