If you're looking for a project that's easy, small, cute, and takes less than five minutes to complete, consider sempervivums in shells!  All you do is take a little shell (the one at left is about an inch and a half across), put a pinch of dirt in it, and stick in a sempervivum rosette that doesn't have much of a root structure (offsets are perfect). 

If you want, put a few multicolored rocks on the dirt, like I did in the example below.

Whoa!  How have I not blogged in over a month?!  You guys never told me that this "blog" thing would be so hard to keep up...  Heh, heh.  Actually, there's been a lot going on in GS-land these days, some of which are related to succs and some of which are related to the sundry illnesses that have befallen me in the last two or three months. 

My girlfriend and I made a pilgrimmage to a couple of succulent nurseries we've been wanting to visit, and I'll give you the full scoop on those in a post later this month.  But for now, I'll just share two plantings I made last week after those trips.

The first contains sempervivums Neptune and Nightwood, with which I am equally in love.  It's a tiny little planting, as you might be able to tell.  Maybe 6 " by 3" or so:

The second contains succs I procured at each of the three marvelous nurseries we visited.  I'm crazy about the particular combination of colors in this one: 

I'm going to sign off now, and go to the "infectious diseases" specialist who will (I hope) pinpoint the cause of my recent maladies and malaise.  Stay sweet, succ-ers!

Developing a succulent obsession means looking at objects in new ways.  Everything in my house became a potential succulent planter.  Jars, lights, corks, coffee cups, pieces of driftwood, the dog's ears--nothing was spared from my greedily succulent-centric gaze.

Fortunately for the dog, my obsession didn't knock all the sense out of me, so her ears were spared.  But as you can see, not everything in the household was so lucky.

See the little sempervivum sprouting from the cork on the lower left side of the picture?  I took an old wine cork, used a steak knife to hollow it out (I can imagine better approaches, but whatever), put in a pinch of dirt, and set a sempervivum offset on top.  I think a bunch of these would look cool all in a row, lined up along a windowsill.

The teapot was a gift from my mom.  I used it as a teapot until three or four years ago, when the lid fell into the garbage disposal and was chipped up beyond repair.  Still, I kept the teapot because I really liked it; I just couldn't use it for anything...  That is, until my succulent-crazed peepers rested upon it and realized its potential.

The only thing that made the teapot hard was the lack of drainage.  As bold as I am with my cordless drill, I wasn't willing to risk ruining it.  So I put a bunch of large rocks and terra cotta pot shards into the teapot first, filling it up about 3/4 of the way before I added dirt.  I wasn't sure if it would work, but the semps have been going strong in here for several months, so I'm calling it a success.