moss terrarium for mum

I made this mini moss terrarium for my mum for her birthday.



I used a vintage moss green coloured brandy glass – green is mum’s
favourite colour. It’s stuffed with mosses, lichen and even a tiny
flowering plant – a Kenilworth Ivy or Ivy-leafed toadflax.



Cue gratuitous mini moss-scape close-ups..
To see the full beauty, click the photos to view them larger..









I love making these little miniature gardens, I cultivate mosses and lichens to grow in pots in my yard – moss and lichen are some of my favourite plants. I also love the Kenilworth Ivy plants, they grow all over the walls where we live.

I use collected beach glass as the drainage material in the bottom of a glass terrarium, carefully washed first. Then I add a layer of activated charcoal which is also used for aquarium filters. For these mini terrariums I don’t add a soil/compost layer, just a layer of re-hydrated dried sphagnum moss, which acts as a barrier to stop soil washing down to the cleansing charcoal layer. Then I add the mosses and lichen which have some soil trapped in their roots from my pots outside – they only need a little soil. They like indirect light and regular misting with a water spray.

beach treasure mosaic mirrors

My sister Tressa and her boyfriend just recently moved home and the kids and I wanted to make a gift to take to their house warming party. Tressa loves the sea so we decided to make something using some of our collected beach treasures..

I thought we could make some mirrors with a mosaic border. I found these small round beveled edge mirrors cunningly disguised as candle plates for a £1 each! Exactly what I had in mind, don’t you love it when that happens!



The mirrors are about 4" diameter. I cut two 6" squares from 3mm plywood we have lying around. I then fixed the mirrors in the center using dual purpose tile adhesive/grout. I made sure to scrape off any excess around the edge. Ideally they should have been left to dry overnight at this stage but we were making them the morning of the party so I just left them for a couple of hours to dry.



I then got Oliver and Cyan to come and design their mosaic borders, using shells and sea glass from our collection. I also have some little tumbled glass mosaic tiles and they used a few of those too.



I was originally going to let the kids stick the pieces on, but I had a few concerns about this. I was not sure about the tile adhesive/grout on their hands as it’s not very skin friendly. Time was also an issue and I suspected it would be quicker to get them to work out their layout and then I would fix them after. I am so glad we did it this way, it is quite fiddly fixing the pieces on. I took photos of their layouts to refer to when I was sticking everything down:



Cyan’s design



Oliver’s design



I spread a fairly thick layer of tile adhesive/grout around the borders, working on a small area at a time, about half of one edge, to stop the adhesive drying too quickly.

Next time I make these (I am planning to make more for birthday gifts this year) I will make sure that the grout is up to the edges of the mirror at this stage. I didn’t – if you enlarge the above photo you can see there are gaps around the edge of the mirror. This meant I had to wait for it to dry and then go round and fill in those gaps which was a real pain, I discovered you can’t use the usual grouting method with these uneven objects!



Cyan’s mirror all finished



Oliver’s mirror all finished

Once they were all fixed and dry I painted round the edge of the plywood bases with white emulsion paint to tidy up the edges, I had scraped off excess grout around the edges when I was fixing the pieces on.

They turned out so pretty and Tressa loved them. I love both the kids’ designs – they are different but complimentary. Oliver was very proud of his symmetrical design and Cyan incorporated a little symmetry after Oliver explained symmetry to her, I love her combination of randomness with a little symmetry!

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a hoard of beach treasures

It’s been a very busy week, one way and another.. I did find time to wash and sort our stash of treasures which have been collected over several days out to various local beaches so far this year. The creamy/white ones on the left above my Mum collected from a Spanish beach on her holidays, some with perfect round holes! They all looked so pretty laid out to dry in the beautiful sunshine.

Some of these were collected when we went to the Pirate weekend at Mount Edgcumbe recently, most of these have come from Mount Edgcumbe, which has a couple of little pebbly beaches which are full of shells and sea glass. My kids have inherited (or learnt?!) my love (obsession!) of beach combing, every time we visit a beach we come back with another load of treasure!



Some of these treasures (heart shaped stones, large sea glass pieces) I have specific purposes in mind for (look out for future projects coming soon), the tiny shells will go into my tiny shell collection jars, and I have promised the kids a jar each to fill with their favourite treasures to keep in their rooms. The rest will get organised into more jars (part of my new getting organised craftiness!) and sit around looking pretty until I have a purpose for them!



Do you love finding treasure from the sea too?

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