Adventures in doily ball making

Have you heard of Pinterest yet? It's becoming the most talked about site on blogs lately. It basically organizes all those bookmarks you have saved into a visual pin board. You can categorize them all into different sections. It's highly addictive. I have pinned 560 items so far. Wow. I'm impressed with myself. :)

Anyway. In my early pinnings, I came across this amazing DIY for a doily ball. I was determined to replicate it. I started collecting doilies from Etsy, eBay & my mom got a few for me in Germany. If you're thinking of making one of your own, I have a few tips for you.

• Make sure the doilies you use are thin and light.
This makes them adhere better - all that glue really makes them heavy and you'll be cursing the laws of gravity when they start dropping like flies.

• Use the right glue to avoid hours of frustration.
Plain old regular wallpaper paste works best. I didn't realize that there were so many different types of wallpaper paste. I made the mistake of buying "activator" wallpaper paste. Which is not the same- this stuff is for hanging wallpaper that has been pre-pasted and simply activates the glue. My doilies adhered ok to the balloon, but they didn't dry hard.
I wasn't able to find regular wallpaper paste here in a small quantity, so I had to improvise. I found some fabric stiffener at my local craft store and used that with the activator. The kind I used was called 'stiffy' you can buy it here. It worked, but because I had to use a lot of glue to get them to stick, there was some glue residue that dried in the doily "windows" that I had to poke out.

• Buy more doilies than you think you'll need
During my first try, I ran out of doilies and had to buy more. In the mean time, my balloon started to deflate and (because I used the wrong type of glue) the doilies fell off.

So here's my finished result! It ended up being 4 feet in circumference (though I wish I had made it even larger) and weighing just under a pound. Since I did it in sections, (top part of the balloon first) it took a total of 3 days to complete. For the underside, it was a lot easier to cut it down and turn it upside down resting in a bowl to complete the bottom. I waited an extra day just to make sure it was completely dry and hard before I popped the balloon.
















































I would love to hear if you have tried making one of these too! Oh, and you can follow my Pinterest pins here. :)