Never Do This! The Mistakes That Ruin a Floral Arrangement

Hello flower friends! Just a few easy fixes can take a beginner's floral design and turn it into a pro style arrangement in no time. In today's video I'm going to help you avoid common mistakes that many beginners make so that you have a lot of success in your floral design. My name is Ellen Frost. I'm building a community of flower friends online at Flower More. You can check it out at my website at EllenFrost.com. Also subscribe to Flower Nerd, my weekly free newsletter all about flowers. Let's get started. The first type of mistake that many beginners make is in the preparation of their flower stems. So that means once you get your flowers, how you prepare them for your design. So one of my biggest pet peeves, and not just because of aesthetics but because of how it affects your floral design, is not cleaning your flower stems and preparing them correctly for design. This is the first step in creating a fantastic design. So you can see here what it looks like if you take your flowers and you just stick them in a vase without cleaning the stems. You can see there's leaves inside the vase. They look a mess. There's also leaves that are getting in the water and creating bacteria and dirt inside the water. So not preparing your stems not only looks bad but it can make the water dirty and kill your flowers faster. That will ruin an arrangement in no time. So you want to make sure you're doing a couple of things. First you want to clean all of your stems properly and that means taking any foliage off of the stems that are going to go inside the vase. The next problem that people have oftentimes is even if they clean their stems they don't trim the bottom. They think it looks like the right height for their vase and they just stick it in. Now the problem with this is that sometimes flower stems have scabbed over on the bottom and when that happens the flowers can't take up water and your flowers will die really quickly. So you want to make sure even if your flower stems look like they're the right length for your arrangement you want to give them a fresh cut every time you're going to put them inside the water. The next mistake that many people make are not taking the side shoots off of their flowers when they're preparing them. So you can see here this is Henry Eiler's rudbeckia. It has several side shoots and when you put it in the vase you don't want to have those side shoots inside the vase. You want to make sure that you're cleaning your stem not only of leaves but of any side shoots that are going to be inside the vase. So I like to have a single clear, a single long stem to go easily in the vase. When you leave this v shape for any side shoots inside the vase I'll show you the problems that you have. So you stick it in and then you stick another stem in and you can see that those are crisscrossed. Now I don't always place my stems exactly where I want them so sometimes I have to take them out and replace them but if I have this v what happens is that I pull other stems out with it and I don't want that. I want to have a properly prepared stem which is a single stem inside the vase so that if I need to take a stem out it doesn't pull anything with it. So a nice single stem. Another mistake that a lot of beginners make is starting off your design without properly cleaning your tools and your vase. So if you start your design with dirty clippers that have residue from other designs or dirt or bacteria and you go ahead and cut into your stem that opens up the stem and allows bacteria and dirt and disease to go right inside the stem and if that happens even if you put it in clean water your stems are more likely to die faster. That goes for clean vases as well. You never want to put your stems inside a dirty vase. Anything that has residue inside of it. A lot of times people just don't clean their vases before they use them. You want to make sure that you clean your vase properly before you use it. A key to a great flower arrangement is not just beautiful flowers. It is also choosing the appropriate vase. One of the issues that people have is using a vase that's too small. Either too short. So you can see here too short. Another problem people have is that they use vases that are much too big. Either too tall or too wide or both. So for this arrangement when I put this in here you can see first it's too tall because my stems if I'm looking at one and a half times the height are not nearly that tall. The other thing is once I let go of the of the flowers you can see that they don't fill in the vase properly. They all flail to the side and there's a lot of room in between here. So this vase is much too big for your arrangement. The next type of mistakes that people make are in design. The first one is not choosing a color palette before you create your design. So there's no plan. There's no thinking ahead about how the colors work together. This is just a one-of-everything color palette. Hodgepodge. Fine but not professional looking. The way to fix this is to think about a color palette before you go into your design. And if you're not familiar with color theory you don't have to be an expert in color theory. You can use some tools. You can use a color wheel to get some ideas for color palettes that work well together. So in this case I've taken my gold marigold and I've used that as the base for a more aesthetically pleasing design. I'm combining it with a purple aster. So orange and purple are opposite each other on the color wheel. Together they make a contrasting and aesthetically pleasing color palette. So I'm using these as my base and you can see here I've used a variety of yellow oranges and purples to create a palette that is much more interesting and unique and pleasing. You can see the difference in the color palettes where one feels very thought out. Where this feels like your eye is not really sure where to look. There's so much going on that you're not really sure what's the focal color, what are the accent colors, because it's all over the place. Common mistake that people make when they're doing their designs is to choose one of something to put in their arrangement. So normally we work with odd numbers in design. Threes, fives, sevens, nines. And those numbers create lines in design that make it easy for your eye to follow along through the design so you know where to look, what to look at. But when you have a design that has one of something, especially a face flower, something like a sunflower. When you have one of those it creates a focal point that you don't see anything else in the design. It's just this one flower attracts your eye. The other mistake that a lot of people make are creating eyeballs with their face flowers. And what eyeballs are are basically two flowers together that are on the same plane, so cut exactly the same length and facing in the same direction. Another common design mistake that I see people make a lot is creating designs that are flat or one-dimensional where all of your flowers are cut at basically the same height even though you have different kinds of flowers. So we have amaranth, which if I just take one of these out you can see amaranth is a line flower. It should in a design pop out of the design and lead your eye into the focal point of the design. But in a one-dimensional flat arrangement or bouquet you can see that there is no dimension, there's no height difference. Everything is flat, one-dimensional, and honestly pretty boring. Here we have an example of a bouquet that takes into account the different shapes of the flowers, the different heights of the flowers. So you can see we have the amaranth and the celosia popping out. We have the foliage doing what it does naturally, drooping out to the side. We have things at different heights and different lengths so that it really adds a lot of interest and just visual uniqueness to your arrangement instead of everything looking like a flat one-dimensional arrangement. The final types of mistakes that a lot of people make that can really ruin an arrangement quickly is not maintaining their flowers once they have their design finished. So the one main thing that people do is not change the water in their arrangement. So you can see when your water gets dirty it can be really hard for your stems to take up water and what that means is that they are trying to suck up water but their stems are clogged and that means they're going to die faster. The next thing that people neglect to do, which is a huge problem, is remove dead stems from their designs. So every flower has a different vase life and they're going to decompose at different rates. When you see a flower that is wilting or starting to die, it's best to just take it out of your design, throw it in the compost, and then let the rest of your design live in clean water in a clean vase. The longer you leave one of these dead stems in the vase, the easier it is for your entire arrangement to get infected with bacteria and dirt and die faster. Finally, a lot of people make the mistake of placing their flowers in the wrong place. Now that seems like a strange statement. What could be a wrong place for a flower arrangement? Any place that is really hot or really sunny is going to damage your flowers more quickly. So I know that that seems strange because when flowers are growing they like full sun, they like it warm, but inside your home they want to be cool. So keep your flowers away from hot sunny windows, radiators, any place in your house where it feels very hot. Keep your flowers in someplace cool, someplace where they're not going to get any direct sunlight, and that's going to help them live much longer. Let me know what you think about the video in the comments. Have you made these mistakes before? Are these tips helpful? Hit the like button if you enjoyed this video and want to see more videos like this one. Also, subscribe to my popular flower newsletter, Flower Nerd, if you know you know.