Pretty Peonies - Ombre Style

I love Peonies.  They are my favorite flower.  They are similar to roses but with twice as many petals.  So get ready for a second post about flowers.  Its summer now and I just can't help myself.

I have been stalking driving by my favorite place - our local flower farm - every few days, watching and waiting for the first Peony buds to open.  And now that my favorite place has my favorite flower, I can't help but share them with some of our favorite people - our teachers!

The kids and I gathered an armful of peonies (for just $7!) to divide up into gift bouquets. 

Following the teacher theme, I became the Art Teacher to my kids while we made these bouquets, teaching them the art word of the day: Ombre.  Ombre means having colors or tones that shade into each other - used especially in fabrics and design in which the color is graduated from light to dark.  Its actually an old French word meaning "shaded". 

So if you didn't know that, there's your art lesson.  Ombre is all the rage right now - in fabrics, flowers, party themes, fashion, even hair.  Google it, I'm telling ya.

Anyway, we created "ombre" bouquets, using all the shades of pink peonies we could find, then clustering them from lightest to darkest.  We kept this theme for the gift tags too, by using paint chips (free at the paint store) that also were in graduated pink shades.

Here's all it took to make this pretty little gift:

- Mason jars ($0 - we already had these, you could even use a soup can)

- Pink ribbon ($0 - I already had different bits of pink ribbon. But twine or string can work too.)

- Paint swatches ($0 - free at the paint store)

- Peonies ($7 per bunch at the flower farm = four bouquets, plus a little left for me.

Total cost: less than $2 per bouquet, plus a little time.

Here is the end result: (Sorry the quality is not great, I forgot to take this picture until we were in the car making our deliveries.)

We put the bouquets in a shallow bucket in the car and the kids took turns delivering them.  Since school was already out for my kids before the peonies bloomed, we didn't have a chance to give these to their teachers so we opted to give them to the teachers we knew personally.  We were able to deliver them to their doorsteps on their first full day of summer break.  Happy summer!

It was a fun summer activity, it made a pretty little teacher gift, and it was a great way to get our kids involved with giving back and having a thankful heart.