Posted in Projects to Make, Flowers, Eggs |
Repurposing Glads
July 30th, 2006
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One of the keys to using what you have and having what you want when you want it, is to “forward-think” a bit. By that, I mean to think about what you may want to be doing, decorating-wise, months into the future (YEAH, RIGHT! Like we all have time for THAT! Ok, try to follow me here.) For instance, I know that, come Easter-time next year, I am going to want to try my hand at naturally-dying eyes. I want to use stuff found in nature to make dyes to color my eggs.
So far, I have been saving onion skins for their color - expecting them to yield an orangish-gold color. This week, I stumbled upon something to save that I would have never given another thought to, had they not gotten wet while sitting on my kitchen counter. I’ll start at the beginning.
The flowers pictured above are glads - given to me as bulbs by my mother this year for Easter (click on the picture above to get a better view of them). I planted them last spring, and this is what they looked like last week. I just LOVE them. So, I was really sad when we had such heavy rains this week that some of them were broken off by the very weight of the raindrops on the flower heads. They were just lying on the ground, next to where they once stood so beautifully.
I brought them inside and put them in a vase on my hutch. (Click on the picture for a bigger view)
Every day I look at them - I think they are just stunning. Yesterday, needing to add more fallen blossoms to the vase, I removed the stems already on display and cleaned them up - plucking off any spent flowers (which had dried on the stems), and trimming stems. I reassembled the arrangement, and back on the hutch it went. Now to clean up the trimmings.
That’s when it hit me. The dried flowers were lying on the counter and they were a DEEP DEEP red now that they were dried. My first thought was that they would make a great addition, color-wise, to some potpourri somewhere. A small drop of water had fallen on one of them while I was freshening the arrangement. That water drop was now this gorgeous color on my counter top. Bingo! These dried glads could be another thing to save that I can try to use to make dye for my eggs! And between now and then, they, in their dried state, will look great in some fall arrangement that I’ll do.
Now, I have not done this before, and I don’t know that it will work. I will find out in the spring. But between now and then, I’ll put these dried flowers to good use in other ways, while they wait out their final color calling. Wish me luck!
Your Frugal Decorating Diva,
Nancy
Jakob on 26 Jul 2007 at 10:24 pm: 1
This is exactly what I expected to find out after reading the title By Design : Repurposing Glads. Thanks for informative article