Mini cactus for the saloon

Kitty told me that she would like a bit of greenery around the saloon so I thought a nice cactus would be appropriate for a wild west saloon. I found a great tutorial on Casey's Minis for April 13, 2008. She took potpourri, tiny terra cotta pots, some dirt and rocks and made beautiful little arrangements. So I took some pots that I already had from Michael's and a bag of rose scented potpourri that I had at the house and dug around in there until I found some interesting shaped pieces. I bought 3 different colors of green paint (59 cents each at Michael's) so I could experiment and find a color that I liked. I also got a block of green plant styrofoam to put into the pots. Below you can see the pieces - they don't exactly look like cactus yet.

I wanted to model my tiny cactus after one that we bought for my Mom for her birthday. As you can see in the picture below she already had two very large cactus (in the background) so we bought some little ones to fill up the front of her pot. I like the little one to the left with the yellow flower sticking out of the top. David actually picked this one out because he said it looked like a pickle!

I ended up liking the darkest green color best so I painted it as best I could - I sort of like that some of the natural color of the potpourri comes through because I think it gives it a little more depth. Then I put some styrofoam in the bottom and used the handy little stem on the piece of potpourri and anchored it into the foam. I had bought a bag of coarse decorator sand at Wal-Mart so I applied glue all around the cactus and then sprinkled the sand on top. I will have to get a new kind of styrofoam next time though, b/c the plant kind that I got does not like to have glue applied - it sort of starts to break apart. Then I used a little packet of yellow, pink, and blue flowers that I found on clearance at Michael's. I used a yellow one (not that you can tell in the picture) and cut the wire stem off and glued it to the side. And * voila * we have a super cute mini cactus!