How to Make Light, Airy Bouquets

Hey there and thank you so much for joining me today on our tutorial on how to create light and airy hand-tie bouquets. Now if you're new to floral design or to floristry then you will know that making bouquets, even just standard bouquets by themselves, can be pretty difficult and pretty stressful at times. So to have to recreate a hand-tie bouquet that not only is a gorgeous looking bouquet but it's also light and airy and has lots of transparency into it, well that can be really really tricky and you know it's becoming a more and more common request given that the style for bridal bouquets nowadays does tend to be softer, more romantic, lighter, and more transparent too. If this is something you struggle with please do not worry, I have a great little hack that I want to share with you today. One of my top little tips and techniques that's going to enable you to create light and airy bouquets in a breeze. Without further ado let's dive in. All right so first things first, if you're looking at what is on the screen right now you might be thinking what on earth is that and you'd be right, it is a bit more of an unusual floral product we're using today. In this technique we're going to be using some mullein becquia, also known as angel vine or salem, which is commonly available from wholesalers usually found in the dried section, although it does go by a couple of different names you do have to ask for it if it's something that you might not have seen in your local wholesaler before. Now what we're going to do is just take a small little fistful of the mullein becquia, fold it in on itself to create a loop and then hold it in your hands just like so. Now this little framework, I mean I hesitate to even call it a framework really because it's such a simple little technique. All we've done is taken out a small little bundle of the mullein becquia but that small little bundle will give us enough structure to be able to weave stems through the center of the mullein becquia frame just you can see here and also around the outsides too. It will give us a structure that will hold all of our materials in place enabling us to create a bouquet that feels lush and transparent and keeps everything where we want it to be without gathering the flowers too tightly. As you can see here it's a super simple technique but I guarantee you it's one you're going to love. All right so first things first we've created our gorgeous little framework as you can see here and now I've prepared a selection of beautiful summery gorgeous flowers which we're going to be using in our bouquet today. Now what I have here is a selection of very neutral, very gorgeous, very beige and greys and cream tones and we're going to be starting with some beautiful astrantia. Now this is astrantia billion star from the growing margin pile one of my absolute favorites and what I've done is I've taken all of the lower leaves off the astrantia um any of the side shoots so I just have the kind of the gorgeous little heads right here and what you can see I'm doing in this process is I'm just taking all of the stems but instead of kind of holding them as you might do a traditional hand type bouquet I'm just working each one of the stems through the mullein becquia framework so some stems will go right through the middle some will go on the outside but by having the mullein becquia structure in the center it means that my stems are being held apart from each other right they're not being held tight within each of the individual um you know head to head stems next to each other they have space to move they have space to be a little bit more free and what that does is it allows us to create space and air and light and transparency all within the bouquet simply like in the middle it just keeps everything nicely spaced out and enables me to create a gorgeous light feeling to my bouquet as I make it now once I finish adding the astrantia through you can see I've started to build up a beautiful domed profile to my bouquet it's a little bit taller in the center and a little bit shorter towards the outsides now I'm going to carry on with this form that I've created this beautiful domed profile and I'm going to start by adding through some beautiful fluffy astilbe now this is astilbe Washington this gorgeous creamy white astilbe not the most longest lasting of summer flowers however I think with gorgeous texture there's just something there that needs to be explored and I think with some other gorgeous summery materials that we'll be using today such as the sweet pea and the saponaria and all those other gorgeous little elements this will come together so so beautifully so here I have my astilbe I'm placing it through you can see my stems are a little taller in the center of the bouquet a little bit shorter as we go towards the sides of the bouquet that's absolutely correct and you'll notice that my stems of my astilbe are really beautifully spaced out so they're not being brought together they're not head to head and really it's the moulin becky that's doing this it's the moulin becky framework that's within there that is allowing all of my stems to be beautifully spaced out and by doing this it means that I'm actually creating more volume within the bouquet so I'm creating the illusion that everything is bigger that there is more space in the bouquet and what that does is it will it really works to my benefit in a number of different ways it means that I have greater control over where my stems go but it also means that my bouquet looks fuller and larger than it traditionally might be if I didn't have the moulin becky framework in the center now you guys saw how quick it was to create that framework too it certainly wasn't anything that took days or weeks or hours of work it was literally taking a twist of the moulin becky turning it into a framework and then winding the flowers through and you can see here as I'm adding the saponaria through one of my favorite summer floral materials I'm just letting that dance through the bouquet placing some towards the inside some towards the outsides but all of the stems are connecting with the framework in one way or another they're going directly through the center of the framework if a stem is being placed more towards the middle and if the stem is being placed more towards the outside of the bouquet then you'll note that the stems in general will be a little bit kind of lower towards the outside they'll kind of you underneath the framework that we have in position I'm now going to be adding in a few extraditional stems here we have some amy magis also known as a cow parsley or queen ann's lace one of I mean really truly one of those romantic summer materials that we can get hold of and we just do repeating the same process that we've done before so we've removed all the leaves from the stems removed any side shoots and then we're just working the materials through the moulin becky framework the central materials are going directly through the framework and then materials towards the edge are going underneath the framework you'll note that we're still working with this gorgeous light beautiful dome profile even though our materials are quite messy the shape still feels very contemporary and structured now one little thing you might have noticed here as I've been making this bouquet is I don't really have any focal flowers and that's because I'm seeing them until the end now I feel that sometimes when we attempt these garden style bouquets it can be very beneficial to create all of the texture to get all of the smaller elements in together to really bring them together to create that gorgeous form and then we can add our more dominant focal materials towards the end here I'm using the ever so beautiful blue chateau uh eustoma one of my absolute favorite blooms and again I've removed all of the lower leaves from that removed all of the side shoots from it and I'm just working those delicate blush colored blooms directly through the bouquet some towards the middle some towards the outside just really working them across the dome of the bouquet grouping them in small clusters to create areas of interest and making sure that the bouquet has the same color and textures distributed evenly across the bit from every angle once we're pretty happy with our bouquet it's now time to tie off the bouquet what I'm going to do is I'm going to take around a meter of string this is nothing fancy just garden twine and I'm going to take around six inches and just tuck it underneath my thumb you can see them hanging loose on the left there with the remaining the longer side of twine I'm going to just bring that around the binding point now when I like to bind things off I start very gently I don't go in you know too tight with that first round of twine we go in very gently and then we go a little bit tighter each rotation that we do and every rotation that we go around should pull the bouquet tighter and tighter until we have a one succinct secure binding point once we're in that position we're then ready to put two knots in it to secure our string firmly in position and then using a sharp pair of scissors or secateurs you can just snip off the excess twine and just like that here we have our finished bouquet now I've got a question for you can you see our framework anywhere can you note our framework at any point on the bouquet can we see it seeping out from towards the binding point can we notice it anywhere else and the answer is no and that is the greatest thing about this moulin becky framework bouquet is that once we finish assembling our bouquet once we have all of our stems in there it's pretty impossible to kind of find the actual framework that we had simply because so many stems are woven through it they're either going directly through the center or around the outside of it so it ends up disguising the framework beautifully so that you end up with a gorgeous clean technique that enables you to really use your materials in a lighter way to create a very gorgeous amount of volume within your average bouquet now if I didn't use the moulin becky framework within this bouquet then I guarantee you the bouquet will be half the size that it is and it would really severely lack that beautiful domed profile that it has that's because all of the materials that I've used are quite light and quite delicate and quite small and it really is the framework that we have in here that's enabling these materials to beautifully spread out to create this fabulous domed bouquet to really allow some gorgeous space between all my flowers and to not have them bundled up or held too tightly within each other it provides me a lot more volume which sells a lot more space and provides a far more elegant finish to this bouquet thank you so much for joining me on this tutorial on how to make light and airy hand-tied bouquets now I do hope you will explore this technique in your own time in your own practice because it seriously is a game changer and this of course isn't the only style of bouquet you can make for it there are many other styles of bouquet you can using the same technique for example such as beautiful bridal bouquets as ever I do hope you love this tutorial and if you have any questions whatsoever drop them below in the comments and my team and I will get back to you as soon as we possibly can have a great day and I look forward to seeing you on the next tutorial until then