With another lockdown underway it's fair to say that we’re all starting to get a bit short on ideas to pass the time. By this point you’ve probably read every book in the bookcase, completed that one trillion-piece jigsaw puzzle and taken part in enough zoom quizzes to be an unassailable contestant on Mastermind. Whilst we’re spending more time at home, I think it’s so important to create an inviting space for yourself, even though we aren’t entertaining guests, our wellbeing needs to take priority and at-home lockdown projects mean you can add your own individual touches to your living space to make it truly yours.

Having a bit of extra time on our hands because of lockdown, we thought we’d reimagine the layout of our DIY Florals kit to demonstrate the versatility of preserved flowers. We used some wonderful, quirky ceramics made by foekje fleur, who used various bleach and cleaning bottles as moulds for the vases. One way to entertain yourself for an afternoon would be to use old cleaning bottles painted with a mix of acrylic paint and baking soda to recreate the same stoneware look, without the price tag. Either that or, if like me, you have spare glass bottles left over from the winter festivities, you can create a lovely sporadic display of different shapes and sizes of bottles and flowers. With the majority having to home school the kids, getting them involved in whatever you decide to create, or redesign can be a brilliant way to bond, and also provide them with some different skills to substitute their creative school lessons.

One of my personal favourites is to create a flower garland using the deconstructed parts of a bouquet and some string, twine, or nylon thread. Simply lay out the bouquet into groupings of like stems and then think about how/if you need to trim any stems to then tie to the twine or string and make the garland. I would suggest laying all the materials out in order before attaching them so you can get a feel for the look of your garland. The beauty of garlands is that they can be sporadic and wild, or they can be uniform, the choice is entirely up to you. This is just one way of repurposing and improvising with the available materials you have at home. Based on our DIY florals kit and off cuts from the Marseille letterbox, the garland we made is lovely and bright to lighten the cloudy days spent in the studio.

Another lovely option for reinventing the look of a bouquet is to split it into smaller posies or single stems to hang. Once you’ve split the bouquet, they can be hung upside-down, connected to some wood, foraged branches or hung up on a nail on the wall to display. It’s up to you whether you want to keep them as one collection or you can split them up across the house to link a look throughout your interior.