Wedding Flower Blues

A few weeks ago, I volunteered to do the flowers for the wedding of some people in my branch. It started when they volunteered to participate in some research I was doing. They mentioned they were trying to figure out how to do flowers cheaply, and I said, "I took a floral design class at BYU. I'd love to help." 

The funny thing about that is that, when Ami and I took the class two years ago during the last semester of our master's degrees, we joked about being able to integrate floral design and therapy successfully. I think this may be as close as I will ever come. What was even more incredible was that they walked out of the clinic that day with a florist, $30 for participating in the research, and an appointment for a free premarital class that would waive the fee for their marriage license, courtesy of my friend Jeremy. I still think a marriage mini-mall would be a good business venture.

To do this post justice, I need to set the stage on this wedding:

The bride and groom are both recent converts to the church. The groom grew up in Lubbock, and the bride is from a town close to Houston. The wedding was a civil service in the cultural hall of the stake center with the branch president officiating. They had five groomsmen, five bridesmaids, three flower girls, a ring bearer, and a lot of help. The bridesmaids' dresses and the groomsmen's ties were made by one of the bridesmaids, who is a clothing design major; I did the flowers; Ashley made their cake; and some kind ward members took their pictures.

I had a concept meeting with the bride and her future mother-in-law a week before the wedding. The bride was very hesitant at that point to make any kind of concrete decisions. She kept saying, "I don't want to be Bridezilla," to which I replied, "Your wedding is a week away. It's okay to make some decisions." She threw out a few ideas, but kept saying that whatever I wanted was okay. At last, I said, "Why don't you just tell me how much you want to spend, and I'll just give you the receipts at the end?" She seemed to think that was a good idea. I took down some notes about colors, numbers of people in the wedding party, cake ideas, and theme ideas. Actually, if I'm being honest, the bride said she wanted daisies, and Ashley and I came up with a theme based on that. It turns out that, in the absence of leadership, I will step up to the plate to create some order. Ashley is very much the same way. Before the wedding started, one of the groomsmen remarked that he wasn't used to a wedding where neither the bride's nor the groom's mother seemed to be taking charge. I remarked aside, "I would prefer it if one of them did." Ashley added, "That's the way it SHOULD be."

Here are some shots of the flowers I made. These are some of the different mock-ups I made two days before the wedding. I ended up using the one with the ribbon loops for the groomsmen.

These are the various kinds of ribbons I used for the bouquet and the other flowers. Ashley borrowed some of the wider turquoise with the stitching for the cake, which turned out to be perfect.

Below are the wristlets I made for the bridesmaids', which were super inexpensive and very easy to make.

And here's a shot of the pretty bouquet (roses, spray roses, daisy mums, hypericum berry, stock, and a few blades of bear grass with turquoise beads, if you're interested):

Below is the bouquet I let the bride actually throw. Still pretty, but not quite the same labor of love. Clearly, I need therapy.

And these are some of my extra corsages.

Some things I expected:

-Needing more corsages and boutonnieres than the bride originally told me. It was a good thing that I made extras.

-Watching someone significantly taller than me come away with the bouquet.

-The wedding reception coming to a standstill for two minutes while the guys in the branch tried (unsuccessfully) to get Layne to participate in the throwing of the garter.

Some things I did not expect:

-Becoming emotionally attached to the bouquet I had made and, at the last minute, offering to make the bride one that she could throw in order to spare the prettier one for herself.

-Arriving at the wedding less that two hours before it started and finding that there were fruit, vegetable, and meat and cheese trays to put together, which I helped with.

-The groom's mother having to leave to go pick up a sheet cake and several trays of cookies and not returning until 10 minutes after the wedding was supposed to have started. As a side note, she also had the rings, so she could rest assured the ceremony would not start without her.

-The maid of honor coming up to me five minutes after the ceremony was supposed to have started and asking me if I had flowers for the flower girls and the ring bearer. My response: "There are flower girls?" Fortunately, I had extra flowers for the throwing bouquet, which I ravaged to come up with three little nosegays and a sad-looking tiny boutonniere before the mother of the groom arrived and the reception could start.

-The stereo belting out "Cotton Eye Joe" just before the processional was supposed to start coming down the aisle.

-The amazing things Ashley was able to do with a few leftover flowers and some greens on the top of the cake (see below).  

-How many intimate family moments I would walk awkwardly through looking for my fabric scissors and pearl-headed pins.

-The number of stores I would have to visit to find white spray roses (four).

-How convinced I would be afterward that elopement is not the worst thing in the world.

Downright Domesticity

In the last few weeks, I went from having a lot to do to having some free time on my hands. I finished up four classes, turned in the grades for the classes I was teaching, stopped seeing clients at Texas Tech, and got released from my calling. Right now, I am working a few hours a week at the Employee Assistance Program seeing clients, and collecting data for my dissertation. And, in between, I am working on a few things for publication, as well as getting ready to take my qualifying exams in August. But, for some reason, I still feel like I have a lot of extra time on my hands, probably because I am avoiding doing some of that stuff that I should be doing. And, for some unexplained reason, I have been feeling domestic lately. Those of you who are domestic every day may think I'm a jerk for talking about it like it's a hobby. Sorry.

Anyway, I got the urge to make a few things I have never made before. The first was rugelach. I am a big fan of Pioneer Woman. She is a witty blogger, and she does all of the things I aspire to do, from photography to cooking to being married to a cowboy. One of the things I love about Pioneer Woman is that she brings other food bloggers to her ranch and cooks things with them. Then she posts about them on her blog, and they post about her on their blogs, which makes it feel like all the people who have well-known blogs are good friends. It also reminds me of my childhood. When I was young (probably about four or five) I was a big fan of the reruns of the Monkees. My first celebrity crush was on Davy Jones. At the time, I had no concept that the show had taken place 20 years earlier. That reality check didn't come until a few years later when the Monkees put together a reunion tour and I saw how old he really was. I also remember watching a lot of Brady Bunch episodes, and the greatest day of my young life was the day that Davy Jones guest-starred on the Brady Bunch and Marsha got to KISS him! This event only served to further support my fantasy that people on live in an alternate universe in which they all know one another and hang out, and that, if I could get inside the TV, I could join them. Anyway, for me, as an adult, Pioneer Woman having Bakerella over is basically the same thing.

Last month, she had Deb, who writes the blog Smitten Kitchen, out to the ranch, and the two of them made, among other things, rugelach. Rugelach, not to be confused with arugula, which is a vegetable, is a type of Jewish cookie made out of dough rolled with nuts, cinnamon, dried fruit, and chocolate. Using Pioneer Woman's cinnamon roll dough, Deb made some rugelach that looked so good, I had to try it. Here's her recipe.

I bought jars to hold my sugar and flour. Look, I'm more domestic already.

This is the only counter space I have in my whole kitchen. Here it is with my rugelach dough rolled out on it. This rugelach had raspberry jam, brown sugar, white sugar, cinnamon, butter, golden raisins, chocolate, and pecans. 

I rolled it up and put it into muffin tins to bake.

And when it was all done, I iced it with cream cheese icing. This was the result. As for the taste, as it turned out, that was a lot of stuff for one pastry. While I like raspberry jam, and chocolate, and golden raisins, and pecans, and cinnamon-sugar, and cream cheese frosting, it was a lot to eat together. Plus, some of it leaked out of the dough while it was baking. However, I took them with me on a date, and my date and his parents raved about them. I wish I was making that up.

It turns out the cinnamon roll dough recipe makes a ton of dough. After cutting original dough recipe in half, I made a batch of rugelach and still had half the dough left. So I made Pioneer Woman's orange rolls, also.

Look how much I got out of a quarter batch of roll dough!

Don't hesitate to make these. However, I am going to warn you right now, in case you have never made any of Pioneer Woman's recipes: you will use more butter than you ever thought humanly possible. So make them, but then do what I do and try to get rid of them as fast as humanly possible. Again, my date and his family went crazy for them.

I also bought sewing machine that weekend. It's pretty rare for me to find a pair of pants short enough to wear off the rack, and in the last year, I have probably spent close to the price of my sewing machine getting my pants hemmed

So I bought a sewing machine and went to work hemming two pairs of pants and my new temple dress, which I bought in December and have been wearing since then with masking tape holding up the hem. I worry when I hem pants that I will hem one leg and not like the length, and then hem the other leg a different length, never be able to match them up, and end up with a pair of John Stockton shorts. Fortunately, that didn't happen.

Then, this weekend, we had a baby shower for Rebel, and she requested chocolate cupcakes with chocolate frosting. I made Bakerella's recipes for chocolate cupcakes and chocolate buttercream. Then, I saw Bakerella's cupcake tower and bought one to display my cupcakes and cup pies. And, for some reason, I thought it would be funny to decorate them with plastic babies. So this is my tribute to Bakerella and Cakewrecks.

I try not to think too much about why a baby would be sitting on an enormous brown swirl wearing nothing but a strange mohawk.

I really like the cupcake tower, though. I have a feeling I will get a lot of use out of it.

Whew! That was a lot of domesticity. I am also working on flowers for someone's wedding, but we'll make that a subject for another post. Now that I've baked everything I've ever had an urge to bake, I need to get back to the less fun parts of my life, like my job.

Happy Mother's Day