Hydrangea's On The Lam

I have been known to do various craft projects in some unique places - crocheting an afghan or knitting a "to-be felted" purse on a plane flying somewhere over the Atlantic; making jewelry at a picnic table while camping in our favorite place - Cathedral Pines in Eustis, Maine; making bracelets after hours at a dining room table in a hotel in Dachau, Germany with a friend from Finland; a "Mom jewelry workshop" in between matches at a high school wrestling meet at an all-day competition & one other time hand-stitching tea stained snowmen, again at an all-day wrestling meet; and probably the funniest - at my day job during lunch - prepping for grapevine wreath making.

I know that lunchtime at work doesn't sound very funny, but you had to be there. It was a beautiful sunny day, so we were eating our lunch at the picnic table in front of our building! Another "addicted" crafter (like myself) and I were noticing that the hydrangea bush at work was really full with blooms this particular year. We decided that we were going to make up some grapevine wreaths with the lovely blooms but they needed to be dried at least a couple of weeks before using them.

We gathered up as many of the cream & pink flowers in various sizes as we could fit into our arms and headed for the file retention room on the ground floor of our office. After all, you need a dark, undisturbed place to dry the blooms before you can use them. This was the perfect room. Hardly anyone ever went down there, there were no windows, and we would have plenty of room & time for drying our treasures, or so we thought!!

We taped the stem of each flower to the front of the tall two-door cabinets that were all around the room. We must have had over 50 to 60 blooms and were anticipating making a few wreaths. We were chuckling as we taped them up to dry. We thought we were so clever... It just looked so pretty when we got done!! We still left plenty of flowers on the bush because we didn't want it to look stripped clean...

Wouldn't you know it, at the end of the 2nd week, just when the flowers were almost to the point that we could use them, we had one of those impromptu audits by our payroll auditors. They were planning to go over some of the files from the year before and the files that they needed were - (you guessed it) down in the file retention room...

I didn't even know that they had gone down to the file room until my supervisor came into my office later that day and asked if I knew what all those flowers were doing taped to the cabinets. Busted!!! I shared our master plan with him; he laughed, fortunately, and told me to get them out of there - it wasn't a craft room!

Needless to say, I finished drying them at home and the wreaths came out lovely!!!