13 October 2018

All six of us attended a terrarium workshop held by The Green Capsule. With the guidance of their staff, each one of us had to create a closed jar terrarium using ornamental plants (Fittonias and Peperomias) and Holland Moss. The plants, soil and other items needed to create these terrariums were provided by The Green Capsule. Our team had originally planned to sell open terrariums using air plants and succulents, and we realized that we might have signed up for the wrong workshop. However, the staff assured us that the method of creating the various layers of a closed jar terrarium was similar to that of an open terrarium. Thus, we continued with the workshop hoping to learn important skills and knowledge needed for us to create our own terrariums for our business.

First, we had to fill our jars with a layer of gravel. After which, we had to add in two and a half scoops of soil over the layer of gravel. The gravel layer helps to drain excess water from the soil layer which helps to prevent rotting of the roots due to water trapped in the soil. Next, we started planting the ornamental plants, that were given to us, into the soil. We had to use tweezers to carefully pick up the plants from the pots by their roots, clean away the soil from the roots and plant them into the soil layer that we had made in the jar.

For the next step, we had to plant the Holland Moss into our terrariums. The moss helps to retain water in the jar to allow the plants to grow well. Up till this step, we still did not find our terrariums attractive and we felt that something was missing. That was when we were told that we could choose figurines and add them into out terrariums for the final step. This got us really excited as we each wanted to create a little story with the figurines in our terrariums. After we had completed all our six terrariums, we asked the staff to choose one of the six terrariums that she liked the most.

The staff chose Cleo's terrarium as the best among the six as it portrayed a story of a shipwreck. This was when we realised that people are attracted to terrariums when there are stories being conveyed in them. We decided that we would also incorporate stories in the terrariums that we were going to sell in future. However, we did not like the concept of the closed jar terrariums as due to condensation inside the jar. This is because the whole jar becomes foggy and it would make it difficult for the owner to enjoy the aesthetics of the plants and figurines in their terrarium. We decided that we would stick with doing open concept terrariums using succulents.

After we were done with the workshop, we had a short photo shoot with our terrariums for our blog. We standardised our outfits and all wore white tops and denim bottoms. The photos turned out great!

Finally, we made a quick trip to Ikea Tampines to look at containers that we could use for our terrariums. We actually managed to find a few good and cheap ones that we could use. We also decided that we would start the development of our terrarium designs on 21st October!