Celebrate Mom with a DIY Fruit Bouquet

(and make new core memories with the kids!)

In honour of my mom who doesn’t like blogs that ramble on, let’s jump right in on how we made our own beautiful DIY fruit bouquet for Mother’s Day (though these would be great for a host of other occasions and recipients as well)!

Tie clear hair elastics around skewer ends
Decorate your vase
Ready for fruit arranging!

Materials for a DIY Fruit Bouquet!

The DIY fruit bouquets we made had a bunch of components, but feel free to adapt to whatever you can thrift or buy on sale (OR splurge for if you want to buy the proper fruit skewers for example)!

We opted for 2 lengths of bamboo ones so we had some different heights to work with.

After trial and error with a grape, we needed something to stop the fruit from sliding down the skewer. We opted for tiny clear hair elastics. I spent an episode of Paw Patrol tying an elastic around each stick.

Go for a decently heavy vase with a wide base. This will help for weight distribution and stop it from tipping over once filled with tall sticks of fruit. We went with glass square ones.

Have fun making the vase pretty! We used sparkly ribbon and some patterned paper and cut it to match the inside of each vase (hence the fancy scalloped edges that took me far longer than I care to admit to figure out!).

We went with the standard green “Floral Foam Bricks” and cut them (with a sharp knife) to make sure they adequately filled the space. To help make this look a little prettier, we just covered the top in aluminum foil.

We used a star, but anything will do depending on the recipient or occasion! Hearts, flowers, or dinosaurs would look great! I would suggest metal ones to help slice through thick pineapple slices.

Pineapple makes the best canvas for large shapes and stays together once skewered. (I found my watermelon fell apart, so I didn’t end up using that). Since the pineapple wedges need to be pretty thick to skewer properly, I would suggest getting two. Edible Arrangements use big slices of curved melon, but our recipients were not big fans of these, though they certainly look pretty! We filled in the space in ours with grapes, berries, and tangerines.

Don’t forget about the presentation! Clear wrapping paper or cellophane works best, and we secured ours with clear double sided tape and a ribbon. (This is also a great kid-barrier to stop them stealing a bite while handing the gift over!)

Cutting the Fruit

Have fun with this stage, and make sure you have lots of extra fruit for snacking!

Our kids (ages 1 and 3) were no help at all as they basically just ate anything we put into their hands, but they seemed to really enjoy the process. The 3 year old just wanted to keep pressing out stars, that was his favourite bit (we used a small cutting board on top of the cookie cutter so he could press safely).

So while they ate fruit kebabs and laughed maniacally about it, we cut and poked the proper pieces into a separate bowl.

Arranging & Finishing

Feel free to use the arrangement in our picture for inspiration, but I fully just tried to copy a tiny Edible Arrangement bouquet from their website. I actually did the base of fat strawberries first, then stuck in skewers of different heights second. Blueberries on sticks were super filler if I had a gap.

Wrapped up in cellophane and bundled with other items for delivery (like flowers from our garden and GG’s favourite toilet paper we found on sale!), they were ready to go!

If you are doing these the night before, I suggest NOT cellophane wrapping until you are ready to deliver them. The juices from the fruits make condensation on the cello paper and the water droplet haze would hide your beautiful creation!

Overall: 10 Stars (Literally!) for Do-It-Yourself Fruit Bouquets

We LOVED doing these DIY fruit bouquets, and watching the kids have a blast sneaking snacks and “helping” to cut out stars was a great spend of time. Even the yelled out “I have sticky hands!” made for a fun “I have to wash my hands upstairs” bonus activity. Doing these bouquets ourselves was especially touching for our mom and grandmas too. Overall? Priceless.

The actual price at the end of the day though was probably comparable to our Edible Arrangements inspiration. The arrangement they have that is closest to what we did is $59. Between $10 floral foam, a $5 vase, too many skewers and all the fruit we were probably right at that $60 overall. Where we end up being cheaper was that we have enough cellophane wrap, floral foam, sticks, and elastics to make a few more bouquets in the future.

100% would recommend, and we will be doing more of these for other occasions!

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