Living Moss Ball Tutorial

It's done. My fun little entryway spring vignette is done:

I had most of it done for about a week but the part I and most proud of?  The moss ball (far right).  You know why? Because it is the real deal - living moss. Not the fake floral aisle stuff.

There is so much awesome mossy goodness floating around the blogosphere right now. I have a whole board on my Pinterest account dedicated to moss. There are a couple great mossy rock crafts listed on Dollar Store Crafts.  My favorite (as far as the fake stuff goes), though is this one from Make the Best of Things.

She basically takes mossy rocks from the dollar store, peels off the moss and glues it to a ball form.  They look really awesome. But I asked myself: Is there a way to make these out of real moss?  Being a Pacific Northwest girl, I'm surrounded by the stuff. That, and this is what the flower basket on my gate looked like at the end of winter:

Filled. With. Moss.

I want to plant flowers in it, but what should I do with the moss? I felt bad just throwing it away. It needed a good home somewhere else.

I actually spent a couple weeks looking into the living moss ball thing. I couldn't find a tutorial online that used live moss and looked anything like what I wanted. The closest I got was finding this, which is a way to hang plants in the air and some moss gets wrapped around the base. But the bases were also pretty heavily wrapped in string. I just wanted a moss ball.  I knew I needed three things: a way to keep the moss moist and fed, moss, and a way to make it stick in a ball form.  This is what I came up with and I am thrilled with how it turned out:

Supplies Needed:

• Wet floral foam (1 sphere or 2 short cylinder shapes)
• Moss (scavenged from your yard or neighborhood)
• "Greening Pins" (I got a pack of 50 from Jo-Anns for $2)

Spring Vignette in Progress

I've been working on the spring display on top of the book shelf by our door for a few days now. It still needs a few finishing touches but I wanted to show off what I have so far:

The two things I'm missing are a living moss ball (it's going to go on top of that tall bowl of white gravel on the right) and grass growing out of the egg shell on the left (it's still sprouting).

Let me break down the different parts for you...

Countdown to Spring: Front Door Decor

Only 16 more days until the first day of spring!  I'm so excited to bust out some awesome spring green decor to cheer up my home.  I've been seeing some fab wreaths around the blogosphere lately and wanted to highlight a few of my faves. Each of the wreaths I found come with tutorials, so read the rest to grab the links and whip up some fabulous front door decor yourself!