5 Easy, Quick Tricks to Achieve a Stunning Flower Arrangement
Spring is in the air! And with the beautiful, warm spring breezes and the accompanying sunshine comes flowers! There is something about the first flowers of spring - their gorgeous color and softness after the grey and chill of winter - that just compels you to fill your arms with them and bring them home (and your Sunset Beach vacation home!).
When you get home, or bring your flowers into your Sunset rental, do you often find yourself at a loss as to what to do with your beautiful bounty? Don’t worry - it is an easy fix! Here are 5 quick and simple tips to help you create a stunning DIY flower arrangement from a bunch of un-arranged flowers!
1). Add “Food” To Your Water
When you purchase a bunch of flowers at a store, they almost always come with a little packet of flower food! It is easy enough to discount and discard that little packet. But that is the biggest secret of a long-lasting, beautiful bouquet of flowers! Now, if for some reason your flowers don’t come home from the store with a packet of food (or if you happen to cut some of your own flowers from your garden) you can use this recipe to make your own flower food. (This is a good recipe to use when you need to add flower food to water when you refresh your arrangement.)
2). Strip Greenery That Could Get Wet
When you have brought your flowers home and just plopped them in water, have you noticed how the water can turn a gross greenish-brown after a few days? Even though you added flower food and everything? This is because your greenery has gone bad in the water! When leaves attached to the stems of your stunning flowers fall below the water line, they do what any leaves submerged in water will do….they rot. So make sure you strip off all leaves that will fall below the water in your vase!
3). Let Them Keep Their “Mouths” Open
Flowers have to be able to drink the water that you put them in! And how do they do this? Through their stems. To let them drink up as much water and refreshing flower food that they possibly can, give the flowers a larger mouth! You do this by cutting the ends of the flowers’ stems on a diagonal, to provide more room for them to soak up water through. Then, every three days, re-cute the flowers on a diagonal. (The bottoms of the flowers begin to die, slowly, and then they can’t soak up water any more.)
4). Think of the Flowers as Weights
Now that we have talked about how to keep your flowers fresh for days and days and days, we can talk about how to actually make them look professionally arranged!
You have to think of the flowers as weights. Which means, look at your bouquet. Pick out the largest flowers in your bouquet. Not the tallest, but rather the largest in circumference - the heaviest looking ones. Cut them to be the shortest flowers, and put them at the base of the arrangement…around the edges. Then put your smaller buds and tinier flowers in the center. Like a pyramid. This will make your arrangement look grounded and balanced.
5). Vary the Sizes and Textures
Now, to make a truly attractive and professional looking arrangement, you have to have different sizes (and heights!) of flowers. Which is why simply putting a bouquet of stunning, long-stemmed roses into a vase when you get home is just somehow disappointing. This is because the roses are all the same height, which means half the flowers are obscured by the other flowers. If you do want to have all the same sized flowers in a display, (aka. have a bouquet of all roses as an arrangement) the just make sure that you stagger the heights of the roses to make a beautifully rounded arrangement. Like a perfect dome. To make an even more interesting arrangement, though, trying mixing varying textures of flowers. Chic roses with the more crinkly peonies. Smooth greenery with light and airy hydrangeas. And you can go on and on with mixing textures!
We can’t wait to see the arrangements you come up with! Show us in the comments below! And, make sure you book your spring vacation with us here in Sunset Beach before the gorgeous, fleeting season is over!
