October 7, 2012 -- times change

Today was an exercise in flexibility. I thought I'd be gardening all day at Flower Camp, and, instead, because of the weather, found myself sewing in Ashland. The unexpected switch gave me time to cover some chairs in a fabric I'd bought on Friday (my unconscious must have known it was going to encounter some project time!).  I could go on and on about this fabric. It's a 2012 version of some colors that I think I used to decorate my home in the 1969. It's definitely contemporary, and I'm so proud to be using it, because I see so clearly now why old people's homes look like old people's homes: we just don't have the energy or inclination to change anything! This interests me, too, because I'll be using the new fabric to cover old fabric that I absolutely loved in the 1980s. The old fabric is a Greff (Grief? Greiff?) print that I couldn't afford but managed to make a part of my life by buying maybe 2 yards and using it for pillows, etc. I loved it because it had violet leaves, ferns, trillium flowers and other wild things on it. How had the Greff (?) people managed to read my mind so well?  But times change. And today the fabric I loved so well was used as backing for this new, contemporary print.  But that's only half the story, because I realize what a troglodyte I am for even SEWING in 2012, and who has a RADIADOR (that's the antique heating device) in 2012? The only thing I see as sort of timeless in the following photos is the squash. First photo shows it sitting on my new fabric. Second photo shows it sitting on my old (now covered up) Greff fabric.

October 6, 2012 -- castor bean

This will go in the annals of arrangements that took under two minutes to make. Went out, picked two sprigs of castor bean (with spiny red seed pods attached) and dropped them into a jar. End of story.

October 5, 2012 -- shuffled bouvardia, etc.

This is bouvardia flowers and fetterbush foliage from Oct. 3 rearranged. (There's also a piece of climbing spinach from Oct. 1 on the far right.)  I'm sort of amazed how well the bouvardia has held up as a cut flower. This is really cheery and looks almost like a garden growing on the windowsill.

October 4, 2012 -- roadside wildflowers

This is a handfull of wildflowers I picked along the roadside as I walked this morning: blue dayflowers, pink smartweed, some red clover (which is actually pink), one stem of goldenrod, one stem of trumpet vine foliage. The trumpet vine foliage is my favorite--such a great yellow green!

To try to make this show up better, I put a blue napkin behind it, which made the colors pop.

October 3, 2012 -- bouvardia + gourd

This is a strange combination:  tropical summer flower (pink bouvardia) combined with traditional green gourd. It's strange in the same way the weather is strange today--hot and humid on Oct. 3.

The bouvardia (picked from a plant I have growing in a pot) is in a tube of water behind the gourd. There's a sprig of fetterbush greenery in the tube, too.

October 2, 2012 -- strange marigold foliage + dusk

I had absolutely no idea how to capture this photographically, but here's my best shot. I picked this marigold foliage because it was so unusual--almost black at the tips and chartreuse green down deeper. I combined it with black cayenne peppers (which you can barely see in the photo), then put this in the windowsill where dusk did some really great things with the colors. Wish I knew how to make all this show up in the photo.

October 1, 2012 -- marigolds and veggies

This is sort of a cheap trick, because 1) the arrangement is on a table in front of the windowsill, not on the windowsill itself and 2) the marigolds in the basket with the peppers are just lying there out of water. I could have put them in floral tubes (which hold water), but didn't. Still, there is one legitimate creative product here, and that's the combination of the basket with the wooden spool it's sitting on. These two items crossed my consciousness together as I was gathering them up to take them (for different reasons) to an arranging workshop. I saw them together, liked them together, and have been using them together ever since.

The plant material trailing out of the basket is climbing spinach, and I did put it in a floral tube, so it would live (to die later!) in a salad.