Please DO Pick The Posies

When my children were young, they loved to pick flowers. Nothing colorful and growing was safe from their grubby little hands, and I can’t count the number of times I have rushed to find a container to receive a fistful of wilted dandelions, daisies, or buttercups.

Let’s face it. Little children are attracted to flowers, and, if we don’t want our prize Dahlias snatched from their stems, we need to provide a special place where our children can pick posies to their hearts’ content.

When I was a little girl, my grandmother would have us take a bowl into her garden and fill it with rose petals. She mixed some white glue into the bowl of petals and had us form little pearl-sized beads with the mixture. We laid the beads on a sheet of waxed paper and when we had used all the mixture, she gave us each a small knitting needle to puncture each bead so that, later, we could string it easily. If we got overly enthusiastic in our puncturing, the beads would end up a bit distorted, but they were usually still damp enough to re-form and re-puncture each of them.

In a few hours, the beads were fairly dry, although if we were staying overnight, she would have us wait until the next day to finish our beads. Once, we dried them in the oven, but some of them split so we decided that air drying was the best method to use. When the beads were dry, we strung them into what we thought were the most beautiful necklaces anyone ever wore. (In reality, they were rather black looking, but we didn’t mind.)

We wore them as though they were fine diamonds, often holding them under our noses to smell the lovely aroma, and pestered other people around us to “smell our rosebeads." A few times, we decided to make them even fancier and painted them. They were nicer looking, but the paint sealed in the aroma so we couldn’t smell them any more.

Recently I saw a web release containing instructions for making a flower monogram to decorate a door, hanging for the wall, or just to keep as a memento of a special occasion.