Playing with flowers

I know - I should be writing. But I'm struggling with something I really WANT to write - the story just isn't clear at the moment - so I'm revisiting Rurik. Unfortunately, that made me a bit despondent, because he needs  lot of work to bring him up to StarMark and Kingstone standard.

So I did something different and completely non-wordy instead.

Squidgeling T enjoys musical theatre - performing it, that is. Over the last couple of years, we've watched his confidence grow on the stage, resulting in a lead role in the musical We Will Rock You (performed last week at school), and a small solo part in Grease, performed by a local amateur youth musical theatre group - ACT One.

ACT One spend a lot of time raising money for their productions, and one of the ways they do that is to hold a raffle at every performance. To support them, we've donated raffle prizes, as do a lot of other families and friends of the young people.

This year, I offered a flower arrangement. I wanted to make it Grease-themed, but not so much that it was intrusive. Yesterday, I headed into town to find some inspiration...

The obvious choice was to use pink flowers for the Pink Ladies. But how to incorporate the T-birds? I toyed with the idea of finding a 'Greased Lightning' car, but that's pretty specific and I don't think Matchbox would do a 1950's car now... On to other ideas, then.

I'd had a sneaky peek at the set when I was helping front-of-house on Wednesday evening, so I knew there were black and white steps on stage. This led me to black and white checked ribbon and black and white tissue paper, and then I found images of the text stitched on the back of the jackets worn by the cast...

Sorted!

Here's what I created this morning;

For the flower arrangers among you, I used baby pink roses, white-edged pink spray carnations, gypsophila, a bit of ruscus, and ivy from my garden. They were arranged in a flat dish on top of a plastic circular bowl filled with black and white tissue paper, with checked ribbon tied around the join. I added a couple of 'badges' stuck on the top of barbeque skewers; my nod to the musical without it being overpowering.

Let's hope that on Saturday, it encourages folks to buy the raffle tickets, because then the young performers will be able to continue putting on their amazing shows and concerts.