As a Vermonter (for at least one more winter) whose back porch door has been completely taken over by bittersweet vines, I can tell you that, while very pretty at the right time of year, it won't likely be too pretty on Dec 29; even now, the berries on mine are already falling off and shriveling up, and the outer flower-like casing thingies around the berries themselves look all brownish and nasty instead of the nice pumpkin orange they are during the pretty part of fall.
Even if the part of New England you had in mind is further south, say Connecticut, the bittersweet would almost certainly already be too far gone for bouquet making. Some artificial flower-making projects among the relatives sounds like a lovely idea to me--maybe made of scraps of shattered/otherwise unusable silk, perhaps with some sentimental value to them? I could swear I've run across several sets of how-to-make-artificial-flowers instructions in Victorian ephemera of the sort your characters might be likely to have run across, although I'm not enough of a masochist to try to hunt them down now... =} -E House _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
