Arrange.

In keeping with my word-of-the-year, I am still on a roll doing workshops and classes of all shapes and sizes. A few days ago I did a fantastic flower-arranging workshop with talented Belinda Soboil of Bella. Now, I have never been one for flower arranging, in fact, I am not really a flower-kind-of-person at all. And as you all know by now, I can't garden. But when I saw some of Belinda's work with branches, leaves and roots, I just knew that I wanted to do a workshop with her. She specializes in Ikebana, but also comes to your home, looks at what you've got in your garden, finds all kinds of interesting containers in your home (ones you didn't even know you had or had completely forgotten about!) and then shows you how to put together arrangements and where to place them in your home. I was concerned that it might be quite a challenge for her to find anything in my 'garden' - I basically have three trees, four shrubs, a motley assortment of succulents, and lots of gravel. But within a few minutes she had gathered branches, dried clusters of seed pods, and a few succulents. She got my home immediately - simple and unpretentious - and finished almost a dozen arrangements for the living room, bathroom, bedroom and sun room. Some of my favourites:

What did I learn? To consider the spaces, to look for balance, to notice the detail, but most importantly, to see the potential ...