Homecoming Mum – Stravaganza

You hear in Texas, everything is bigger and its true, the hair, the bling, the trucks, the houses, yep pretty much everything. I never really appreciated Texas, or Houston for that matter, until I moved to Oklahoma. Oklahoma is an odd place, land locked but rumored to have more shoreline than any other state (I know, weird).

Focus, this post is not about Oklahoma. It’s about Texas, errr, Texas homecoming.

I grew up here in Houston, in the great state of Texas but for some odd reason (maybe it was private school for a few years, or that my public school was a magnet school for the arts with no sports teams) but I never went to homecoming or had a mum or did that whole court thing. Even in college it was kind of a forced event, we didn’t have a football team so we had homecoming in the dead of January winter during basketball season. Even still, there were no mums.

The only mum experience I can recall is I had a friend who was a few years older than me growing up and she had mums hanging on her bedroom wall. That’s it.

So when two of my friends said, “I have to make a mum for my son’s date, I have no idea what I’m doing can you help?” I thought, neither do I but I’m crafty so sure, why not.

Enter Mum-Stravaganza.

I knew two things.

1. There was some kind of white flower attached at the top.
2. The bigger it was and the more crap that was attached the better.

Number two gets my brain reeling, gaudy things get me excited, because I prefer to go above and beyond. Through out the planning and shopping stages for the mum I offered the following suggestions: we should put one of those fake birds on it, no a real bird, no a chicken (which offers the benefits of fresh eggs). My friend said no. Then I said, OOO there’s that fake fruit and vegetables in the floral section, NO, a loaf of fake bread. She said no to that too. I did get feathers in there, and some zebra print ribbon. But had she said yes to all of my suggestions that mum would have been awesome (insane).

So after a trip to every craft store in town we ended up with this for mum #1:

And there WAS a picture of the table with all of Mum #2’s stuff, but it seems to have gone the way of lost sock matches and children’s pencils.

It was about 9 hours of glitter, yards of ribbon, tulle, feathers, staples, high level planning, hot glue and hot glue gun burns. Basically it was awesome, and I felt like a real Texan.

At the end of the 9 Hours we ended up with these:

I now know more than two things about homecoming mums.

1. see above
2. see above
3. The mums should be personalized to the girls with their names, hobbies, accolades and favorite candy attached or represented.

4. Freshman and Sophomores get mums in school colors, Juniors get Silver, Black and White, Seniors get Gold.
5. They should hang around the girl’s neck.
6. Reinforcements are important.
7. Build it up in layers.

8. High temperature hot glue on your skin will leave giant painful blisters (I may have known this before).
9. Start with a less expensive item in the back, we used tulle and cut it into strips. You could barely see it by the end but it added a lot of girth and puffiness.
10. Get creative and go away from the “mum” section of the store. We got stuff from the party, scrapbooking, christmas, floral, and fabric sections.
11. Making these things with three other women is an insane amount of fun.

Is it silly to say I’m already looking forward to next year?