In a Vase on Monday: Minimal Effort?

I set myself this particular  challenge after seeing Amy and rickii‘s vases last week, but in the circumstances it turned out to be quite tricky, particularly as I did not want to copy the pretty contents of the latter although I had the material to do so. Searching high and low, inside and outside of the box, I came up with some comfrey flowers, probably Symphytum ‘Hidcote Blue’ (which start pink before opening to white and blue), a couple of sprigs of one of the recent additions to the new shrub border, Eonymous fortunei ‘Silverstone’ whose variegated leaves currently have a pink reverse, and  red tips of Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’. So far, so deceptively simple?

The secret of my challenge, however, was to create a miniature vase, which is what Amy and rickii produced last week. Having lots of miniature ‘things’ about the house this really appealed to me and although it was easy to choose this tiny stoneware jug, a mere 1½ inches or 4cm high and its even tinier partner, filling it with ‘to scale’ material at the beginning of February was not. I had a back up plan of stripping the outer petals off some Paperwhite to leave their almost lily-like centres, but snipping the leaves and opening flowers from the comfrey produced an acceptable result. The leaves of the pretty euonymous were the perfect size and the pink and green colouring made them a great match, enhanced by the rhubarb red cornus.

I could have added all sorts of miniature props, but decided to keep it simple with the other little jug, and am quite pleased with the deceptive result. It brings back memories of when, as a 13 year old, for an Art exam we were asked to produce a scale model of a room in our house. Now, I may be creative but ‘art’ was never a good subject for me, particularly in the days when an art lesson did not involve teaching us how to paint or draw but just an instruction to ‘paint a picture’, something I was always rubbish at. Although I had never done it before, the model making concept really appealed to me and I produced a meticulous 1:12 scale model of my bedroom, perfect in every detail from the ‘candlewick’ bedspread to the vase of ‘London Pride’ flowers – my Art teacher used to enthuse about it for years afterwards, long after I had happily given up art as a subject and, according to my Mum, even after I had left the school at 18! These days we would have photographic evidence of something like that – but not then, alas!

Mine may be tiny this week, but the size of your Monday vase is up to you – as always it is a personal challenge to find material in the garden or foraged locally to bring inside and bring you added pleasure during the week. It doesn’t have to be flowers – we have had lemons, pebbles, vegetables, twigs and leaves over the months and thinking out of the box can add to the pleasure of the challenge. We have been inspiring each other with the meme, bringing pleasure to others as well as ourselves, so what could you find this week? If you would like to join in, just leave a link to this post from yours, and from this post to yours so that we can see what you have found.