January 7, 2013 -- pansies on the windowsill

I pass this little house every day when I walk, but until today I hadn't noticed something wonderful on the windowsill. Here's the window closer...

...and closer!!!

The pansy roots are wrapped in a paper towel and sitting in a plastic food storage container. Beautiful. Really. 

January 6, 2013 -- same materials, different arrangement

These are the same materials I've been playing with the past couple of days. I just moved the round of roses over and sat it down on what I now think is a fatsia leaf. The leaf came from the florist, but if it is fatsia, it grows in the southern U.S.

January 5, 2013 -- rose round

The roses from previous days' arrangements were drying out, but they were pretty even dried, so I jammed them into another object I've found too pretty to throw away--the box a round of Brie comes in. This all looks so very graphic to me!

Wish the dried roses looked as bright in this photo as they do in real life.

January 4, 2013 -- order from chaos

This order came from a chaos of paperwhite narcissus foliage (see below). I bet lots of people have floppy paperwhite foliage like this in their homes right now?  I didn't want to discard mine without using it somehow, so I clipped some of it off and dropped it into a container made from test tubes nested in a block of wood (above left). Loved that linear look, but it seemed to need some contrast, so I displayed a palmate tropical leaf beside it. The tropical leaf was leftover from an event for which I did flowers on Dec. 28.

January 3, 2013 -- roses with leaves

It felt like cheating to use roses in a January arrangement again (I'd rather be modeling how to use seasonal stuff), but with leftover roses still sitting in that bucket on the back porch, I couldn't resist. Still, this arrangement seemed sort of boring to me (yellow roses with a couple of sprigs of periwinkle and money plant leaves) until I added the upside-down mahonia leaf in the second photo.

This is remarkably similar to my Dec. 29 post -- with roses now where the dandelions were!

January 2, 2013 -- apples and old roses

This is a variation on the theme "arsenic and old lace." I took yesterday's roses and nested them in an apple. It was sort of amazing how well this worked. You really can create a water-holding void in an apple.

January 1, 2013 -- roses and apple peels

I was peeling apples this morning and couldn't throw away the peels, because they were so twirly and colorful. Dropped them into stemmed glasses where they looked sort of interesting. But I couldn't leave well enough alone, especially since I had roses sitting in a bucket on the back porch. (The roses, leftover from an event I helped with, have actually experienced two frosts while outside, but they still look pretty good.) Here's the result. The colors are great, the execution not so great. And I usually don't like fruit under water (where to my eye it looks like rot waiting to happen) but in this case I decided my peels could be submerged a while without offending anyone.

Here's the color up close--gorgeous! And there's the smell of apple cake baking in the oven surrounding all this. Almost too rich to bear!