Cheryl Entry #5

It was a long long day.

Last Sunday was the day our team met up to make our succulent terrariums. We planned to make several designs using different sizes to find out where exactly our creativity would bring us, along with the feasibility of doing so. We split up to get the supplies with the Westies getting the succulents, soil and figurines from the Chua Chu Kang area while the rest of us Easties got supplies such as glassware, gravel and pebbles.

Shun Kai and I were in charge of getting gravel, pebbles and basically decorative materials for the designing of terrariums. Since we lived close to the farmway area of Pasir Ris that had many aquariums, we went ahead to source for these supplies.

Since we planned to check out the different farmways (there were Pasir Ris Farmway 1, 2 and 3), we rode bicycles. When it came to actually cycling back with these 10kg loads on our baskets, we almost never made it back.

In the afternoon after we met up at a food court near my house, we started the actual making of our terrarium and it was so so so so so difficult. Here are the problems:

• the sand was so light and airy and it never stayed in shape
• removing the excess soil from the succulents was painful because the roots were so fragile
• my design ended up looking ugly

Our initial idea was to come up with fairy tale themes but the end result had us deciding that this was out for the time being, because nobody recognized what theme each other was coming up with. This would be something we will work on in the future. But there was a silver lining throughout this entire process - we came up with personalized designs

The designs above were done by Cleo, Jiaxin and Shiju and it gave us an idea on where to proceed from then. We explored ideas such as drawing on the glass itself, as well as coming up with similar designs to be placed inside the terrarium.

Overall, I had to say that we did a good job considering this was the first time we did something like that. But I do think that our designs can be improved and will only get better from here! The next time we meet to do this would be for the actual making of our shortlisted designs that will be sold in the upcoming November event. Looking forward to seeing the fruits of our labour!!