My friend Shawna is an amazing (amateur) florist who comes up with the best ideas and most beautiful arrangements. She did the flowers for our wedding and they were STUNNING. And perfect… just what we wanted. It’s not everyone who can completely understand the vision that you are looking for. Then again, she is one of my best friends so I think she knows me pretty well.
I cajoled her, at 40 weeks pregnant, into coming over and teaching me about arranging flowers. I insisted we buy them from our grungy dépanneur (corner store) so that we could show readers how ANY flowers could be made into a beautiful arrangement.
We decided to make four different arrangements with our flowers: a mini bouquet to give, an arrangement for a garden BBQ, a traditional dining table arrangement and a side table arrangement.
She selected pink tulips, white gerbera daisies, coral coloured lilies (I think! correct me if I’m wrong) and green chrysanthemums?? (Sorry…. I’d love someone to correct me.) We spent $37 total.
Tips for Picking Flowers:
- Choose a neutral colour like white
- Choose your second coloured flower
- For an eye popping bouquet choose your third flower as a contrast to the second coloured flower. If you looked on the colour wheel, these colours would be opposites. For example, you can see Shawna chose a green to contrast with the other flowers which are in the red/orange/pink family.
- Don’t go more than 4-5 colours top.
She specifically chose these colours for a more rustic look and in keeping with the rustic look, she chose more rustic looking vessels to hold the flowers for some of the arrangements.
She brought over some vases and other accessories and I got out all of my vases. Most of my vases are simply from Ikea and nothing special.
Arrangement #1 – Simple
For the very first arrangement she went super simple using a quirky vase and filling it with flowers of different heights. It works because the green is such a contrast to the white vase. She suggested this arrangement for a bathroom or side table.
Arrangement #2 – Centrepiece
For the second arrangement, she decided to create a focal centrepiece that would be appropriate in a dining room.
1. To start off select a focal flower. In this case, the white gerbera daisy was a natural choice:
2. Build around the focal flower adding odd numbers of flowers at a 45 degree angle, and turning every time you add a flower so it’s as balanced as possible. Take off as many leaves as you want.
3. Cut your stems after your arrangement is finished. Stand up the flowers next to the vase of your choice to measure where you should make the cut. Trims stems at an angle and cut off at least 1″ or more.
Aren’t they gorgeous??
See tomorrows post for how to create a rustic arrangement and a bouquet to give away!
Michelle Little
Writer & Photographer
