Pinterest Win–Pineapple

So in June, it was my cousin Becky’ wedding. Now as I don’t have a lot of money, I wanted to make them something handmade and unique. As they have two houses currently, they did not need a lot of the usual items that newlyweds need. I tried to get answers on decor from her sister, but was not given any good information. So I went on Pinterest and started looking for unique craft ideas. I searched and searched to no avail. And then one day I came across this pineapple.

So I thought to myself that this would be the perfect gift for Becky and Brett. I asked my mom to ask one of her clients for a recommendation for a good bottle of cheap sparkling wine. After getting the name of a good one, went out and bought it and then waited for pay day to come around to buy some Ferraro Rocher. Mom was nice enough to buy me two boxes that had 12 each in them. With those original 24, I mocked out the bottle of wine with the chocolates to get a rough estimate on how many packages I would need to buy. I ended up having to purchase 16 more packages (16x3=48 + 24 = 72!!). After it was all said and done, I had 6-8 chocolates left over from creating the pineapple, so my estimating was pretty spot on.

And now, here is how my pineapple manifested (and turned out better looking than the one that I had pinned originally).

Supplies

• Bottle of sparkling wine or champagne
• Approx 75 Ferraro Rocher (I suggest buying a large box first and then measuring out to get an estimate like I did)
• Green card stock
• Pencil or pen
• Hot glue gun with glue sticks (I used a low-temp gun, regular may work better)
• Clear cellophane wrap (I used the stuff that can be heat shrunk to baskets)
• elastic band

Instructions

1. Start off by opening all the packages of chocolates. I had them spread out on my work table. And plug in your glue gun. Wait for that sucka to get hot.
2. Once your gun gets hot, take a chocolate and put a trigger squeeze of glue on the bottom of it and push against the bottle. Don’t push too hard on the chocolate as it will crush it and we don’t want a deflated pineapple. Start at the bottom of the bottle and go all the way around.
3. On your secound layer, you will want to stagger the chocolates slightly so that they are sitting within the spaces of the first layer. Try to keep them as close as possible.
4. Keep repeating this process until you get just past the shoulder of the bottle. A word of warning, the chocolates like falling out of their little brown “trays” as you keep rotating the bottle in circles. Just leave them off until you are done putting all the chocolates on. Use a little bit of glue to get them to stay back in their little trays.
5. Once all the chocolates are attached, it is time to start making the leaves of the pineapple. The pin that I had found had no instructions at all, so I wasn’t too sure on how to proceed at this point. I ended up googling an image of a pineapple leaf and just free-handed all of them. This is where having the pencil will come in handy, as I kept changing the way that the leaves looked. I drew the leaves close enough that they could just be cut out as one piece and then glued to the bottle. I used about 2 or 3 pieces of cardstock to make all the leaves for my pineapple.
6. You will want to start off with bigger leaves and then work your way to smaller ones as you go up the crown. You can add a bit of curl to the leaves by running them along the edge of the table. I ended up adding the curl by running my finger nail along the center of the leaf. This way you can adjust how much curl each one has. It is easier to do this part before gluing them to the bottle.
7. Keep adding leaves until you work all the way up the stem of the bottle to finish the crown. For the top pieces, I ended up gluing a large piece of green cardstock onto the foil wrapper of the lid to cover the brown. I then added a single leaf to the very top. Once you  have finished adding the leaves, take a look at it and glue in individual leaves wherever you think it could use it.
8. Voila! You have now created a pineapple. Your final step would be to wrap it with the cellophane and secure the loose ends at the neck of the bottle with the elastic. Be careful getting the elastic over the leaves! I did end up getting a bit of help from Justin to do this part. If you use the shrink wrap cellophane, be very careful when you shrink it with the hair dryer so as to not melt the chocolate. You just want it so that it is taught against the chocolates.

Becky loved the pineapple! Turns out that pineapples are her favourite. Needless to say, the bottle of wine will never be drunk. She loves her pineapple.

Overall, I would call this a Pinterest Win!