I googled the price of fruit bouquets once and I couldn’t believe how much they were charging for a few slices of pineapple, grapes, wedges of melon and a handful of strawberries.  So I decided to see if I could make my own fruit bouquet.  I convinced Ed to make one too for our mothers’ day gifts.  In the beginning, Ed was grumbling about doing “arts & crafts” but then he really got into it and had a lot of fun with it.  It was really cute to watch him try very hard to be delicate with the fruits and thoughtful of the placement of them  🙂  Both of our moms Loved it.  It was so easy that I made one for my friend’s bridal shower too.

I bought a cute ceramic plant pot and filled it tightly with styrofoam balls (although next time I will use a head of dark lettuce or cabbage instead).  I used long wooden skewers, some of which I cut so that my “flowers” could be arranged in varying height.  I washed and picked green and red grapes (for stems), cut cantaloupe and honey dew into wedges (for leaves), washed and dried large strawberries, used a melon baller to make half spheres of cantaloupe (for the centres of my “daisies”), and sliced my whole pineapple crosswise.  Taking a small sharp knife, I carved varying sizes of flowers from the pineapple slices (3 in total).  After that, it was all assembly.

With the pointy side of the skewer down, I threaded fruit from the bottom to the top leaving room on the top of the skewer for the final top pieces of fruit.  I also left room on the pointy end of the skewer to stand it in the styrofoam/cabbage.  When I was assembling the strawberry flowers, I would thread a string of same coloured grapes lengthwise along the skewer from the pointy end up, leaving space on the top and space on the bottom open.  Then holding the skewer on the top, I pushed the pointy end of the skewer into the styrofoam and pushed a strawberry onto the top end of the skewer so that the pointy end of the bottom of the strawberry was facing upwards.  Make sure that the end of the skewer doesn’t stick out of the strawberry.  I did the same thing with the daisies, only I finished the top of the skewer with a pineapple flower and then the half sphere cantaloupe, again making sure that the end of the skewer did not poke out through the fruit.  I arranged the daisies first, then the strawberry flowers and finally the “leaves”.  I skewered threw honeydew and cantaloupe wedges and arranged them around the outside of the “flowers” all the way around the pot.  Finally, to add my own creative touch, I bought gourmet chocolates that were wrapped like bees and lady bugs and placed one each throughout our bouquets.  I had the lady bug hiding in the leaves and a bee on top of a daisy.