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.

So much to talk about!

This has been a crazy wonderful weekend! So much has happened...and I haven't had any time to blog! And because there's been so much, I'm going to do several entries today. Just because I can.

The last time I blogged was Friday night, right? Right before the second-to-last show? All right, picking up where I left off.

The Friday night show was AMAZING. We were completely sold out, and the audience loved us. There's four points in the show where I have what I call my "ego laughs": when I enter, when I say "oh" after Bob's story about the Gentile children, my overexaggerated eye roll during the "Monday night, we're watching Conan" bit, and my pause during the "who's your aunt?" "Sylvia Klein" bit. Typically the audience would laugh at a couple of them. On Friday, they laughed at all of them. I was exhilarated. (To use a quote: "my aura has never been pinker!")

On Saturday morning I had to get up early for my 9am dance class. Although it's exhausting, I really enjoy it. I was put in the advanced class, which I originally thought must be some kind of mistake, but Emily, the teacher (who has the world's most delightful British accent) said I belonged in the class, and after Saturday, I think I believe her. We do the greatest routines in the class too- this one was to "Old Time Rock and Roll"; the class before was to "Footloose."

Afterwards P picked me up and we zoomed back to the house so I could get everything ready for the cast party. He set up Rock Band while I made dill dip, lemon pound cake...and lukshen kugel.

I spent a lot of the show discussing how "for a special occasion, I make my special lukshen kugel." I decided to make some myself, just to see what it's like. Well, it's DISGUSTING. One pound of egg noodles, two pounds of cottage cheese, four tablespoons of butter, half a cup of sugar, eight eggs, and a dash of cinnamon. And it's gross. I couldn't even swallow it. I have never been more grateful for lemon cake in my life.

After several hours of eating, Rock Band-ing, and DDR-ing, we headed back to the theater to prepare for the final performance. And that's when something absolutely amazing happened, but it's so amazing that it deserves its own blog entry. And so it shall.

The final show of Beau Jest was fantastic. We finished at 9:30...set strike began at 9:50. By midnight the set was completely disassembled and the theater was spotless! It was really sad to see the "living room" we'd been playing in for the past month completely vanish, but it's necessary.

Needless to say, after such a long weekend (and with a sore throat coming on...), I slept in super late on Sunday. P picked me up afterwards and we had Super Wedding Field Trip Day.

Our big goal was to find a new set of invitations. We started at the Michaels in 100 Oaks, because I was hoping to find those pretty eyelet invitations that I found on the Michaels website. Unfortunately, they were nowhere to be found. We did find a couple of other options, though, so we took pictures with my camera phone to mentally file away.

We also looked at silk flowers. I found some possibilities, but P was decidedly unimpressed. He pointed out that because of recent advances in our budget (which shall be explained in the next blog entry), we might be able to afford real flowers for my bouquet and the boutonnieres. I'm still a little skeptical (you know, that whole allergies thing...), but I have to say that I was rather disappointed in the selection at Michaels.

After Michaels we checked Walmart, just to see if, by some remote chance, they had the eyelet invitations. They did not. I was sad.

(also, their flower selection was even more dismal than the 100 Oaks Michaels.)

Our final stop was JoAnn's, one of my favoritest places in the whole wide world. We looked at the wedding aisle first, where we were once again nonplussed with their invitation selection. We quickly moved on to familiar territory, where I purchased a length of old-gold rose print velvet for my colonial gown for History of Costume class, a cut of white knit with a pretty green floral print, and Vogue 8360. (The pattern's going to be used to make my dress for my lingerie shower.)

(Isn't it pretty?)

After our Super Wedding Field Trip, P and I discussed wedding things on our way to small group. We decided on a pretty blue invitation kit that we saw at Michaels, but we're going to wait until we get a coupon. But not wait too long...we learned our lesson. We're also still discussing the flower situation. No resolve on that yet...but at least we have invitations!

So that's basically how the final weekend of Beau Jest went down. But I have to tell the SUPER AMAZING STORY that deserves its very own post, just because of its sheer epicness. So...stay tuned.

The theater life

As I write this, I am sitting on the floor in front of my dressing room, sipping a Juice RockStar and reading MLIA (and blogging, obviously). Why, do you ask? My dressing room is locked. I need to curl my hair, but it's locked. Sadness.

It's the second-to-last show of Beau Jest, and I'm terribly bummed. It's been such a great show that I hate to say goodbye to it and all the people I got to hang out with for the last two months. I almost wish we would add more shows just so I could keep going. But alas, we cannot.

Kat (my bestie/roomie/MOH) is coming to see me tonight!! I am thrilled beyond words. I was so afraid that none of my close friends were going to see me. But she's coming! I have to sneak her in because the show is SOLD OUT for tonight, but it shall be a successful mission. Mostly because my director okayed it. (Not nearly as cool as a devious ninja mission, but still, I'm happy.)

Tomorrow is the cast party at my house. There shall be Rock Band, Dance Dance Revolution, and lukshen kugel, which looks like it's going to be disgusting. But I spend the whole show talking about how I make amazing lukshen kugel, and I figured I'd better make it at some point. What better time than the cast party?

P is spending the day with me tomorrow (cast party, final show, and all!), and then on Sunday afternoon we are Weddinging It Up. This means several things:

-sorting through wedding files

-purchasing our invitations

-perusing artificial flowers

-and monitoring my fabric purchases

All right, so the fabric is actually going to be for my colonial gown project for History of Costume, my Regency-era protoype, and most likely some of the supplies for my Giselle dress, but I'm also going to get what I need for the dress I'm going to wear at my lingerie shower. It's Vogue 8360, and it's typically used for a prom or wedding dress, apparently, but I'm going to make it out a super soft pale blue knit, trim it with lace, and wear it for day #2 of the party.

But it's time to go get ready. Time for the second-to-last show!

Flowers, flowers, flowers!

I love flowers. I love getting bouquets after performances. I love studying packets of seeds at Home Depot. I love the look and feel and scent of flowers. P gave me two dozen roses when he proposed, for heaven's sake.

The problem?

I'm allergic.

It's so depressing. I love flowers, but they make me sneeze. And the last thing I want is to sneeze all the way through my wedding...especially when my sneeze sounds like a cat getting kicked. I have been the cause of many a classroom disruption. Ergo, I am going the route of silk flowers...even though I swore I would never ever use them. I thought they were tacky. But I'd rather carry fake flowers than have snot dripping onto my wedding dress during the ceremony. Gross.

(Besides, silk flowers are cheaper!)

So I'm going with silk flowers. I need to go purchase them...there's so many options that I don't know what to do! Luckily, I found an awesome website, Afloral.com. I sent them an email about my wedding colors, theme, and the flowers I liked, and they made me a super spiffy inspiration board of my very own!

Isn't it lovely? It's so soft and pretty. And these are actually all items I can order from the website.

There's only one trick. I don't know how I feel about blue roses. I think they're pretty, but I don't know if they're too much. I mean, blue roses=obviously fake. At the same time, I like them. What do you think? Could I get away with them?

Oh, well. What I know for sure is that I want roses and daisies, and probably lilies of the valley. Maybe something like this:

(minus the smiley face mug, of course...)

I want to wrap the stems with blue velvet ribbon and eyelet and drape a vintage strand of faux pearls around it. Maybe even tie a cameo or a locket to it. I don't know...it may be too much!

I'm going to make runs to JoAnn's, Hobby Lobby, and Michaels and see what flowers I can dig up that look nice and match what I'm looking for. If I can't find enough there, I'm so hitting up Afloral.