9/11/22 Working On Building A Mum For Homecoming?

     After constantly asking Mijo about the girlfriend situation for three years, now we are paying for it.  He has a little girlfriend, and we are trying to do things right.  The latest thing is a Texas mum for Homecoming, which is in and of itself a big deal.  We looked into it, and they are not what they used to be.  Prices we saw online were easily over $300, which did not seem right, until we went and priced some things out.

    Mijo decided we could do one at home, so I looked at some videos and agreed, but wow, the cost is almost all material.  Wife and I went to Michael's Saturday morning, while he was at the game review at 10:00am.  Just getting basics, and I thought Wife was overdoing it, we easily spent over $200.  This was not all, we then went to Hobby Lobby and spent another $50.  This does include a new glue gun, and some new scissors, for the job, but even subtracting that out, we are still over $200, and I know we already need some more acetate ribbon, as they refer to it.

    Youtube is so great for stuff like this.  I saw about 3-4 videos and almost felt like an expert myself.  Apparently, the mum is built in sections.  There is a mum head, where the flower is installed and the mum body, which are all the hanging ribbons and stuff.  The consensus seems to be that 3 cardboard body parts are needed.  The mum head is first decorated and then attached to one of the round cardboards, then all the ribbons are glued to a second identical cardboard layout, about the size of the mum.  A third is then used to hide all the gluing and stapling and this is where the hanging mechanism that will hold the mum to the girl will go.

    Last night, (Saturday night) Mijo and I worked on building a good-looking base for the mum and attached more ribbons than I thought possible to about an 8-inch disk of cardboard.  I thought Wife was nuts buying 4 of each of all the gold, yellow, and brown ribbons the stores had, but we used up 90% of everything.  The ones we didn't use were just because Mijo did not like the goofy footballs printed on them.

    We are waiting on a crafts stapler to come in the mail, tomorrow (Monday) to really attach everything and put the head and body together.  I don't trust the glue will make it through an average high school day hanging on a busy girl, hence, I want to staple everything, then seal it up, like the examples showed.  After this, we will add the finishing touches, like gluing a small cougar head to the center of the mum, and all sorts of bells and shiny things, to really make it pop.