When you’re thinking about party decorations, you usually want them to be different from what everyone else is doing, but you need them to be easy and inexpensive. One of the easiest do-it-yourself decorations for your party is the centerpiece. With minimal effort, you can make a huge impact on the room. And since they’re fully customizable, you decide how much you want to spend on supplies.

A simple, fun way to get started is with a simple plastic hat. You can find them in a variety of colors and styles to fit your party. You’ll need one for each table. Turn the hat upside down, and place a block of floral foam in the bottom. You’ll definitely want to attach the foam with some hot glue, so that it doesn’t topple over when you have all of your decorations attached.

Cover the foam and fill the rest of the hat with shredded foil tinsel “grass”. Or, if you can’t find any in the right color, use some of those spare Mardi Gras beads we all have lying around.

From there, fill your centerpiece with as many onion grass, leaf picks, and ornaments as you want. You can make it as simple or as elaborate as you wish. For the best effect, make the center point the tallest, and cut the surrounding picks a little shorter. Don’t forget to fluff the picks and pull apart the pieces of grass and decorations on them. Most of them are on bendable wire, so you can arrange the shape so it resembles a fountain of water spraying out of the hat.

 
This is such a quick, easy project, it’s no problem to make several centerpieces. Each one only takes a few minutes to assemble. And you can make them all exactly the same, or switch them up a little for more variety. Use your imagination, and customize the colors and decorations for any event—the Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, birthday parties, Halloween…your party will have all the finishing touches, and your guests will be impressed.