January 14, 2012 -- more browns

Still playing with brown things: two alder twigs in beer bottles and a coffee mug with my "rabbit ears" in it. (The rabbit ears are avocado husks lined with orange peels!)  I also found a gorgeous brown sycamore leaf on my walk yesterday, and it's on the windowsill, too (second photo).

January 13, 2013 -- alder

This is just a beautiful alder twig I found on my walk today--male catkins toward the top, female cones near the bottom. The catkins are actually more deep purple than black right now.

January 12, 2013 -- more leftovers

This is just another tweak of yesterday's display. To the black avocado rinds on the right, I added some orange rinds. Crazy, but it's sort of fun to play with these forms and colors using only leftovers.

Here are the avocado rinds with orange rinds nested inside, up close. I've made the avocado rinds stand up by spearing them with wooden skewers.

January 11, 2013 -- color echo in eggs

So many parts of this would be prettier if I took the time to tweak them (or the photo). For example, you can't really see the avocado husks on the right (so beautiful!), and the under-ripe papaya round sitting on the windowsill isn't really round because I hacked on it for reasons that would take too long to explain. Still...this was sort of fun to do--building on papaya colors from yesterday. The most satisfying part of this was displaying the brown eggs. These are actually eggs from a neighbor's chickens, but I'd have never thought to include them if I hadn't seen Marty Ross use eggs in a windowsill display she created and shared with me.

January 10 2013 -- papaya

This is a remake of yesterday's arrangement with the mug turned around and papaya rounds substituted for the lilies. (I also removed the paperwhite foliage and unfurled the fatsia leaf). Long, long story re why the papaya. The short version: for the first time in my life, I used both papaya and mango in a recipe on Sunday. Or, to be more accurate, I used mango in a recipe on Sunday, but the papaya I'd bought turned out to be too unripe to use. Sure was pretty inside, though! Tonight, I decided to try cutting the papaya into slices and using them as "flowers"-- sort of the way people use cut pomegranates in arrangements. I jammed them onto skewers to make the stand up. The result: this is sort of interestingly tropical-looking, but it also reminds me of something from Teletubbie Land!

January 9, 2013 -- recycled materials

This is really too big to qualify as a windowsill arrangement, but it does use materials that have been on the windowsill for the past few days. They include the hunk of green hellebore flowers from yesterday, narcissus foliage from Jan. 4-6, and the big fatsia leaf from Jan. 4-6 (it's sort of rolled up in the back of the arrangement). I started with the pretty mug, a Christmas gift, then added the peach-colored lilies because they've been languishing in the utility room since Dec. 28.

The lilies, of course, are the zinger here. I have them only because, after working with friends on some big arrangements Dec. 28, I brought home a little bucket of leftovers. They were buds at the time and we almost threw them away (flowers seem unwanted and cheap when you've been in the presence of too many of them too long), but I've had this happen before: the flowers that seem like too much trouble to keep alive on Dec. 28 have begun to seem like rare treasures by January 9!

January 8, 2012 -- catalog colors

I must have a mind meld with the creator of the McClure & Zimmerman catalog covers, because I used last year's cover to inspire an arrangement, too. Whoever their designer is seems to know what colors will seem fresh and new each year. In fact, all designers seem to know it, because I almost bought a jacket in these very same colors yesterday! Anyway, this acid green, wine pink, and yellow appealed to me, so I put the catalog on the windowsill then started looking for vase and plant material to accompany it. First thing I found was this stem of green stinking hellebore flowers. They seemed to compliment the cover without overwhelming it, and the low yellow bowl could hold water deep enough to keep even a horizontal stem hydrated.