Strawberry Topiary

Hello everyone! I hope you saw yesterday’s post on Strawberry Roses. Today I will show you how I made this strawberry topiary, which you could use as a Mother’s Day gift!

Most of the time when you see craft and food blogs, everything is so perfect. All the crafts turn out perfectly, all the meals are beautiful and delicious. Usually see the mistakes and the disasters don’t show up on the blog, and all the photos you see are nicely edited and just perfect. I want to disclose that this was a semi-failed project! Not the strawberry roses itself, but my poor choice for the base! I wanted the topiary to look like closely clustered red roses with a very simple white base. I just grabbed the first vase I saw at home and did not consider how top-heavy the topiary would be with all the strawberries! So although the topiary behaved well enough for me to take photos, there were a couple of moments where it almost toppled over! I would’ve probably added something more like a bow, but I wanted to make sure I got good photos in case my project toppled. So please learn from my mistake and use a heavy, wide base for your topiary! 🙂

You’ll need:

• styrofoam ball
• wooden dowels or chopsticks if you don’t have any dowels
• plastic food wrap
• tape
• ribbon
• hot glue gun
• lollipop sticks cut into 1.5-2″ pieces
• a wide, heavy vase
• vase filler – like beans or rice
• paring knife
• strawberries

First, take some plastic food wrap and wrap your foam ball with it so the strawberries don’t touch the foam. Gather the excess wrap at the bottom of the ball. Next, take two dowels and glue them together. I used two for the extra support. Push the dowels into the foam ball, making sure it at least goes 1.5″ into the ball. Tape the excess plastic wrap at the base of the ball around the dowels. Now, use your hot glue gun and ribbon and begin wrapping the dowels, from the base of the ball down. Now you should have a giant lollipop in your hands.

Remember to choose a heavy, wide base. Don’t be like me! Heh. If you have a block of foam that fits in your vase that you can use to keep the topiary standing up, use that. However, if you don’t, this is what I did: Fill the vase with some type of filler like beans or rice. Use tape and tape across the opening of the vase horizontally and vertically like the picture above. The center should have a hole just barely wide enough for your dowels to fit in.

Insert the dowel in that center hole and make sure everything steady.

Now take your lollipop stick pieces and insert them all around the ball. Try to space them out evenly. Once you have done that, you can now start adding your strawberries one by one. I recommend adding the lollipop sticks to the base first and then adding on the strawberries so that you don’t accidentally damage the strawberries trying to get them on the stick. Do not try to insert the lollipop stick in the center of the strawberry where the stem is, because it is too hard. Move off center just a little bit and it will be easy to insert. Once you have the strawberry attached, you can now carve them like in the strawberry rose tutorial. It is not recommended to do the spiral center for the topiary because the strawberries may not be able to stay on the lollipop stick. I recommend just cutting layers until you get to the tip, like the image above.

Work your way around the ball, adding strawberries evenly. Make sure not to add too many strawberries on one side only, or it may topple over. For the strawberries that are pointing downwards at the bottom of the ball, I recommend not carving them, because a cut strawberry may slip off the lollipop stick. As you can see in the image above, the bottom row of strawberries are not cut.

I chose to leave the strawberry topiary as-is because I like the all-red look because it reminds me of those red rose cluster bouquets, but it would also look really cute if you wanted to attach some blueberries, blackberries or grapes to fill in the gaps.

I really hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and I’d love to see any of your creations! Remember to tag me on social media if you do give any of my tutorials a try! Thanks so much for reading!