Poinsettia Arrangements

As part of my support for my Spiritual Centre, I did up some poinsettia baskets. The other day I found some very inexpensive poinsettia plants as well as some different kinds of ivy and a dieffenbachia plant, all at low prices. I have lots of dieffenbachia here already, but this is a different kind that I have growing here, and most of what I have is way too big for this, and the rest is young ones I started that are not really big enough yet. Do I have you convinced yet that it was okay to buy another "dieff"? Do you believe I really need any more plants of any kind? More about that in another post, but for now... The Centre has only one little window in the office area and the blind on it has to be kept closed when we are not there so people can't look in and see the computer and such. So that means that it is not a good place for living plants of any kind. So these will live with me and I will take them to church with me every Sunday for the rest of this year. This is a bit of "a pain" in that I usually catch a ride to church with a friend, but will now have to take my truck. There is no way my friend would make it up my driveway, so I would have to make several trips up and down to get all my "stuff" down to her car, then the same to get it all back up again. 3 baskets of plants, eggs I take to sell, briefcase I keep with treasury stuff for the CPL has to go with me every time, my purse, oh and this week a big dish of bread pudding for the pot luck Christmas lunch we're having, and sauce for it. I'm sure I could be forgetting something else too, like the book of songs I need to have with me each week too. But I digress... back to the plants :o)

I love this little poinsettia with it's beautiful multi color, and beside it is a plain ivy. I put the plain ivy so it wouldn't take away from the poinsettias beauty. I had another little plant at home I could have put into this arrangement if I'd had a bigger basket to put it in. This was my egg collecting basket, but I needed it so it now has these 2 plants planted in it.



This basket is just on loan to me for the occasion, so I couldn't actually plant these into it. What I did was put some wool (not good enough for spinning, so keep it for stuffing) into the bottom of the basket to fill excess space. Then I put the 3 plants into baggies and arranged them into the basket. Some of the plastic showed, so I stuffed a bit more wool in around the top to hide that. It worked pretty well. A pink & white poinsettia, a variegated ivy, and a dieffenbachia. I put together about 3 of the little ones I started from cuttings this summer, mostly green with a bit of white markings.



A red poinsettia, a plain ivy, and that dieffenbachia I told you about at the top of the page... my new one that is different than all my old ones I already have. Pretty with all the white on it, isn't it. These are all planted in the basket I "stole" from some other stuff I had in it, and lined with plastic before putting the plants in.

I had no problem with the transplanting, I've done a lot (and I mean a LOT) of that over the years. Deciding which plants to put together was fun, and seemed to "come naturally" for the most part. The ribbons and bows, however, were a different matter. Hannah gave these ribbons and wire ribbons to me to use on this project and I've never used ribbon for anything other than decorating gifts, and never even touched wire ribbon before. However, I think it ended up okay in the end. At first it took away from the plants, but I think I over came the problems and now the bows just are accents.