stacked mugs with aucuba

Here's what happened after I decided I liked the look of one clay-colored dish under a green mug of Aucuba foliage. If one's good, why not two?!

The array evolves

One day last week, to my pots of green sticks and Lincoln log structure I added a mug of Aucuba foliage.And to make it a little more "of a piece" with the clay pots already on the windowsill, I put a clay dish under it. And that gave me a bright idea for what happened today, which I'll post separately.

more stick play

This little structure of kerria sticks (swiped from yesterday's arrangement and shortened) was so much fun to make! Reminded me of playing with  Lincoln logs. The log-cabin-like structure surrounds a little green vase, and the foliage in it is cryptomeria. The cryptomeria foliage has been cycling in and out of various arrangements for over a month!

Kerria sticks in clay pots

I started playing with these sticks about a week ago, and I'm still playing with them. John and I had cut a kerria shrub to the ground and carted all the stems off to the brush pile when I realized they were way too green and pretty to discard. I've used some long, tapering ones in a big arrangement in the living room, and now I'm shuffling the remaining straight stem pieces around in various vases. I think I like them best in these clay pots.

     The colder January gets, the greener these stems look in comparison to everything else.

hazelnut catkins

I love the catkins that hang on my hazelnut shrub at this time of year, but I've never been able to display them in a way that suits me, because the twigs are sort of angular and the catkins never hang as gracefully in a vase as they do on the shrub. Tried again last night and this was the result--still unsuccessful, but I do like the color of the catkins with the color (or non-color) of the vase.

pussy willow/blue light

It was the light outdoors that made this so much fun to look at--pussy willow inside, blue light outside.

so January

I actually had a couple of pansy flowers I might have dropped into a vase today, but this silvered vase seemed to call for something starker and more January-esque. Had these evergreen cryptomeria snippets leftover from another arrangement, so I used them.