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Ye Maidens A'

Did you know if you have a few friends, access to Michaels, and several miles of twine (and coupons) you can make a pile of flower crowns? You can. They're great for keeping track of short people, fast-moving people, and people with the kind of face that just blends into a crowd at busy events.

An overflowing bundle of fake sunflowers, roses, and millet, mostly yellow and orange, with one bundle of white sunflowers and one of purple roses.
GLORIOUS ABUNDANCE
First you have to spend some time pulling flowers out of bins and arranging them, picking up fancy "accent" flowers and delicately putting them back when you realize they're more expensive than the entire bundle already in your cart, and debating the need for cohesion and variety with the entire party. Loudly, in the floral section.

Three young women in a living room with beige carpet and off-white walls, one lying on the floor with a straw hat obscuring her face and a pile of fake flowers on her torso, one with her back turned, setting another flower on the supine woman, and one watching and laughing from the squashy brown couch.
It's very hard to arrange flowers on someone when she keeps giggling.
The next step, naturally, is to bring your selections home and arrange them on your friends so you can take artistic photos with them.

A really quite creepy polaroid from above of a young woman lying on beige carpet with her legs in a backwards four shape, one arm down at her side and one crooked up over her long dark hair. A straw hat obscures her face, and a pile of fake flowers completely covers her torso. She's lying between a brown couch on the left and a set of matching chairs with a low dresser between them on the right.An underexposed polaroid of a young woman lying on beige carpet, with a straw hat mostly obscuring her face and one arm crooked up so her hand is on her hair, and a pile of orange, yellow, and white fake flowers completely covering her torso. One side of her face is just visible under the hat.

Or, y'know, take photos that look like a record of the corpse as it was found after Hannibal Lecter arranged it. Whatever makes you happy.

Two young women in a living room with beige carpet and a number of wood-and-upholstery chairs. One is sitting and leaning against the side of the stairs, holding a straw hat over her lap and haloed by fake flowers tucked into the stairs and spaces between the spindles of the handrail. The other in kneeling up, her back to the photographer, holding a camera in front of her chest with her long dark-to-turquoise hair falling over her shoulders.
"Stop laughing, you'll make the flowers fall!"
You can also take photos of what exactly must be accomplished to get the accidentally-creepy polaroids.

A young woman reclining on a pile of fake flowers, with her eyes closed and a faint smile, holding a straw hat over her chest.A slightly overexposed polaroid of a young woman with a round face, glasses, and shoulder-length brown hair, leaning against a white stair banister and holding a straw hat and small bunch of fake flowers against her chest, with piles of fake sunflowers haloing her head.

Bones, looking as serious as it's possible to look with 60 dollars of fake flowers perched on your head, and Mochuela in serene repose on a bed of plastic flower stems.

A pile of fake flowers, mainly yellow and white sunflowers, with a few red and purple roses and red-to-yellow millet heads, and a dramatic orangey-red motion blur above the pile.
Nyoom
We'd bought multi-stemmed fake flowers, so we bent the individual stems out from the base like little mangled floral umbrellas before cutting them apart.

Two small piles of individual fake sunflower stems, one white and one yellow.
It begins.
Snips from the garage proved very useful for sawing through the wire embedded in the flower stems, and Bones sacrificed her hands for the cause. Fake flowers are tough little things.

A person mostly out of frame, with their legs spread in a vee enclosing several piles of fake flowers, and their hands blurred with the motion of throwing another flower stem onto a pile. The piles are mostly white and yellow sunflowers, and the person is holding a bundle of small orange roses and millet to add.
"There's rosemary, that's for remembrance..."
We wanted a crown for each person going to the faire, so we split our sunflowers evenly into eight piles and then started distributing accent flowers until each pile had about the same number of pieces, with a mix of colors and styles.

Eight small bundles of fake flowers, each composed of a mix of white and yellow sunflowers, small orange and purple roses, and red-to-yellow millet heads. Cut-off stems make a small, sad pile in the background, and two people's knees poke into the frame at opposite sides.
Pretty posies!
And then I stopped taking photos, because we were arranging and rearranging and wrapping the daylights out of flowers for about an hour. We discovered the crowns worked best if we laid out the flowers so the stems weren't touching each other, and worked from tying the center two sunflowers together outward, one arm and then the other. We also discovered that Bones and I make tiaras more than circlets, Draca makes rather loose circlets, and among us, we had enough different sizes to fit everyone's heads in the party.

A white hand holding up a flower crown made of yellow and white sunflowers, with smaller orange and purple roses peeping out. Two other flower crowns with similar mixes of flowers fill the background.
Voila!
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