DIY Oyster Ball

I have a little project to share that I completed last weekend. If you are a Pinterest or blog addict like I am, you see all kinds of projects out there in cyber-land. I have had a 5-gallon bucket full of oyster shells that I have been hoarding since back in October. I kept them thinking I could simply display them in a glass container or find some fun project for them. Well, like most things around my house, they have sat in that bucket for months on end. So it was definitely time to do something with those things! I have seen these pretty gems floating around and at $180 a pop, I figured I could make one myself (although if you click through to see the one for sale, it looks 1,000,000x better than mine does!).

First, gather your supplies. You will need:

• Styrofoam ball
• Hot glue gun/glue sticks
• Oysters
• Spray/craft paint in a white or light gray

My first mistake was relying on Wal-Mart to have what I needed. They had no Styrofoam balls there, but they did have a topiary form. With that weird moss stuff on it. Ladies (or gentlemen) do yourself a favor and get a regular Styrofoam ball. That moss made this project much more difficult than it needed to be! Also, cutting that wire stick out wasn't any fun either.

Prepping the oysters was fairly simple. After shucking and devouring the delicious oysters, I simply threw them in the 5-gallon bucket, filled it with water, and added bleach. That's how they sat for the longest time until I realized that it was attracting too much attention from the wiener dogs, so the bleach water got dumped and shortly abandoned/forgotten. Therefore, they were sitting in a bucket full of rain water and pine straw for probably 3 months! So I brought them in, and gave them a good soak in the sink with hot water and bleach and then just took a scrub brush to them.

 

Then I laid them outside to dry. Once they were dry, I gave them a quick clear coating (just spray paint you can pick up at any hardware store) to make sure that any funky smells would be forever locked in!

Once that was complete, it was time to assemble. **Learn from my mistake and paint your ball before you begin. I didn't and I really wish I did. That green moss sticks out like a soar thumb peeking out between the oysters.

I grabbed oysters that all had about the same length to go around the circumference in the hopes that it would produce a somewhat round shape. Just keep sticking the shells in and gluing them in place. Since my ball had that moss stuff on it, I couldn't really stick the shells in, so mainly I had to glue them in place. This took FOREVER! So word to the wise- I thought this would be like a 30 minute project and it ended up taking me about 3 hours! So it wasn't the quickest project. But that was because I had to hold each and every shell to wait for the glue to set.

 

Just keep going and sticking those suckers in the ball! You can see that I had it sitting on that small container, which was a great way to keep it steady in the beginning.

This ball ended up taking quite a lot of oysters surprisingly. And when I was finished it was super, super heavy!

I am going to go back and try to add a few more shells in the gaps if I can because it needs a little extra. But by the time I got the ball to this point, I was so over this project and didn't want to see another oyster for quite some time. I will eventually go back with a paint brush and some paint and paint the gaps that are too small to fill with another oyster shell. You can really see the gaps in this photo.

This thing is quite large, so if I make another one, I will be getting a smaller Styrofoam ball for sure. It doesn't look quite as good as the ones I've seen, but it's close! And for $10, I'll take it!

Happy crafting!