Hello Friends! I am so happy you are here.  If you are new to my site, thank you for coming and visiting my blog. I hope you keep coming back.

How was your weekend?  Did you do anything exciting?  The garage sale was a success and now everything is put away and the garages are cleaned up.  It feels so good to have that done and with a little spending money to boot!

Sorry for the technical difficulties with my blog Friday.  I am not too sure what was going on.  I hope it is fixed now.  That was crazy!  I wanted you to see my pictures especially since it was a tour.  GOSH!  If you missed it you can go tour my Guest bathroom HERE, but come right back over to learn how to make your own Cotton stems!

This DIY is for those Farmhouse lover friends.  I see so many people use the cotton stems in all type of decor.  Have you priced them?  You can pay up to $6.99 for just one little stem.  You would need at least 3 to make any type of a nice arrangement.  Hobby Lobby has all their stems on sale for 50% off this week.  Just in case you would rather buy them instead of making them.  I looked online and found tons of sites on DIY Cotton Stems.  I gathered the items up and started making my own.  I wanted to share how I made mine with you.

I hope you enjoy this DIY.  I am not a full blown farmhouse decor girl, I like my own spin of farmhouse.  This is for all of you that love the country type decor.  This would be perfect for you and it is very simple to do.

Here are the items I used to make my faux cotton stems

• Branches: Make sure they have many new twig shoots on the branch.   I took some off our Crepe Myrtle trees and cut some twigs off.
• A bag of cotton balls.  I bought the jumbo size.  I didn’t even use 1/4 of the bag.
• Pine cones.  I used 2 of them.
• Hot glue and glue gun.
• Some sort of scissors or wire cutters to cut the pine cone scales.

If you have followed me you know anytime I bring the nature indoors I like to spray a little flat poly to make sure there are no little critters lurking around.

After I found the right branches I pruned some of the twigs.  My branches were a little light in color so I sprayed a little brown paint on them for more of a darker look. I applied the poly and let them dry.

Next you will want to cut the scales off the pine cones.  Try to get as close to the base as possible.  The longer the scales the better.

Now you are ready to start making your stems.  Take your first branch and sit it in front of you.  Take a cotton ball and pull it apart to make it not so neatly packed.

Once it is pulled apart to your liking add some hot glue to the center of it and wrap it around a twig.  Be careful the glue is HOT!

Make sure that you don’t squeeze the cotton, you want to make it look like it is a blossom.  Place as many cotton balls to your branch as you want.  I left just a few empty.  Keep in mind the more cotton balls you have the fuller it will look.

Now take your scales adding a little dab of hot glue to the end where you cut it off the pine cone.

Attach it to the base of your cotton ball.  I used 3 scales per bloom.  If I wanted it to look like a bud then I used more.

Do the above steps until you have all your branches done.

Cut your stem at the bottom to the length you want.

Seriously…it was that easy.  It didn’t cost much at all.  I bought a bag of 250 jumbo cotton balls for $2.50 which like I said I only used 1/4 of the bag if that.  The branches were free and I had hot glue and pine cones on hand.  Oh….my cotton stem smells like cinnamon. ha!  They were the only pine cones I had.

I made 3 cotton stems.  Let’s just say $2.50 is what I spent for my 3 cotton stems.

As always thank you so much for stopping by. Don’t forget to sign up for my NEVER MISS A POST to receive all the latest from Decorate and More with Tip.  Remember to share my website site with some of your friends.

Thanks again for stopping by I appreciate your visits. I hope you continue to come back!

Have a good week, my friends!

Stay strong and stay blessed!

Terrie