DIY Wedding Flowers - Elevated Arrangement with Petal Savvy : Tall Centerpiece Tutorial

Welcome to Pell's Abbey and today I'm going to show you how to create a beautiful elevated centerpiece using hydrangeas, roses, spray roses, and greenery for your special event. I'm going to show you the tools, the supplies, the mechanics, everything that you're going to need to design this including what kinds of flowers we're using, the recipe, the stem count, as well as considerations on transferring it at the end and getting it to your venue and even how to select your riser. So first let's talk about the tools and supplies that we're going to need to create an elevated arrangement to go on top of a riser or tall vase for your special event. So the first thing that we're going to need is our foam, a loamy dish, I like using a nine inch size, your clippers, your anchor tape, a knife comes in really handy to cut the foam. You can also just use a butter knife if you don't have a florist knife. And then I like having a smaller vase to put your foam on top of while you're designing. It helps if it's a little taller that way you're not trying to design directly on the table. And then you are going to need your riser and what makes a good riser for a tall centerpiece is that it's sturdy and strong and it's not going to wobble and not going to fall over. You don't want to use those little bitty Eiffel Tower vases. Those things are terrible and not safe for something this heavy because this foam gets really heavy. Okay, so let's talk about how we created our foam vase here. So what I like to do is take our foam and cut it so that you have two thirds of the brick. And I take three pieces of foam and get three pieces that are two thirds of the brick. If you're doing a giant arrangement, you may want to do a larger loamy dish and just do three full bricks of foam or even four full bricks of foam. And what I like to do is place them side by side in the dish and tape them down. And then I take the next one and do a crisscross across the top with the tape. And then I go all the way around to secure the tape so that this thing is not going to fall over. Let me drink some water. You want to make sure that this foam is staying in place because this is really, really heavy. I do like to soak my bricks of foam before putting them in the dish and taping them down. You can also just pre-assemble and soak it all as one. But I just want to make sure that all of that foam is absorbing as much water as possible. And so for me, I just feel more comfortable soaking the bricks individually or in a big tub before cutting them and putting them down into their dish. The recipe we're going to be using today for our arrangement is 20 stems of full-size roses. Today we are using sole roses. We're using a dozen spray roses, 14 stems of premium hydrangea, 10 stems of israeli ruscus, and five stems, this is only five stems guys, five stems of italian ruscus plus our foam and our longan. Let's get started. To begin our arrangement, we are going to start with our hydrangea. And what I'm going to do, we have 14 hydrangea. I'm going to decide before I start kind of where I want to place them. And I'm going to do three in the top, six in the middle, and then five around the bottom, kind of like in a tighter area. So the six in the middle will be wider and then the five will be tighter in. If you're not sure how long to cut your stems, you can kind of hold it up to your foam and see where it would be good. You know you want your stems to be in just a couple of inches, so that's kind of how you can measure against your phone. So here we have our three. That is kind of going to be the height of our arrangement. We are going to have roses and greenery also popping up, but this is kind of the foundation of our arrangement is the hydrangea. So now I'm going to come back in and do six around the middle and five around the bottom. And the ones in the middle are going to be a little fuller out here, and then the ones toward the bottom are going to be a little tighter. So I'm going to start placing those now. So now we have all of our hydrangea placed. Obviously we have lots of gaps. You can still see the foam. We don't want to see the foam eventually. So what we're going to do at this point is come back in with our greenery and kind of fill in and cover the majority of the foam, especially around the bottom, because when your guests are sitting at the table, they're going to be looking up and they're really going to see kind of the middle and the bottom of the arrangement. So that's where you want to give the most attention. I'm going to cut my greenery into sections. There's not a whole lot of usable stuff down here. There's a little piece right here. And when you cut your greenery, you want to make sure that you are cutting as close to the leaf as possible. That way you're not getting little lump stems like this. It's just, it's not as cute to have that stem poking out. So we're going to cut it so that it looks more like a natural end of the stem. And we're going to do that to all of our greens, kind of place them throughout. And as we go, I'm going to do about half of the greenery now and then save the other half for after when we have all of our flowers in place. So we can really fill in and see when we're going to need that coverage. Okay, so we cut all the greens. We have a big pile of greens. I love the this, this fun, playful line that it has. And we really want that to kind of come out. This is not going to be a typical tight round arrangement. It's going to have some movement. It's going to have a little body and it's going to be beautiful. So I am going to be placing these. I'm going to look for kind of the biggest gap. So you can see right here, we have a big gap and I'm going to place it kind of in an upwards position so that it's coming out. So I always think of it like a firework or a nice fern that's just kind of naturally growing. So you want to take that into consideration with your stem placement and really give it a nice natural feel by how you place your stems. So I'm going to go around and everything in turn as I go, find all those little gaps and just start filling in with this beautiful greenery that we have. And especially like I said, around the bottom, we want to make sure that it's all filled in and the greenery at the bottom, it's good to kind of point it downward a little bit. Up here, we want it kind of up and beautiful, but at the bottom, we want it kind of cascading down and that's really going to help. Again, when your guests are looking up, it's just going to be a very beautiful, natural-looking arrangement. Now we are at the point where we have most of our gaps filled in. We have our greenery just being all beautiful and garden-y. And now we're going to come in with our full-size roses. And what I'm going to do is do half of the full-size roses and half of the spray roses and then we're going to come back again with half and half. That way we can really see where we need to fill in the gaps. So before you start with your roses, you may want to spin them open or reflex them to make them a little bit larger. And to spin them open, to make them bigger, all you do is pull them upside down and give them a little spin. Make sure that they're all nice and fluffy. You want to remove thorns, leaves, scar petals, all of that ahead of time. And this is stuff that I like to do before I begin designing. You know, the day after I get the flowers, the day before, I really do the design. That way everything has time to open, it's beautiful, and it's ready to go for you. That way the designing portion takes a lot less time. You know, one of the things that takes the longest time is all the prep work. So make sure you have a lot of people to help you when you're doing all of your prep work for your wedding. Now going in with our roses for this one, I do want them to be popped up a little bit higher. So I'm going to kind of measure against my phone like I was saying. That way you can kind of determine where you want to cut the stems. You only want the stems to go in about two inches into the foam. There you go. So you can see how it's popped up and nice and high above the level of the hydrangea. So I'm going to go in with our first ten roses, well nine now, and then our first seven sets of spray roses. Okay, so here we have half of our roses and spray roses in place and you can already see this arrangement is so beautiful. I'm going to give it a little spin. Forgive me if my lazy Susan has little squeaks. It doesn't, okay. I feel like a couple of these little pieces of greenery, this one's a little too long, so I'm going to push it in just a little bit. You always want to stand back as you're designing and have a look and see what your your big pieces apply. Luckily I have the camera to look at and see how it's turning out. But yeah, this is looking absolutely beautiful. Now I'm going to come in with the rest of our flowers and greenery, flush it all out, and we'll be done and ready to put up on top of our riser and I'll show you how to do that too. Okay guys, here is your classic set in piece all done. You can do this in any color scheme that fits your wedding. If you're doing a classic look with a slight garden feel. If you wanted to do a really clean classic look without greenery, you totally could. You would just need to use a little bit more hydrangea, maybe do 20 hydrangea instead of 14 and really get that tight ball of hydrangea and then pop your roses in on that. It's the same basic principle and like I said, you can do this in any color scheme without roses and hydrangea. So now you have your big beautiful arrangement and that's all you have to do to make it. Now you get it up on its face. So transporting these, I highly recommend having somebody with a big SUV or even getting a U-Haul if the weather is not too hot. You don't want to put these in a back seat because they may smoosh against the back of the seat. The flowers themselves, if you have big arrangements in the back of that SUV, they can nestle in a little bit and they can touch one another but you don't want this touching anything that's like hard or the side of a vehicle or anything like that. So I have our riser down here on the bench because it's so tall that you wouldn't be able to see it. So we put it on the bench so you can see. This is our riser. Again, you want to have something really sturdy and ours is flat. It's not like a vase that has an indentation to hold that low edge. So it's usually a good practice to put some glue dashes or some double-sided tape on top of this if you have something that's flat like this to really secure this to the riser. So I'm just going to scoot it on over here and show you. Now be mindful when you pick these up they may spill a little water. Whenever you put the stems into the foam, they're going to displace some of the water. So you may get some drippage. Don't be surprised if that's a concern when you're transporting line the bed of your vehicle with towels or cardboard and towels, to keep your interior clean. So let's see we got some drips right there and we're just going to put it on our riser. We want to make sure that it's centered. Now if it's on a table you want to give the table a bump. Make sure that it's not going anywhere and you want to just kind of give it a look just like as if you're sitting down and like I'm seeing this one is kind of pointed more up so I'm going to adjust him just so that he's like prettier for somebody who's sitting at the table and go around and kind of check all of that and see if I like the placement of everything. Make sure that you can't see any of the mechanics which is that foam and the tape and whatnot and once you have it the way that you want it you're good to go. And that's it guys. That's really all you have to do. Thank you for joining us for this Petal course on how to arrange an elevated centerpiece for your wedding. We showed you the tools and supplies that you're going to need, flowers, the recipe, mechanics, and how to put it all together. I hope you found this helpful. If you did please like, share, and subscribe and visit us at PetalSavvy.com