Too Many Prickles...

This week I saw a picture in  magazine of a vase with some stems of gorse in it - it looked really pretty and I thought 'I could do that' as we have some gorse bushes along a path at the back of our house.  So I took the dog for a walk, found a gorse bush and proceeded to pick 3 branches.  Turns out that while gorse branches snap off very easily, they are covered in very sharp prickles - you'd have thought I would have taken that into account.  Anyway, I did happen to have a wadge of kitchen roll in my pocket which I wrapped around the gorse and gingerly carried it home.

Upon getting it home and trying to put it in a vase, I discovered that due to the excess of prickles, gorse literally 'walks' straight out of any container you try to put it in.  So I ended up snipping off the bottom few inches of sharp bits in order to make the stuff stay put.  At this point, seriously wondering if it had been worth the effort...but it does look nice and smells divine.

Next day, I thought I'd like to try painting the gorse...yeah, after wrestling it back into the vase after it decided to 'walk' when I was carrying it over to my desk, I discovered that the numerous prickles aren't much fun to paint either.  It was a good experiment, but not one I shall be repeating any time soon.