flora.
Our concrete pin board planter.
For a long time this just remained as a chicken scratch scribble after a colleague brought up the idea of putting plants on a pin board in the office. But as we went into another lockdown, we wanted a small project that we could complete from start to finish in our home. So we decided to give concrete casting a try.
Once we achieved the result we wanted with concrete, we turned to Jesmonite as we just had to give terrazzo a go.
A soft concrete form.
We always wanted to have a form that looked like it was expanding from the wall instead of just hanging there. So we explored how we could create these transitions for the volume and give the concrete an unusually soft appearance.
As we wanted this to be secured to a cork board we settled on thumb tacks as the attachment method early on. This allowed for a playful element to the design with different colour tacks being able to be mixed and matched with the planters. At this stage we didn't realise the challenge awaiting us of maintaining crisp edges for the counterbore surfaces.
Mold making.
A lot of the time on Flora was spent figuring out how to mold it. After watching lots of videos on Youtube we naively thought it was going to be pretty straight forward. 3D print the mold at home, mix some concrete, done.... couldn't have been more wrong.
After a few more failures and a lot more YouTube we decided on making our own silicone molds, which should let us de-mold the planter without damaging it.
After a few more failures and a lot more YouTube we decided on making our own silicone molds, which should let us de-mold the planter without damaging it.
It took a lot of experimenting with the ratios of the different aggregates but we got it to a point where we maintained the structure and kept the crisp edges of the design.
