Christmas 2010

This was the first year my family was not be at home for Christmas morning. Seeing an opportunity to justifiably scale back my usual "over the top" decorating extravaganza, I did something I have always wanted to do and that was to have a simple tree branch with silver balls. Thanks to a timely windstorm, I found some "roadsidea" in the form of a perfect branch, that even had an added element of chartruesy lichen. Silver balls, matte and shiny, hung from the branches with care and the finishing touch was 2 snowy white birds. Perfect!

It seems like a century since my last posting. So many reasons have come and gone as to why I have been unable to post. Primarily I can say that my camera took a dive and without photos to post, I felt like a ship without a rudder, bread without butter, pickles without ice cream, and a writer without a voice. So without further ado (what is an "ado?"), I am back.

Recent Trip to Florida

I had the good fortune to travel to an enchanting island off the west coast of Florida early in October. The weather was perfect, the water temperature was perfect, the sunsets were perfect, and the shelling was, well, perfect. Shells are abundant and as long as there is not living creature inside, they can be removed. Would you believe that even after collecting bagfulls of shells, I still wanted to keep looking? It was as though a blissful, sweet addiction took hold and you find yourself always stooped over wanting to find just one more and then, just one more, and so on and so on and so on.

Not to be totally on the greedy side, there is a purpose for the shells. They appear in the picture frames, boxes, and wreaths that I sell at craft shows. With the bounty I came home with this time, I can use them liberally which is totally luxurious and wonderful.

Floral Arrangements for Wedding

This is a sampling of the floral arrangements I created for my daughter's wedding the end of August, 2010. There were over 25 total arrangements plus the bridal bouquet, corsages, and boutonnieres. There were also floating flowers in the 2 water features, 3 potted containers barricading the driveway which I had potted early in the summer (white geraniums, white pansies, and golden groundcover (forget the name right now-helichrysum?). I was making the corsages in my hotel room until 2am on W-Day. Yikes! There was a bit of a feather theme being woven through the decorations so my daughter wanted feathers in her bouquet which blended with her fascinator in her hair. She also wore the 2 crow feathers my late husband and I wore in our hair at our wedding 10 years ago. Transporting all of them took 2 SUV's with the air conditioning on full blast to keep them from wilting on the 1 1/2 hour drive to site. The amazing piece was between my daughter and my stash, we had all the containers, French flower vases, pedestals, galvanized cones we needed.

Floral Fireworks for my Daughter's Wedding

Here are some of the gorgeous flowers I had the joy to work with in putting together over 24 arrangements, one bridal bouquet, 7 corsages, 9 boutonnieres for my daughter's wedding the end of August. The colors were brown, white and citrus, with an emphasis on lime green and orange. Brown was picked up with manzanita branches and the white came mostly from dahlias & paniculata hydrangeas. The oranges came from rudbeckias, dahlias & crocosmia. Lime green came from limelight hydrangeas, bells of ireland, golden lonicera, golden cotinus, and monterrey cyprus, The next posting will show the finished products. Transporting them in two SUV's was a challenge. But my brilliant designer son figured out how to bungie-cord plastic crates and square buckets together to hold the vases. I worked late into the night under the tent but it sure was fun. Flowers were picked from 4 gardens in the area plus more from an area wholesale floral warehouse.

Food for My Daughter's Wedding

The following posts will be dedicated to my daughter's recent wedding (end of August). I was honored to make her cake (created essentially for the slicing photo -they had a cupcake tower along with a dessert bar), the floral arrangements (about 24), her bouquet, corsages, and boutonnieres. I thought you could learn a few tricks from my experience with the chocolate and the pastry shells.

The kids wanted to serve my fresh homemade ginger ale so I purchased over 4# of ginger, peeled and sliced all of it. The ginger gets simmered in sugar water then is cooled and mixed with club soda. Delicious! You can find various recipes for this on-line. This time (instead of sending the ginger to the compost) I tried tossing the cooked slices with granulated sugar then air dried them. You then have candied ginger , which I love to eat and no longer have to buy!

A trick I discovered with making tiny pastry rounds was to use a muddler to gently push the dough rounds into the tiny cupcake holder. They were to be filled with lemon and lime curd for creamy citrus-y tarts. The wedding colors were citrus (orange and lime) and brown so the tarts looked great on the dessert bar.

About the Wedding Cake-to keep with the organic branch and bird theme, I made chocolate leaves and twigs to decorate it. My artistic son gave me a great sketch of a branch which I placed a sheet of wax paper over and with melted chocolate, outlined the branch with a small frosting tip. The chocolate was runnier than I would have liked so they turned out looking more like antlers than twigs. So the remedy was to carefully shave the ends into more of a point. For the leaves, I tried rose leaves first but found them way too soft and were not easily peeled from chocolate. Then I tried salal (some florists refer to it as lemon leaves) and that worked. You paint a thick layer on the vein side (underside) and let harden. Then carefully peel off. As the day was very warm and they needed to be transported over 1 1/2 hours to their home (garden wedding), I placed the container the leaves/twigs were in on frozen ice bags, then covered it with newspaper & towels and then put it on the front passenger floor and cranked up the air conditioning. My feet froze but they made it to their destination! There I frosted the 4 layers then carefully peeled off the twigs and placed them onto the cake. The leaves were at the base.
For an amateur I must say it looked pretty good.

The next posting will be the fantastic flowers I had the joy to work with.

Venetian Costume Ball

Here are photos of the costume I created for a Venetian costume ball I attended last February in Seattle. I was able to use the teal velveteen gown I made in high school (I was inspired by the movie, Camelot, which I saw 5 times). After studying the Italian costumes, I concluded that the ladies did not show cleavage so I folded purple organdy 4 times, gathered it with basting stitches, and held it together with a ribbon to make a "ruff." The glittered mask was embellished and the hat was definitely OVER THE TOP! Because the gown was teal, I had to use peacock feathers as the basis for the hat.

I found the skirt recently at a local consignment shop. I immediately knew it would be the one for the next ball. The fabric is sheer (will need an underskirt) with stripes of sage green, orange, rust, and the"dots" are actually splotches of gold threads spaced all over the skirt. So now I must design the top. The colors are so rich an luscious-velvet seems the only way to go...
I am open for suggestions for the top....any ideas? Help! The ball is Feb 2011.