Hi, guys, gals, and nonbinary pals!
This is a little how to of how to make coral out of pool noodles! It's something we have put together this year in one of our rooms. Included, at the bottom, is a video of us putting them together.
ITEMS YOU NEED:
Pool noodles (varying colors preferably but not required)
Heat Gun
Knife (Pocket knife or X-Acto™ Knife, preferably, but anything should do as long as it's sharp)
How to cut the noodles depends on how you want the coral to look, and how big you'd like it. My helpers and I had a bit of issue at first with this. Some of us were cutting too wide and too short for what we specifically wanted. However, it still ended up doing pretty well.
Since we had an idea of that we wanted it to be similar to branch coral, we started out cutting into the noodles, producing long wavy branches. It is important not to go too narrow when doing the waves on your branches as it won't hold the rest of your branch up.
We did this on several pool noodles, carving limbs up to 2.5 feet as well as smaller pieces to branch off of them. Keep aware that doing this will create shavings of the foam, being a little messy. However it is pretty simple in clean up. Make sure your ends are pointed and not so thick, they'll be 'welded' together and you don't want the base to be too big.
Once you have all your pieces cut, you may bring out your heat gun. Unfortunately the pool noodles don't glue together very well but with the heat gun you can 'weld' them together. It's important to be safe when doing this, I had an extra person helping me, holding the pieces while I manned the heat gun.
We bought our heat gun on amazon for like $15. You can buy better ones with adapters and such but we didn't need those with this current project.
We found it easier to heat the noodles with the heat gun and form them together two pieces at a time. Once the first two were complete, we'd just keep adding on to it until we deemed it complete. For us, we didn't really have any smaller, additional, branches on the larger ones forming the bouquet. It was an additional step we didn't feel the need to do as the idea was clear, especially in the room it was going in. As for the colors, most of our bouquets were of the same color, however we had plenty left over to make colorful coral bouquets, (we had purple, red, blue, lime green, and orange). Play around with it, give your bouquets branches, have fun with it.
Once the bouquet is properly welded together and formed, you can place it to the side and continue with the next set. Our initial idea of how to have them stand by themselves was to stick the bouquet into a 2-2.5 in piece of a pool noodle and place it where it needs to be.
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