Earlier this year, my girlfriend and I went to the Museum night in Rotterdam. Wonderful event, by the way! Plan to go again next year. But I digress… Because the main reason I’m writing this post is not the museum night, but the fact that my girlfriend impulsively bought a fancy looking doo-dad in one of the museum shops: a deliciously green Le Sack!
– “So what the fuck is a ‘Le Sack’?” – I hear the reader thinking. Well, to put a finer point on it, it’s a moldable vase. You see, it starts out as a bag (hence the ‘Sack’ in the name), but it’s made from a plastic that becomes malleable when you fill it with hot tap water. Then after ‘Le Sack’ has been molded into the desired shape, you simply fill it with cold water and it will lose its malleability. So now you are left with a uniquely shaped vase in which you may display your fragrant posies. O joy!
However, this is all theory. Practise has proven to be quite another matter altogether. I have now tried several different shapes and have discovered that the vase can also change shape when filled with cold water, causing it to topple over. It is particularly prone to do so if you make it top-heavy with flowers, which is strange since that’s what it’s supposed to be designed for. This can lead to most unfortunate results, for example when using a ‘Le Sack’ to decorate a digital piano as I did. Thus I awoke the next morning to find my ‘Le Sack’ resting on its side, the flowers all but fallen on the floor, and the keys and electronics soaking in the water… It was a tragedy.
So now I am trying different molding shapes to see which shapes confer sufficient stability. The vase has toppled over four times since then, though this time I was wise enough to position it in a location where it could do no harm. I still like the look of the vase very much and am willing to overlook its stability issues for now, but caveat emptor my friends… Consider carefully where you place this pretty vase.
