For a funeral, I usually try to send something that the family can keep. A plant, a blanket, wind chimes, just something that they can have and not have to worry about disposing of in a few days as the petals wilt and slowly die. (Depressing, right?!?)
When my Papaw passed a few years ago after a tough fought battle with cancer there were sooo many flowers. I found a blog post about turning the rose petals into beads. I thought it would be worth a try. It worked. Kind of. I ended up with clunky beads that looked like something my daughter made out of Play-doh and let harden. Not exactly the keepsake jewelry beads I was hoping for.
This past November my Auntie lost her battle with cancer as well. She was diagnosed at Stage 4, inoperable, and although she fought as much as she could and maintained a remarkably positive attitude about it all, in the end the cancer took her from us way too soon. (Still depressing, I know, but here comes the fun part)
After my Auntie's funeral there were again tons of flowers. I took a few thinking I could do something with them similar to the beads, but better. She loved Christmas trees so I thought I would make little trees for us to remember her by.
I've heard rose petals work best for this type of thing, but in my experience it didn't matter that there were other flowers mixed in.
I pulled off all the petals and kept the ones that hadn't browned yet.
I figured the best way to start was to use the blender. I put the petals and a little bit of water in.
It took longer than I expected and there may have been a wooden spoon sacrificed, but in the end I had a nice little "petal paste".
Before I could form the paste into anything I need to cook out the water. I just put it all in a pan in the stove over medium heat and kept stirring until the water had cooked out and I had something I could shape.
At this point my paste wasn't very pretty and smelled a little strange.
So... I added some peppermint oil and green food coloring.
Much better!
Now to shape my trees. Ok, so calling them tress might be a stretch, but that's the general shape I was going for.
I decided to turn my Christmas trees into Christmas tree ornaments. I used a chopstick to make a hole for the hanger.
I took a photo of some her handwriting and made some little tags to tie on to my "trees".
So while it's not a blanket or bench or keepsake jewelry, it's also not a sad dying bouquet of funeral flowers. And it brings me some comfort, which is what the point is of sending flowers in the first place I think.