Unnecessary Projects 101: Frosting Grapes

I love google. At the tip of my fingers, I have the goods on anything I’m searching for. When we decided to frost artificial grapes for a wedding we recently designed however, I couldn’t find any helpful tips. Even my most trusted friend, Martha, deserted me in my darkest hour. So we took matters in our own (frugal) hands and frosted grapes experimentally. Of course, we could have purchased pre-frosted artificial grapes, but what fun is that?

The grape motif came about after meeting with Nirbhika and Dinesh, a couple who wanted a Midsummer Night’s Dream wedding combined with a vineyard theme (more to blog later). Dinesh’s family owns and operates a winery, so grapes were obviously a natural accent.

Enter the grapes. Sometimes Kendra gives me strange looks when I decide that I want to do a project. I wouldn’t say it’s a look of scorn…well, maybe it is. It’s like trepidation with hints of doubt. Then I cajole her into riding the bandwagon and we’re convinced we can do it!

Ex. 1: Notice the perfection of frost? That’s because we purchased those from Stats…in the case our experiment didn’t work. We purchased these because we figured artificial grapes would last a whole lot longer in the June heat. Meet Model Grape.

Ex. 2: This was the first sample we created. Armed with a bevy of items, we first watered down some beige paint and bathed the grape in it only to find it to be too milky. Then we sprayed some “Pearly Dew” on it. With a name like Pearly Dew, you’d expect it to have a soft finish and glaze. Instead, we got a metallic, silvery finish. Punks! So to take it down a notch, I looked around the room to find that one thing to give it that dusty, just picked from the vine look. So I rolled it in some plaster. You know…like flour. You’ll notice it got clumpy. The only time I've ever seen a clumpy grape was at the bottom of my fruit drawer in my fridge.

Ex. 3: Sitting around and looking at Model Grape, I noticed that they were grapes of the red variety, and the “frost” I rubbed off of it had a pinkish red cast to it. Though we usually connect frost with a white color, it was really too bright to give it that filmy finish. I wondered if we used a light blue color on our sample grape (which was of a blue/purple variety) if that would work. I hunted around our studio and found some "Wedgewood Blue" spray paint (the kind florists use to tweak colors of flowers). So we found that our techniques may have been right, but we were using the wrong kinds of color.

We ended up watering down the beige paint concoction to give it a filmy, translucent finish when it dried. Then we lightly sprayed on the blue paint. Before it dried, we rubbed off some of the paint to blend it a bit. Maybe it wasn’t exactly the same as our sample, but nobody else could tell...right?

So this could be really obvious to some people, but by trial and error we’ve learned something new. If you want to frost an apple, use a pink spray, pears a white/sage green spray...plums a lavender or bluish spray, and so forth. So if you’ve googled “frosting grapes” or “how to frost artifical grapes” or “frosted grapes” or “frosting a grape but not for cakes” or any of the combination aforementioned, we hope this helped you solve your project dilemna.