Memorial Day Floral Arrangement On The Fly

So it’s Memorial Day weekend, and my husband comes in from working all morning.  I am working on the computer.  It’s about lunchtime, and he asks if I want to know if I want to go out to eat.

He never asks if I want to go to eat somewhere…unless there is another reason.  I start thinking that maybe COVID has really gotten to him, and he just wants to go to a restaurant?

Well, then it comes out that he would like to go to the cemetery on our way there or back.  Ok, it’s starting to make sense now.

Oh, and “Do we have flowers to put on his Dad’s grave?”  I get up and leave the room, and he’s like, “Hey, we were talking…”.  I come back with a little pink flower arrangement that we have used before, but for his sister’s grave.

So now that one is ok, we will use it for Denise, but we still need one for his Dad.

I go to the garage this time and come back with 3 different containers that were handy.  And I had just happened to get in some silk flowers from Amazon last week.  I said, “If you want to, we can use these blue-ish flowers (blue was his dad’s favorite color) and put them in one of these containers.”  I had him pick the container.  Another option fitting for his dad would have been an old metal coffee container, but we would have had to empty one first, lol.  His dad used them for all kinds of storage in the shop.

Then we had to come up with a way to make it stick into the ground so that it won’t be able to blow away.  We talked about a hot wire fence post, but that seemed like overkill, lol. This is what we finally landed on. 

This was just a metal type can thing that I had left over from my store.

We took it out to his shed and got started.

First, he drilled a hole through the bottom.

Then, Greg MIG welded the big metal rod to the can.  That was pretty tricky since the can is a pretty lightweight metal.  He said to please not judge his welding skills on this because this isn’t what he would typically be welding on, lol.

After that, he ground down a rough spot then ran it under cold water to cool it off to be ready for me.

I dried it with paper towels and then fit a couple blocks of floral foam inside the can.

My plan was to hot glue them in, but once I jammed them in, it was not going to be easy to get them back out, so I left them.

For the flowers, all I had to do was cut about an inch of the bush stem off to make them fit down in the can nicely.  I did add some hot glue to the stem before pushing it into the floral foam.  I don’t know if that actually helps or not, but I did it anyway.

And that was just about it.

I did add a new ribbon to Denise’s arrangement also.  It was just a pathetic, little satin bow that had seen better days.  I am not a bow maker, so don’t look closely, like at all, but it does look better than what it had on it.  I do plan to teach myself how to make some bows this year.  Stay tuned for that!

I hope you all have a happy and safe Memorial Day Weekend!!!

UPDATE: So the next day, it popped into my head that Larry’s can would have looked nice if I had stenciled “Dad” on it.  And I said it out loud.  In front of Greg.  He really, really liked that idea.  So we went back to the cemetery after lunch today with a baggie of crafting supplies to make it happen. 

Give me a little slack, lol,  I stenciled it while on the ground.  I did forget to spray it with a sealer, so it is definitely not weather resistant…yet.  That will be our next trip!

Supplies:

• Florist Foam – https://amzn.to/2zCbo0M
• Artificial Peony in Spring Blue – https://amzn.to/2ZR9PqN
• Galvanized Milk Can – https://amzn.to/36FuvTH (Not the same as pictured)
• 6″ Alphabet Stencil Set – https://amzn.to/2ZRP5Pk