Transform Your DIY Wedding With These Stunning Floral Columns

Hey there, it's Callie with Flower Moxie and I'm gonna be showing you how to create ceremony pillar flowers. So there are many different ways that you can do this. I'm going to be showing you the method using a large Grande Oasis foam cage. I've already pre-soaked this, so it's ready to go. But if you wanted to use a different method, you could try a nine-inch loamy dish with two thirds of a brick of the Midnight Oasis foam and tape around that to secure it. This is a great option because you can fill this dish with extra water. So it kind of gives you some backup reservoir. The most eco-friendly way, and my personal favorite way of doing this is a Pyrex dish with chicken wire inserted to hold your stems up and then wrap that with wire for security too. This is our good friend Leah's method from Ribbon and Blooms and I've done this several times. It's very secure and good for the earth. But this happens to be the most popular way for our DIY brides, so I'm gonna show you the cage method. All right, I've got my bucket of flowers here. You can see I've labeled what this is. This is our ceremony pillar number one. So I've already created two of these to kind of get me in the flow and I'm gonna show you how I did that. This is important because as you're prepping your flowers, you can pre-section your recipes so each different design you get to, you've got a bucket ready to go. That's a hack, just wanted you to know. Ceremony pillars are extremely popular right now and probably for a long time, I hope, because I love them. So imagine you're at the altar and you've got two sets of pillars beside you and you can really get a lot of depth and dimension on those pillars. It's popular to have one flower arrangement on the taller pillar, one on the medium pillar, and then one on the ground in front of the two pillars. So you really get the flowers kind of cascading up and down on either side of you. With that in mind, this cage will likely be sitting on top of a pillar, so I don't want to make everything growing up. I'm gonna make sure that some flowers and greenery are facing downward and that's where the greenery comes in handy. I'm using Leatherleaf here. This is the most budget-friendly greenery of all time. And as I insert this, I am making sure that it's facing down. This just gives me more coverage. Make sure that at eye level, you're not seeing the bottom of this cage. We don't want to see any foam at all. You should always start with greenery. If you're not a big greenery fan, that's okay, but I still recommend using greenery. You can cover it with flowers later, but this will give you the most coverage and give you a good base to start with. You'll notice I am taking one stem of Leatherleaf. Instead of just sticking this whole stem in there, I'm cutting it into smaller pieces. This makes it go further. Again, really good for your budget. As this arrangement sits on top of a pillar or on the ground, it's going to be facing one direction. So I'm going to front load this, meaning, whoops, I broke that one, meaning that all of my greenery, not all of my greenery, most of my greenery and flowers are gonna be in the front, but I do wanna make sure I get coverage in the back as well so that it stays balanced and doesn't topple over. It's important to keep in mind, what are your plans with this arrangement? Is it only for your ceremony? Are you gonna put it on the pillars and then never see it again? Or are you planning to reuse this at your reception? If you are, make sure that wherever you're reusing this is also one-sided. Or if you're gonna put it somewhere where it will be seen 360 degrees, you'll wanna make sure that you're not front loading and that you're evenly distributing everything. But if it is one-sided, it's much better for your budget. You can focus all of your flowers to the front. If you love greenery, you don't have to cut this up so much. You could leave it a little longer, stick it in and have it cascading out further. I'm going to keep mine pretty short so that the greenery is not so much the focal and the flowers are. I really wanna cover as much as I can with greenery at the beginning, as much of this foam as I can, because if I see holes at the end, I don't wanna risk damaging my flowers by sticking that greenery all around the sensitive petals. So it feels like I'm putting a lot of greenery in here, but it's gonna get covered up with our roses, carnations, delphinium. All right, I think that's about it. Now I'm gonna take a few pieces and make sure my back of this cage is really covered besides, because I want to add some weight back here to make sure when I place this on the pillar, it doesn't topple forward. So greenery is a really inexpensive, low-key way to add weight to the back of this design. Another way to do that would be to attach a brick to the back, so you could do just that. Set the brick against the back of the foam and then just tape around it. That way you can really front load this without having to worry about it toppling forward. I've got a couple pieces I can use later if I need to fill in, but for now, I'm gonna move on to some of my line flowers. It's gonna be these yellow stock. Line flowers, I like to use right after greenery because they are very structurally straight lines, so they help us to create the shape of the arrangement. So for this, I wanna do a little bit of grouping. Remember, we have two other arrangements that are gonna be going on the pillars as well, and so I kinda want them to act as one large arrangement. So I'm gonna do three of my stock flowers grouped to one side, and I know that this'll probably be about the tallest point in my arrangement. Grouping is a really fun way to bring your eyes to one area of the design. Maybe I'll group some roses down here so the eye can go that way. Creates a lot of visual flow. Now, I've stair-stepped these because I didn't want them all in one area, so I kinda made a triangle here with one, two, and three. I have a fourth stem. We don't always like using even numbers. Odd numbers are the best for design. But since I have this, I don't wanna throw it away. I'm gonna cut it pretty low and just help to bring that yellow color nice and deep into this design. My next line flowers are these nice light blue delphinium. These feel a little bit light and airy, so I know I want these to go up pretty tall. I'm gonna offset my stock a little bit, actually make that one taller. Again, I would love to group these. I think I might group two of these together, and then opposite those, maybe bring some blue to this side too, but down low. Again, using a little bit of grouping here. If any of your delphinium or stock has chewy bits on the bottom, just remove those. That's totally normal, especially with line flowers. That's just the buds that tend to go bad first because they've been alive the longest. So I'm just balancing out some of that blue, adding some to the side and the back. Okay, now I've got all my lines set with my line flowers. Next step will be to use our mass or volume flowers. That's gonna be the big roses and carnations that take up the most space and give you the most color in your design. We've got these really beautiful candy expression, bright pink roses. These are like garden roses, they're so amazing. I only have three of these, so I'm going to create a triangle to make sure this is nice and balanced. And I know I wanna cut it pretty short and kind of come right out at you from the center here. So I want this to be more of my focal. Just removing some of these guard petals that were a little bit brown, cut off some of those thorns. Create a triangle with these to bring the eye from the bottom up here. And then my third one, I think I want to kind of anchor more in the center over by these yellow stock. Garden roses tend to be the thorniest of all, so be careful if you're working with those. Definitely want it to be much shorter than that, so I'm not covering up all of my pretty yellow stock. I'm kind of facing it outward and not upward. Let's see. Wonderful. All right, let's move on to spray roses, which could be considered a texture flower, but sometimes they're more like a mass flower, especially when they are really big and beautiful like this, where you have one, two, three, four, five, six, six big blooms and like seven tiny buds. And this is a giant cluster. It's going to take up a lot of mass. So I'm going to go ahead and get it in the arrangement, probably pretty low center here. Take up a little bit of that space. And I have two of those. Again, staying pretty front loaded here. Show you what I mean by that. The back is pretty bare and that's okay. That's on purpose. We've got a lot of carnations that we can put back here. Speaking of, let's move on to carnations. I'm going to cut some pretty short and stick in the back, but still long enough to sort of see through the arrangement there. Don't want to forget this side. Remember to stay balanced as you create your design. If you place a stem over here, consider placing one on the other side, unless you're grouping, which I'm not right now. I feel like that one might be sticking out a little far. I can look at that when I'm done and make any edits then. I'm going to bring some of that peach color up in the back between these yellows. Gently open that. With my hands, it was still kind of tight. All right, moving on to my last roses. I have two stems that are bent, but the roses are still alive. So I'm not going to throw these away. I think they're a little bit too big for a boutonniere or a corsage. So I'm just going to cut that and add it really deep into my arrangement. There's no use in throwing something away because it was broken. Let's see. And that adds a lot of great depth. So that's about three inches inside from this rose, and it brings your eye deep into the arrangement. This one is super short, so let's see what we can do with it. Maybe right in the middle, because I know I can get it to the foam there. You can't really see that, but I can see it from here. I have one more broken stem. You may be thinking, why are my roses so bad? They're actually not. The heads are really big and beautiful and heavy. The stems are super thin. Sometimes roses just grow that way. I don't know if it's the farm or the season, but the heads were so big and beautiful, they just bent the rose over. Let's see over here. But I do have some that are nice and tall and straight. So I'm going to use that to my advantage. Make sure I've got some pretty roses up tall. I think that's a little bit dramatic. Bring it in a bit more. Now I have kind of stepped back and looked before I use all my roses. Definitely got space to fill in in the back. Looking here, it seems like I've got a bit of peach missing through here, kind of straight line of nothing. So I'm going to focus some of those roses in there. It's always good to step back and see how the arrangement's going before you use all your flowers. Make sure you've got color where you want it, roses where you want them. Going to bring the arrangement out a little bit wider. Why not? We'll make it look nice and big. Doing that by sticking these in straight out from the sides. OK, I've got two roses left. I kind of want it to drape down a little bit. I think that'll be cool on the pillar if it maybe comes off the pillar a bit. I love that. And then my last rose. OK, that is our ceremony pillar arrangement. You may have noticed that there's a bit of water on the table here. And that is what happens whenever you use a foam cage because there is no loamy dish or vase container to catch the water that comes out of the foam as you stick flowers into it. So just something to keep in mind. Don't arrange a cage bare naked on your kitchen table. You may ruin the wood. You always want to have some towels or maybe some plastic down, especially when you're using a foam cage. So now we're going to bring the two pillars in and the two other arrangements. And you can see how these all connect together. OK, thank you so much for watching. I hope you learned a lot and had fun. And I can't wait to see these ceremony pillars at all of your weddings. Before you go, I want to show you the final product and how these all work together. So I've got my cage here that we just created. Just going to slide it on to this middle pillar here. Make sure that everything looks OK. You can see here how this arrangement starts to touch this one. And this one goes into that one. And that's that movement and flow that you want to create with your pillars. Don't forget, these can be reused as a cake meadow or in front of your cake table, your sweetheart table. I would highly encourage you to find some way to use these in your reception because they are just too pretty not to. So thanks so much. For more videos like this, find us on Flower Moxie YouTube.