Glass Bell Cloches Decorated for Fall

Add these beautiful glass bell cloches to your fall decor this year! This is such an stylish way to spotlight some of your smaller fall pumpkins and florals!

Today I am sharing a fun, quick and beautiful fall decor idea. I have decorated some glass bell cloches to coordinate with the rest of my fall decorations. I LOVE how they look! They are so classic and elegant looking. They are currently sitting on my boho fall mantel, but first I wanted to show you how I made them.

What are glass cloches?

I love glass cloches, don’t you? Even if you are unfamiliar with the word cloche (“klōsh”), I am sure you have seen them. The word itself comes from the French word for bell. So you may know them as bell jars or glass domes. There are so many different kinds and sizes of cloches. Some glass dome cloches come with bases and some do not.

The glass cloche was first made in France in 1600, and it’s original purpose was to protect young plants from cold and frost. Today they are more commonly used in decorating than for practical purposes. They are also a great way of keeping a fragile item protected and dust-free. My favorite thing about cloche domes are how they can spotlight a smaller, insignificant piece of decor. Cloches take something that may have been overlooked before and now make it the center of attention.

What to put under a glass bell cloche?

The ideas are endless on how to style glass dome cloches. It really depends on what you are decorating for. They can be used for holidays and seasonal decorating, displaying photos at weddings or other events, or even used in a nursery to highlight your baby’s first pair of shoes. Whatever you want to accentuate, just remember, it has to be on the smaller side. Most glass cloches are smaller in size.

For example, since I am decorating for fall, I wanted to use the cloches with my fall decor. Last week I shared my Boho pumpkins with braided raffia. I was looking for a fun way to display them and came up with this idea to spotlight one of those pumpkins with some colored berries. Along with the pumpkin cloche, I also wanted to add some faux fall stems in another glass cloche. I will be showing you how I decorated the floral cloche.

Supplies to decorate a fall floral glass dome cloche

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Glass Cloches – Mine are several years old but I found similar ones here, here and here
Faux florals or stems – I found all of mine at Hobby Lobby
Air-Dry Clay
Wire Cutters

How to decorate a fall dried floral cloche

Gather some dried or faux florals that you would like to spotlight. You will only use a little bit in your cloche, so I just cut off a few stems from some faux florals that I put into a vase this year. I already had the fig berry stems from my easy autumn wreath so I just reused some of those. I found the wheat looking stem in the picks section at Hobby Lobby. That is another great way to get some stems without having to buy a whole bunch.

Measure and cut your stems to size using the wire cutters. Make sure they are short enough so that they do not touch the top of the dome cloche. You will want them to end at varying heights as well for interest.

I used air-dry clay to hold the stems in place. This Sculpey brand works very well. Form the clay into a disc that fits into the bottom of your glass cloche. I just used my fingers to shape and flatten it out but you could also use a rolling pin.

Place the air-dry clay disc onto the base of your cloche. Mine ended up measuring about 1/4 inch thick.

Start sticking your stems into the air-dry clay. The cloche will squeeze them together a bit if they stick out wider than the base. You can move them around if you do not like the placement.

Fit the glass cloche over the stems to make sure everything fits inside and looks good. Initially, I was going to use the acorns as well but decided against it.

This is the most important step… make sure the clay is dry before you put the cloche on! I got a little too antsy on that evidently because when I went back to photograph these a couple days later, there was dye condensation all over the leaves which made them darker in color. It had also dripped onto the clay and bled onto some of the other leaves. Ugh! What do you do? Oh well, it could be worse! 🙂

This large glass cloche did not come with a base so I improvised and use a cake stand for the base. 😉 It happens to fit it perfectly! I really like how it gives the cloche more height as well!

Along with my Boho pumpkin, I just added some colored berries that I cut off from the end of a garland that I have had for years. The colors fit in perfectly with the rest of my fall decor this year.