Space saving vase

Well, my wonderful weeks of summer travel are over and I saw and did so many things I want to share on this blog. Tune in as I ramp back up to my regular blogging frequency! 

One neat thing I found was a collapsible vase. I've seen these on other organizers' blogs, but had never seen one in person, until I came across this lovely striped one at a design store in Buenos Aires a couple of weeks ago. The idea of these things is that you can store your vase flat when it is not in use and then fill it with water to transform it into a useful 3-D object. Since vases are kind of a bulky pain to store and also often delicate and difficult to transport, the design of this object solves those problems and make an organizing-minded person smile!

This vase also made my mother-in-law smile, as I brought one back for her. My initial thought was that she, a great flower lover, could use it when she travels to brighten a hotel room with a local bouquet of flowers, as well as be an addition to her vase collection. She's also an artist who makes gorgeous prints from photos, the subjects of which are often flowers. She sent me these photos to demonstrate the collapsible flower vase at work.

 

 

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com. Sign up for Lelah's News, a once-monthly newsletter.

Tips and Tools: Flower arrangements

Cut flowers are a popular gift around Valentine’s Day and do a lot to bring a temporary surge of color and freshness to a space. From a keeping-organized perspective, I like them because they are consumables and as such as preferable in some ways to a living plant. Here are some tips to extend the life of your flower arrangement. 

• Depending on the flowers, recutting the ends of the stems when you put them in water helps, as does flower food and using warm water. 
• Don’t forget to keep the water level up, and for most arrangements, replacing the water entirely every other day is a good idea. 
• For a mixed bouquet, once the weakest flowers start to die, pull them out and separate the rest of the flowers by type into smaller vases. Then position those in strategic areas around your home. The large bouquet that could only be enjoyed when in one area of your house then becomes a small vase of tulips for the kitchen, greenery for the coffee table and orchids for your nightstand.
• Put a penny in the bottom of a vase of tulips to keep them perky.

Lelah Baker-Rabe is a Los Angeles-based professional organizer. To discuss your organizing needs, call her at 818.269.6671 or email lelah@lelahwithanh.com