Create a Zen Japanese-Inspired Vignette for Spring

Hello, dear friends, and welcome to this month’s Design Challenge! Springtime signals renewal in nature with plants pushing out new leaves ~ a rebirth, if you will. With that, our host Cindy from County Road 407 has changed up our challenge name to reflect these changing times. Our design challenge this month is to create a sweet spring vignette. Let’s do that, friends!

French Ethereal: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest

Welcome to all of you coming over from Missy‘s design at Sonata Home Design! Aren’t her instructions for creating balance in design easy to use? I love how gorgeous her vignette is with the bright pop of pink balancing the neutrals! I also love that every month each participant puts their own mark on each challenge. I’ve decided to challenge myself this time by using mostly greens and whites in my vignette just like our inspiration piece, and limiting the use of other colors. 🙂

.

.

Springtime Inspiration

Our inspiration photograph comes to us from LizMarieGalvan on Instagram. Her table includes pieces from her home decor collection created for QVC home shopping network.

.

What really stands out to me:

• new and vintage white urns
• florals with white blooms
• an ivy wreath
• vintage creamware plates and platters hung on wall plate racks
• a white and brass lamp
• the swan image in framed artwork

There are so many ways to go with this! I like the Greek-inspired urns a lot from LizMarie’s display!

Today’s design challenge takes me back to my childhood roots where Japanese and French-inspired Vietnamese art, chunky 1970’s teakwood Japanese furniture and mid-century modern furniture were a mainstay within our home.

Creating a spring vignette with a Japanese zen garden idea came to me while I was watching a video series about Japanese gardens hosted by Monty Don of BBC Gardeners’ World fame.

I think you will really enjoy this video! Monty Don has hosted Gardeners’ World for years and he has presented other garden series featuring famous gardens in France plus other locations throughout the world.

This was my starting point, so I began collecting creamware jugs that I have from around the house, a little wire plate stand bought many years ago and used often at teas, and finally a ceramic vase found at Hobby Lobby just a few years ago to use as my main focal pieces.

Perhaps the biggest thing which stood out to me from our inspiration photograph was the swan print, actually. I have a swan decoy picked up at our first home builder’s closeout sale. He is BIG, and I did try him on the table, but he dwarfed everything else, lol! 😉

I knew I would be using white flowers as I really liked the spring green & white combination from the florals Liz used.

.

Peace & calm

I was thinking about the serenity, the sites and sounds within Japanese gardens ~ the usage of gentle greenery of moss and grasses like hakonechloa*, sweet scented cherry blossoms in springtime, as well as the use of flowing water and white flowers, like in another videographer’s channel ~ Sara K.

*Japanese forest grass

In Monte Don’s video, he shared an opportunity to visit an ikebana floral designing class he attended. I have tried to use that sense of creating peace in the tall vase with these faux white wisteria blossoms cascading gently downward.

The white wire stand has the graceful look of upturned eves found on traditional Japanese buildings.

Faux hydrangea blossoms and a daffodil lend their beauty in the other creamware vessels.

.

Ethereal light

Lace shrouded windows filter afternoon’s bright sunlight while allowing one to look out upon the backyard; they add their own graceful beauty as a backdrop to our scene.

I strived to recreate the feeling of ethereal beauty as Japanese photographer Toshi Otsuki created in the those magical pages of Victoria Magazine at its inception…

Delicate. Gentle. Ethereal…

My daughter’s Japanese maiden adds her subtle beauty to the vignette along with The Three Graces, which were inherited from my mother.

These three dancing ladies were a gift from my father found on one of his TDY trips with the United States Air Force to Okinawa, Japan in the early to mid- 1970’s.

Thank-you for stopping by today and sharing this peaceful garden idea with me! Let me know what you think of my Japanese springtime zen-garden vignette.

Up next is a gorgeous all-white vignette created by Carol at Bluesky at Home. Carol’s spring decorating idea is perfect using her lovely blue & white planters!

Please find everyone’s links here at the end of this post.

.

Happy decorating,友達 (friends),