Fairy Tale Ball- Flowers

   Last Saturday was the Fairy Tale Ball, a fundraiser for the Children’s Museum of Southeastern CT in Niantic. I was invited to share my children’s book Nature’s Royal Tea Party in the form of a tablescape. Ten guests attending the event would have the honor of sitting at the table for dinner, however everyone attending was able to walk around the room to admire all the tables with visual depictions of children’s books  by brilliant designers. http://gallery.me.com/cherylkling#100069

 I’ve talked in my blog before about place settings and table decor, but this was an event of extreme tablescapes. The entire room was filled with magic  all in the name of childhood. Yet it was for the grown ups to enjoy, way past the bedtime of the wee ones.

   I enlisted help from some of my high school students to create a centerpiece filled with paper flowers that  appear in my book. The Queen Anne’s Lace was made with a card board disc, white paper doily and little teacups and saucers made with paper clay. All of the parts were glued together  and attached to with wire stem  with crêpe paper on wire for leaves .  Don’t underestimate the power of floral tape. It takes so little to make ordinary wire look like a stem. It takes so little to make a piece  of paper to look like a beautiful flower.

You can make a floral centerpiece from paper. There are great books on paper craft or just Google ‘paper flower patterns.’

Posies were made with small paper circles  folded in quarters, then cut to make a scalloped edge. They were mounted on a wire with floral tape. We put several posies on each stem.  I used real Milkweed , with pods attached, that I  sprayed gold to add more texture and contrast.  I was so excited that the Milkweed seeds were still in the pods, but over time it became clear that I had to remove the seeds. As the pods dried, the seeds unfolded and , well, just imagine hundreds of little fluffs of white floating all over the house like fairies. They could not be harnessed with any sealer. I tried. Fairies want to fly freely. To add to the theme, I cut pictures of the characters and attached them to wire stakes and placed them among the flowers. You can put the stems all in to a narrow vase or push some floral foam down into a wider pot to better control the placement.  Consider your focal points as the strongest colors or most ornate flowers and fill in with smaller flowers to create a balance around the centerpiece. Have fun with it.

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