December 31, 2011--pomegranate and pine

I had already done an arrangement for today when I noticed the pomegranate sitting on the counter. I'd cut a wedge out of it to harvest some seeds, but suddenly it looked like a vessel, not a fruit, so I jammed some pine into it. The feel of that pine stem penetrating the pomegranate flesh was crazy. And then, another interesting thing happened: I turned on the light over the counter and that created a great pine needle shadow under the pomegranate.

December 30--geranium, again

This morning I discovered I'd left a geranium clipping on the kitchen counter overnight---something I'd edited from yesterday's arrangement. So I put it in water. Then, tonight, transferred it to a hot sauce bottle.

Then I decided to tranfer the big geranium blossom I'd used in yesterday's arrangement to a different vase, and I put a brown, woven coaster under it. Voila--a whole new look.

It's really amazing how much plant material you can harvest from one geranium plant overwintering in the windowsill.

December 29, 2011

What interested me here were the chartreuse leaves. I got back late from NY with little energy for windowsill arranging and decided to use only materials already in the house. I had used these geranium leaves in an arrangement before Christmas, and they were looking pretty shot, until I realized that "shot" in this case meant they had turned chartreuse green--a leaf color I LOVE in arrangements. So I decided to put them center stage. The chartreuse geranium leaves are combined here in a vanilla bottle with one red geranium blossom. A vanilla bottle makes a great vase for windowsill arranging because its base is so narrow.

December 28, 2011

Still in NYC where there are cut flowers for sale just blocks from us, but foraging is so much more fun! In this red vase (which I bought at Pearl River yesterday) are an ivy leaf (which I pinched off a vine), chopsticks (which I also bought at Pearl River), and a lemon wedge, which I begged off a waiter in the hotel lobby. My iPad doesn't take very good pictures (or at least I don't know how to take very good pictures with it), but my ineptitude led to something interesting here: In the photo, the notices on the hotel room
door (reflected in the window) remind me of the chop marks on Japanese scrolls!

December 27th 2011

This is a windowsill in The Roosevelt Hotel, NYC. The evergreen twigs came from a discarded Christmas tree on the sidewalk. The little red bag ($1) came from a store called Pearl River. We (Kate, Eliza, and I) were on the lookout for other greens all day but never found any.

December 26, 2011--Santa in his skivvies

This was a gift for a friend who loves clotheslines, but I had to take a picture of it in the windowsill before giving it away.  The only natural material here is moss--two kinds, a sheet moss and a cushion moss from Flower Camp.  Santa and his clothes came from an old-fashioned sheet of paperdolls I bought at a Christmas tree farm near Howardsville. The clothesline poles are wooden skewers; the tiny clothespins came from Michaels (the craft store). This may be too clever by half, but it sure was fun to create. Just cutting out the Santa paperdoll clothes took me back to cutting out paperdoll clohtes from McCalls magazine.

December 25, 2011

Oh, my. I am posting this from my new iPad. And this photo was taken by my granddaughter Eliza with her new phone. My glass is definitely more than half full.