A Whole New Challenge (and Entry)

Arranging flowers has been a passion of mine for a long time. I blame my mother, for always filling our house with beautiful fresh flowers (which, of course, caused my constant urge to be surrounded by flowers). However, since I don't have the cash flow to constantly make my husband order flowers for me from fancy flower shops (like Mark's Garden), I tried to figure out to arrange flowers on my own.

Eventually, my husband caught on to my new interest, and one day he came home with a couple of bunches of flowers, and he "challenged" me to prepare an arrangement with the flowers he picked. After the first challenge proved to be a real hit (this was pre-farmers market days, after all), he continued to surprise me with sporadic challenges. Note that some challenges proved to be harder than others (leave it to my husband to pick out purple irises, orange roses and baby's breath), but it was always incredibly enjoyable (and as a special bonus for my husband, he quickly realized it was a cheap and easy way to have a very happy wife; it also granted him video game time as I am not very social while arranging--but I am sure the happy wife part is why he started the challenge).

While my husband always humored me (telling me that each arrangement was the most beautiful arrangement he had ever seen--yes, even the crazy one with the baby's breath), I always felt like I had no idea what I was doing (although I always did manage to have a great time regardless of my clueless-ness). For the past couple of years I've been searching for a flower arranging class, but for some reason these classes were always held at unrealistic hours for a person who worked like I did or across the country.

I had almost given up on my dreams of learning how to arrange flowers in a proper way, until today, that is. Today, I wandered into a bookstore (which is my version of a candy store), and came across a section of flower arranging books. I was in heaven, and for the next couple of hours I searched through all the books to determine which ones wanted to come home with me.

Which brings me to the point of this blog entry (queen of tangents that I am), I have decided it is time for a new challenge: From now on, once a week (or if more realistic, once every other week), I will challenge myself to pick out flowers from the local farmer's market by my work, and I will try to use a new skill or two to make an arrangement. From time to time, I will post my successes and failures on my blog, and you can be the judge as to which are which (I also openly invite you to help me name my challenge).

In the meantime, I have a lot of reading to do!