Saturday 6 October 2012

Fantastic and Free #8

Tonight was Thanksgiving supper with Aunt Heather, Uncle Myles, Grayson, Olivia, Aunt Wendy, and all of Derek's immediate family (minus Natalie, who wasn't able to make it). We went into the city with Jeremy (Derek's brother) and Adrienne (Jeremy's wonderful girlfriend!) to meet up with the rest of the fam at the Halliday's (Heather and Myles) house. The food was fantastic and the company was even better! We spent (several) hours playing those fun little mind games. Some of them were incredibly frustrating, others were quite easy, but they were all a blast! Aunt Heather is an incredible cook. I always love going to her house because the food is so good they're such wonderful people (both are true, don't worry). And she generally sends us home with leftovers, a fact which makes both Derek and I quite happy. It was a time of laughter, of stuffing ourselves, and of reunion. It's always a blast when Derek's family gets together, and adding some other crazy into the mix definitely makes it even better!

Today's evening was great - but really quite full. And in fact, the entire day was full - with cleaning, making food, running secret missions with Anja (and Lana, even though she was in Alberta), going grocery shopping (for the first in over a week!), etc. Derek's family is coming over tomorrow to spend the afternoon with us/see the house, so we wanted to make sure that it looked great for them. Because the house very easily - and quickly - becomes messy. And by that I mean that my house is always completely spotless. *wink.

All that being said, today left me with very little time to actually do anything "fantastic and free", so my project today was more of an experiment than anything else. I've been quite curious about terrariums for awhile now, and a couple months back, I picked up a cake-cover in order to craft one. However, it ended up sitting in our house gathering dust until today. Today, I grabbed it and figured why not put one of the plants that I had inside, and see what happened? The idea of a terrarium is a completely self-sustainable plant. Some terrariums are incredibly complex, with various layers of soil, and all kinds of different plants, but in today's case, mine was rather simple. 


I used one of the wedding succulents that I normally have sitting on my night table, and - after making sure the soil was damp - I put it inside the cake-cover, set it on our dresser, and I am now letting it do its thing. I'm a fan of this succulent because it's managed to stay alive since the wedding, even after I thought it had pretty much died. I'm not so good at keeping plants alive... several of the succulents from the wedding have died completely, and most of them seem like they're on the verge of death... But this one keeps growing, albeit slowly. So now he sits on my dresser in his (hopefully) self-sustaining environment. And he makes me smile.


Budget Breakdown:
CAKE COVER: $0 (had it already)
SUCCULENT: $0 (got it for the wedding)
MASON JAR PLANT HOLDER: $0 (it was a gift, and it originally had a mini apple pie in it! Yum!)

CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT(?): Priceless

No comments:

Post a Comment