A Little Bit of Flower Power

If someone made a cartoon about me and P, it would be about Allergy Girl and Captain Dehydration the Colonless Wonder. Because he has, well, no colon, and I have forty-seven allergies.

And because flowers make my eyes swell up and my nose run like a faucet, there's no way that I can carry around a real bouquet and come out unscathed. Hence, I'm making my bouquet and the guys' bouts myself. The bouts are for another day, but I got a running start on my flowers.

I bought a slew of silk flowers from Michaels. If you're going the silk route, just wait a bit for sales. When I went, they had all flowers on sale for half off or more! Frickin' sweet.

I started off with this:

Kind of a hot mess, isn't it?

I started off by trimming the length on the longest stems and taking off excess leaves. And I discovered something very, very important.

OH MY LANDS, I NEED BETTER SCISSORS!

I pulled out the scissors I use to cut patterns when I sew- they're nice and sturdy, so they should work, right? WRONG. My poor hands are aching. There was no way on earth that those scissors could get through those stems. Under that innocent vinyl facade is a monstrous thick cord of steel.

Ouch.

I started a system of making a small cut, bending, and twisting until it snapped off. It still took me the better part of an hour to hack away at those things. Eventually it came down to three piles: the bigger flowers with the longer stems, the smaller flowers with the shorter stems, and a Jonas Brothers popcorn bucket filled with fake leaves.

I just sort of stared at it for a moment, like "Uh...what happens next?"

I resolved my blank stare by gathering the larger flowers into one large bundle, and then dividing the shorter flowers into four small bundles. So it came out to this:

Then I gathered the four little bunches on the fringe of the large bunch. Easy, eh?

This is only a rough mockup- I haven't taped them together or added the ribbon and string of vintage pearls. But it gave me a pretty good look at what it's going to end up like.

(Please excuse the highschooler Myspace picture. But isn't it nice that the colors of my bathroom coordinate with the flowers?)

I'm not a fan of the stripe of blue flowers in the middle, and overall it might be a little bit too big. I still like the overall look, though. It has that fresh, pretty just-picked-from-an-English-garden look that I like.

The best part: they don't look like cheap silk! Huzzah!

The worst part: I have to clip at least six more inches off the longer stems.

Gah. I need to track down a bear trap or something to cut these silly things.