Louise Worner
Self-made Ikebana Vases for Children

This week in Madrid, after 3 long months of summer holidays, children finally return to school. We spent a lot of time during our holidays trying to stay cool: eating ice-cream and swimming.

Of course, being the ubiquitous bowerbird, I was never able to throw away our unusually shaped ice-cream wrappers.

As the remnants of summer holidays grew to a close, we decided to make small ikebana vases from our collection of triangular ice-cream wrappers. My daughters painted the wrappers in different colours and filled them with water.

They arranged their ‘vases’ on trays and added some flowering grass we had collected in a field.

As a touch of colour and contrast to the grass, they added some leftover kangaroo paw. Once they were happy with their arrangements they took a step back to view them from afar.

My youngest decided that she wanted to change the placement of her ‘vases’ and adjusted them until she was happy.