Unlock Your Potential

Whether you start a collection, build a miniature house or adorn a wall, with spring in the air it’s time to kick-start your creativity.

- Johane Neilson and Marian van Wyk

Keys to my castle 

Jill Marion’s key collection began on her 21st birthday. “Instead of the usual engraved key, my parents presented me with an enormous rusty one from an old Scottish castle,” she explains. “The rest have been collected on my travels – they’re so easy to transport! Keys evolved to locks, bottle openers and even old penknives. The handcuffs are from the old Mossel Bay prison; they were given to me by an elderly gentleman who saw that I had an old jail door on the back of my bakkie.”

Jill takes steel nails out of electrical cable clips and uses those to hang the bigger items on the wall; thinly rolled ‘sausages’ of Prestik work well for the smaller keys.

All bottled up

A vertical garden is still a great way to liven up a boring wall. Wehrner Lemmer made this interesting structure for the wall outside his Port Elizabeth coffee shop and restaurant RAAK! by welding additional fasteners to two ready-made galvanised grids and attaching them to the wall with screws and epoxy glue for good measure. The recycled bottles were cut open and attached with zip ties before an array of indigenous succulents was planted in them.