How to Make a Mum Garter for Homecoming

A homecoming mum is a large ribbon and tissue paper corsage that guys or girls can wear on their arm during homecoming. Instead of running out to buy one, try to make one to save yourself the expense. Follow these steps and you can have a cool homecoming mum garter for your date's arm.

Things You'll Need

• Pencil
• Scissors
• 1.5 inch thick ribbon
• Stapler and staples
• 3 paper plates
• Ribbon
• Garter
• Staples and stapler
• Hot glue and hot glue gun
• Tissue paper mum
• Decorated plates from Sections 1 and 2

Instructions

Build the Base

1. Prepare you plates. Trim the rim off of your paper plates so that you are left with three flat circles. Then use your pencil to poke a small hole in the middle of two of the plates.

2. Cut three inches of each of your school colors in the 1.5 inch wide ribbon.

3. Stack the ribbons on top of one another. Then spread the ribbons out. To show your pride for homecoming, you want to make sure you can see each color.

4. Bend the ribbons by grabbing each of the ends and bringing the ends together. When the ends meet, overlap them. This should give you a shape like one on a gift wrap bow.

5. Staple the ribbon you just bent on the edge of one of the paper plates. Make sure that the pointy part of your ribbon shape is on bottom and that the shaped portion of the ribbon hangs over the plate's edge. The middle of your plate should be empty. This is where your mum will go in Section 3.

6. Repeat Steps 2 through 5 until the entire edge of the plate is covered with these ribbon shapes.

Make Hanging Ribbons

1. Take a second paper plate with a hole in the middle. Cut ribbons of various lengths and staple them to the bottom edge of this plate. The more ribbons, the fuller your homecoming mum garter will be.

2. Put the garter around the middle of this plate, perpendicular to the direction of the hanging ribbons.

3. Use hot glue to secure the garter to the middle of the plate. Make sure you only add hot glue it to one side of the plate--the same side that has the ends of your stapled ribbons.

Put It All Together

1. Thread the stalk of your tissue paper mum though the center hole of the plate you decorated in Section 1.

2. Secure the mum to the plate using hot glue.

3. Place the second plate, the one with the hanging ribbons and garter behind the first plate. Make sure the stapled ends of the hanging ribbons face the back of the plate with the mum.

4. Hot glue these two plates together.

5. Glue the third plate behind the second plate. To do this, you will need to add hot glue to the back of the second plate, but under the garter. Then squeeze the third plate behind the garter to press onto the glue.