I saw an ad for a floral-themed crafts workshop the other day. It looked like a good, safe way to unwind on a Saturday afternoon. I mean, I can’t imagine anything happening that would cause my cortisol to surge while handling a bunch of small pressed flowers. I hesitated initially, though, because I had been looking forward to taking a long nap that afternoon. I’ve been sleeping poorly lately, and it’s really taking a toll on me, so I needed extra rest. On the other hand, there’s no telling when they would host this activity again.
I also came to the realisation that making something nice with my hands would be healthier than lying in bed and letting my mind run amok and rehash the same things over and over without any resolution. And so I put my name down. I wound up being 30 minutes late because I forgot about payday traffic. When I arrived, there was only one other lady seated at the table, and she was quite far along on her jar already. I was glad it was just two of us. After a long morning, I just wanted to focus on my activity in peace and quiet.
There was a plain jar sitting on the table waiting for me. The instructor showed me the cup of glue I would be using and how to brush it on to the jar. There were four small boxes of various dried flowers to choose from. Since I was already running late, I wasted no time picking out flowers. The glue was very watery and ran down the sides of the jar, dripping copiously onto the vinyl tablecloth. It resulted in various flower and plant bits sticking to the bottom of the jar every now and then. I also got some glue on my fingers, especially after sticking a flower and then realising I didn’t want it in that spot after all and peeling it off and re-sticking it somewhere else.
The flower petals were very delicate, like acid-free tissue paper, and a few times I wasn’t careful and a small petal got torn off and I had to reattach it carefully.
At some point I decided to stick yellow flowers onto the same stem as some red flowers. I don’t know if it’s biologically possible for two different-coloured bunches to co-exist on the same flowering stem. I had slept at 12am the night before and was running on fumes. It had been a day of questionable decision-making, including ordering and eating a whole bunch of marinated raw crabs for lunch and treating my shellfish allergy as fiction. And anyway, I’m an accountant, not a botanist. As I sat back and looked at my yellow-red flower, I thought of that tender poem about the two-headed calf, freak of nature, who would see twice as many stars in the sky that night.
[Credit: bdcreativecentre.bn on instagram]
I didn’t take any ‘action’ shots, so all I have is a screen clipping from the workshop’s IG story afterwards.
The last step, after letting the jar sit to dry for a while, was to add something called gloss. My monkey brain thought that the more of it I added, the shinier my flowers would look afterward. It didn’t occur to me that there could be too much of a good thing when it came to gloss. At some point, there was more gloss than flower.
After I was done, to my surprise, they handed me a free string of fairy lights to put inside the jar.
I looked up some of the flowers. There was a cream delphinium, a yellow-and-purple pansy (it’s so interesting how the purple one is just piggybacking on the yellow one), a blue hydrangea, orange & yellow baby’s breath, and a three-leaf clover, among other things. I think the red ones were my favourite.
Little floral jar, shine bright and light the way for me, as we go into the last two months of this exhausting year.