Picture the scene. The summer holidays are just about to start and you’ve invited friends around for a celebration dinner. Ideally, you’d like to amaze your guests with your hosting skills, but your jam jar of flowers as a table centre is letting you down. What next?
First, you’ll have to cut and condition* your flowers and foliage.
Find a vase and make sure that its water tight. Obvious you may think, but leakages happen to the best of us! I like using opaque containers because you can’t see the stems and your eyes just feast on the flowers. As with my buckets, I bleach my vases so they are super-clean and free from bacteria.
Re-cut your stems of foliage, so that they are the right length to fit comfortably in your vase. To start with they won’t stay in place, but the more stems you add the more stable they become. Keep looking at your vase from all angles to make sure that the positioning of your stems is visually pleasing.
Remember to strip off any foliage that will fall below the water line.
Once you have an internal support structure of stems inside your vase, you can start adding your flowers. I like to work in stages, methodically placing my flowers according to type. Once all of one sort of flower has been used up, I add the next group. The more stems you add, the more support the next set of stems will have, so that (water level permitting), you can place stems bolt upright or almost horizontally into the vase.
As a finishing touch I like to add in flowers that are visually light in weight so they appear to hover above the arrangement like a delicate cloud.
*If I’ve confused you by talking about conditioning, this blog post on ballet toes should explain all!
Until next time, happy flowers!
As a thank you to my newsletter subscribers I’m entering you into a competition to win a flower arranging workshop (worth £350) – if you’d like to be in with a chance you’ll need to sign up to my mailing list by midnight Sunday 13 December 2015. The winner will be picked at random and notified by email by Sunday 20 December 2015.
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