The Gourd In The Glass Jar

Should I say "The gourd cloche"?

Or better yet "The gourd terrarium"?

No matter how hard I try, it seems impossible to come up with a good title for this post. Friends, this is the big reveal to yesterday's post and its burning question. How to decorate with a gourd that has pointy bumps on each end and doesn't want to stand upright?! It upsets my OCD... So my solution was to put it in a bowl full of gravel. Even better, I put the gravel in a big empty glass jar (recycled, of course - see it here full of paper-whites) and then I put the gourd on top of the gravel. It doesn't stand vertically, but it's enough for my design sensibility.

The gourd in the glass is now good enough to star in a pretty fall vignette. If you're not sure where to start in creating a vignette, click here to see my tutorial on how to make a balanced vignette following a few simple rules. As you can see in the first pic, I chose natural elements and neutral colors for the arrangement. We've got everything: wood (the desk, the blank Russian doll), glass (the jar), metal (the vintage can), wax (the candle), ceramics (the mushroom salt shaker). The whole thing forms an "A" shape, for instant eye attraction. The whole thing is sitting pretty on the desk. So I created a vignette inside a vignette!

Talking about personal history, almost every single item in this pic has a special meaning to me, so I love it even more:

- Let's start with the desk: my dad bought it for me when I was 9 and I've had it ever since.

- The round brown sign was written freehand by my sweet Ana from Uituka, who is a master of typography. Don't ask me what is says, because we wanted to say "Division of labor" but in the end she came up with this untranslatable joke in Romanian.

- The blank Russian dolls are a birthday gift from my friend July. I've wanted a blank set for ages and even found some good deals on Amazon, but now I can't to paint them!

- The succulent is a gift from Sigrid's mom, from the most beautiful autumn garden I have ever seen "live".

- I stole the vintage tin can from my grandma, it was a tobacco box from the 1930s.

- And I saved the best for last: in the last pic you can see my cat Anais hidden inside the desk box. She does that to protect my cards and illustration from fading, right?