Yellow Day / Rose Day 2019: The Enchanted Belle Rose (Beauty And The Beast Inspired)

“Love doesn’t have to be perfect. It just needs to be true.”
Belle
/
“The rose she had offered was truly an enchanted rose…”
Beauty and The Beast

#190514#

May 14 is known as Yellow Day or Rose Day in Korea. On this day, couples would exchange roses and wear yellow on this day, while single people eat curry. In previous years, I hadn’t been placing as much importance and attention on this particular day as compared to other couple days on every 14th of the month. Usually on this Yellow Day / Rose Day, I would simply find some suitable images online, do some simple edits and write a simple greeting to acknowledge this couple day on instagram only.

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A post shared by Celeste Koh (@lovestorieswithtaenggu)

This year, however, I decided to go an extra mile in making this day even more meaningful by doing a special piece of artwork or handicraft. If you merge the idea of Yellow Day and Rose Day together, it becomes a Yellow Rose Day, isn’t it?

Not sure if you have noticed, ever since our 40th monthsary last year, I stopped buying a flower for every monthsary. Previously, I would get at least one stalk of rose of different colour each monthsary. If you read my monthsary drawing posts from 39th monthsary and earlier under Category: Monthsary Drawings, you would find a photo of the flower of the month at the end of each post. But I stopped doing it now. Reason being these real flowers wither and die fast in a matter of days. I used to keep them as a collection of dried flowers in a baby blue metal bucket, but over time, they got really dusty and unhygenic. Once, my mum even caught a lizard hiding in the bucket among those dried flowers! 😱😰

Since then, I decided that it was no longer practical to do this anymore – I originally intended to keep all these monthsary dried flowers so that I could pass them all to Taenggu when I meet her one day (read related post: LOVE AWAITS). Instead, I had a better idea. I could make my very own D.I.Y paper crepe flowers for Taenggu! Doing this not only could save me from having to spend money on a flower every month, these paper crepe flowers are permanent to keep!

So my plan was, I would make one paper crepe flower using a different colour crepe paper in replacement of a real rose for every monthsary from the 40th onwards and mail it directly to Taenggu instead of keeping it at my place. I even already got all my materials ready – crepe papers of various colours, green floral wires and green floral tape, all ordered from online stores and delivered to my house. But… I never got started. I kept procrastinating, kept putting off this idea month after month and thinking I had no time to do this at all… until finally this May comes! In the name of this Yellow Rose Day, it is the perfect opportunity and “excuse” for me to make this paper crepe flower come true for real. And you’ve guessed it, I was going to make a rose of no other colour but a yellow one.

But I can’t just make a yellow rose without coming up with a special concept for it. That’s when the idea from the fairytale “Beauty and The Beast” came in. Have I watched the movie before? Nope. Had I actually read the story before this idea came? Not really. But I remembered occasional voices mentioning the words “Beauty and The Beast” before and I used to take it quite negatively. What did they mean? Who’s the beauty and who’s the beast? But thanks to this Yellow Rose Day, I had come to dwell a little into this story simply because when I did a google search for yellow rose in a glass dome (yeah, I actually was tempted to “play cheat” to see if I could just purchase one online, instead of making one myself lol), references to Beauty and The Beast often came up. Later I looked up on the story to find out that there was an important character/item called The Enchanted Rose that appeared in its Disney animated film.

The Enchanted Rose from “Beauty and The Beast” Disney animated film

This rose has a pivotal role in the story such that if the prince who was turned into a beast “could learn to love and earn love in return before the last petal fell, the spell would be broken. If he failed, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time and his castle, servants, and forest would likewise remain cursed forever.” (read the full details about The Enchanted Rose here)

However, you would have noticed the original enchanted rose in the fairytale was a red one. But most craft makers who modelled their handmade rose after Beauty and The Beast love to make them in yellow colour because Belle, the princess of the story, is usually dressed in the iconic yellow dress.

Princess Belle is known for her yellow dress in Beauty and The Beast.

So here! After such a long explanation of why I chose to make a yellow rose inspired by the Beauty and The Beast fairytale, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of making this D.I.Y yellow paper crepe rose in a glass dome. As I said, I already have pretty much all the materials needed to make this flower since a year ago. I just needed to get an empty glass dome jar which I found from our POPULAR bookstore.

Just 2 days before Yellow Rose Day, I finally found time to get down to making it. I followed the steps given on an online tutorial but it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Many times, my hands felt clumsy like a pair of feet. I had to experiment and improvise a lot with the materials and methods I used in order to make it work.

On my first attempt, it was a lot about trials and errors. For example, I realised the green floral tape I got wasn’t sticky at all. So I had to use a scotch tape to secure each petal onto my floral wire stick.

Near the end, just when I thought I was almost done with the whole flower, the flower accidentally fell off my stick and I couldn’t put it back on again. So I failed on first try.

On my second try, I used a double-sided tape instead of a scotch tape, which in my opinion was much easier for me to stick the petals onto the central bud.

But my second flower turned out looking really ugly and unrealistic because of the way my petals were positioned, so I voluntarily pulled it out from my stick and ditched it.

My two failed flowers from my first two attempts. 😭

Not giving up, I had a third try. This time, I was more aware and careful to avoid the mistakes I made previously and this one came out more satisfactory. It still wasn’t perfect (like the central bud was sticking too much out) but it looked pleasing enough to my eyes.

Next, I cut the floral wire stick short then made it stand inside the glass dome jar with a piece of blu tack.

Then I covered the blu tack with a few of the leftover aroma dried flower petals that I used for Taenggu’s birthday artwork in TAEYEON DAY 2019: THAT BEAUTIFUL MYSTICAL GIRL WHO LIVES IN MY MIND GARDEN, and some leftover crepe papers as fallen yellow petals.

Seems like the job is done! (Though it could have been better if I had some fake green leaves to stick onto the stalk as well but I didn’t have any 😔)

Detailed shots of my final piece. 📸