How to design with grocery store flowers.
Hey Everyone! I am Carrie Bishop, from River Rose Flower Company. Thanks for joining me today for this fun grocery store flower design tutorial. I wanted to pick a really small and inexpensive bouquet because I wanted to show you how you can stretch and make a beautiful arrangement.
Want to know to my two favorite tips to help create a large arrangement with a small bunch of flowers?
The first tip can be found in your back yard. It is garden scraps! Your bouquet may contain 1-2 stems of greens, but that is never enough to make a nice arrangement. Using garden scraps will give you more bulk and a nice shape to your arrangement.
The second tip is what I call "strategic cutting" of your greens and flowers. If you cut your flowers or greens at a certain point, you can make 2-3 extra stems out of one original stem.
Ready to get started?
What you will need:
1 small mixed flower bouquet
1 bouquet of a filler flower (wax flower, cassia, solidago)
1/2 floral foam brick
floral shears
3 different types of garden scraps
(large leaf, feather leaf, and small leaf)
floral container (ceramic, brass, silver, etc)
You will want to start off by soaking your floral foam and cutting the four corners as shown in the photo. By cutting off the corners, this will help give you more surface area for your flowers.
The next step will be getting your greens ready. Tip: You will need to remove any leaves on the lower part of the stems. I am using rhododendron for my "large leaf" greens. I love using rhododendron leaves because they will often have a bud on them. I love the texture of buds and because the leaf is so large, this will help make up for any lack of large flowers in the bouquet. I am using two types of boxwood for my "feather leaf" greens. Tip: Make sure you get long stems of the boxwood, in order for them to look like "feather leaf" stems. For my "small leaf" greens, I am using azalea stems. Tip: Make sure the azalea leafs are bright green and healthy.
Garden scraps guide from left to right: rhododendron, boxwood, azalea, and boxwood.
Flower guide from left to right: freesia, gerber daisy, alstroemeria, daisy mum, and pittosporum. I like to have three types of flowers to design with: base (large flowers like hydrangea, gerber daisies, and lilies), accent (medium flowers like roses, freesia, alstroemeria, and mums) and filler (micro flowers like cassia, wax flower, solidago, and seeded eucalyptus). You will usually have 1-3 stems of base flowers, 3-5 stems of accent flowers, and 1-3 stems of filler flowers.
Tip: You may have to buy a bunch of filler flowers or you can grab additional long stems of boxwood and use them like filler flowers.
Arrange your greens. I will typically arrange the "large leaf" greens in the north and south position. You can take one of the "large leaf" greens and angle it almost in the top center part of the floral foam. This will be your front of your arrangement and a nice focal point. This will also help even out your arrangement if you are only given 1 or 2 base flowers.
Tip: Here is an example of "strategic cutting" with the only stem of pittosporum. This way you can represent this green in three different locations in the arrangement instead of one cluster.
Here is an example of "strategic cutting" with flowers. I decided to leave only one blossom on the bottom of the alstroemeria stem to mimic the pretty design of the freesia blossoms.
This photo shows how I used the single alstroemeria blossom pushed closer to the floral foam. Tip: Do not have all of your flowers sticking out. Push in some of your single blossom flower stems in order to create a nice balanced shape. This will also help hide your floral foam.
Place flowers with missing petals at the bottom of your arrangement. Don't throw them away, they still add color and depth.
I always add the filler flower last. I look for gaps in between the flowers and I will place the filler flower stems in those gaps. With this arrangement, I decided to have the right side flow out a little more in a fun asymmetrical design. You are welcome to have a different shape: longer, rounder, or something else.
Tip: You can always trim leaves back in the end. If something looks too cramped or a big leaf is hiding a flower, just trim the leaf down or cut that particular leaf off.
I hope that you enjoyed this floral design tutorial. I will leave you with this fun flower photo. Remember: you do not have to spend a lot of money to make a beautiful arrangement.
Stay Classy-Carrie
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