Having a Ball! (Giveaway!)

Giveaway is now closed!

I'm going to add this post to Julia's Hooked on Fridays this week, because I heart these ceramic alphabet spheres so much! As I said originally, I don't know what it is about them. Somebody said basically the same thing in the comments, and I got thinking about it a little bit. I didn't come up with anything profound, but maybe we love letters and numbers because it's a reminder of childhood, of learning our ABCs and 123s on mommy's lap or in our cozy kindergarten room. Maybe because a mere 26 letters and 10 digits are the basis of all communication in the English language, and have formed great documents of freedom and beloved works from Shakespeare to Jane Austen to J.K. Rowling.

What-ever! They're just really cool. And even if you don't care about all the nonsense written above, you can still enter the giveaway until 6pm today (Fri. Apr 17).



A couple of months ago Dixie and I were in Pottery Barn and saw a display with some ceramic alphabet balls. I don’t even remember looking for a price, but they are not on the website, so apparently are not available.

We both loved the look and started brainstorming about how to create such a thing. Dixie thought of ping pong balls. I ran with that, and remembering some rub-on letters that I had, gave that a try. It worked great!
The next day Craig asked me to spend an online gift certificate we’d had for a while. There were only two stores that I recognized that accepted it; one was Coldwater Creek, so I started there. I couldn’t believe it when I stumbled upon their Word Play Letter and Number Spheres! On clearance, no less!



I don’t know what it is about these, but I. love. them. They’re just so cool! Dixie and I ordered a large and small set of both the letters and numbers and divvied them up.

I thought I’d go ahead and try one of the ping pong balls, just to give you the option of making them if you wanted to.



I got the little package of ping pong balls at Walmart, but they have a logo on them. If you were going to do this for real, you would want to get blank ones.



I cut out the rub-on letters individually, held it down sort of curving around the ball, and just rubbed it on with the stick. If you look closely at the top photo, you can see that each ceramic ball has the letter several times. Six, to be exact; four around the diameter and then one top and bottom.



Next, I gave it a few coats of glossy ModPodge. You can push a pin into the ball and use that to hold it while you brush on the ModPodge.



I then stuck the pin into some floral foam to let it dry. Obviously, if you were doing a bunch of these, you would need a lot of pins and a lot more foam to stick them in. Really, it could be anything that would support it and allow you to push the flat end of a straight pin into it. Maybe clay or playdough.



Maybe even a pan of brownies. Or in this case, what’s left of the Easter carrot cake. Well, it would give you an excuse to bake some goodies!



Here, I’ve put the ping pong ball in with the ceramic ones. It’s the ‘U’ on the top left. If it wasn’t a slightly different typography, I don’t think you could tell!

This was really quite easy, and you could make a bunch of them without too much effort. Or, you could order them from Coldwater Creek. Or, you could enter my giveaway!



Yes, I thought of my readers and ordered an extra set of large number spheres just for one of you!

• Leave a comment on this post to enter
• Blog about, and link to, this giveaway for another entry (let me know if you do)
  
• Become a follower of my blog for another entry

Contest will end Friday, April 17 at 6:00 pm. Good luck!
P.S. If you decide to make your own, be sure to let me know how it turned out!