Creating a Bouquet Using the Spiral Technique

Hi everyone! My name is Elisha, owner and designer at Wild Blossom Studio. The purpose of this video is to guide you through the steps to create a beautiful hand-tied bouquet using the spiral technique from the box of curated flowers that you received. After you've unpacked your flowers and taken the critical steps to hydrate and process them, lay them out on a table in front of you. You want to remove any of the leaves that would be underwater in your vase or in the way of your designs. We've got our focal flowers, lisianthus and echinacea. We've got our lion flowers, some foxglove, and also some poppy pods. We have our accent flowers, apple mint blooms, yarrow, and some nice feathery queenias lace. So those are going to create a lot of air and movement through your design. We also have some nice cascading amaranthus and two types of greenery to kind of add structure to your bouquet. Before you get started on designing, make sure to fill the vase with fresh clean water, grab a pair of pruners, and some ribbon for gifting. All right, let's get started. Let's choose three nice stems to be the central point of our bouquet. I'm going to choose a poppy pod, echinacea, and a foxglove. You can see how I'm crossing stems in there. Don't get too fussy because we can edit this as we go along. To start with, notice how I'm holding the stems between my thumb and fingers. The next steps become second nature with a little practice. You're going to add flowers in a spiral motion crossing over the last stem place. If it helps, you can tap your shoulder to get the right direction. After placing a stem, give your whole bouquet a quarter twist before you add the next stem. The more you add, the more the spiral comes together. So you just want to add, twist, add, twist. As you continue adding flowers to your bouquet, keep in mind that you want to create a balanced design. So when I add, I'm either going to add in groupings or I'm going to place one here or one here. Okay, so if I do another one, you can see how I've created a grouping of the foxglove, which adds a very nice garden natural feel. So the next flowers that I'm going to add, I'm going to create a grouping of the echinacea. Flowers look best in wreaths. That is the magic number always. As I continue adding flowers to this bouquet, I'm keeping in mind that flowers need to be at different heights to create dimension and depth in your bouquet. You don't want everything squished together in a little ball. So feel free to move your flowers up and down so that you can get a pleasing look. And again, I've got one kind of deep in here, so I'm going to let this one kind of breathe a little bit. Twist, twist. Don't worry about any imperfections. We're going to edit this design when we're finished. Right, as you're designing, make sure that your flowers have lots of air and bounce. Keep it organic. These are getting a bit hard to work with, so I'm going to cut the stems down so I quit jabbing myself. Don't cut too short, just give you everything a nice trim. I wanted to give you guys a peek over my shoulder so you could see a different point of view. So place at the angle, twist the bouquet, and place your next stem. As you keep creating this bouquet, you can really see the spiral starting to take shape, and that is what you want. All right, so this bouquet is going to look good from all sides, so there's no back to this bouquet. So I'm going to add greenery going all the way around to kind of create a collar around the bouquet. All right, my arm is getting very tired at this point. They get harder and harder to hang on to, so don't feel like you're doing it wrong. Okay, so our last step is to edit. All right, we're finished placing all our flowers and we're ready to edit. When I say edit, we want to make sure that we like what we've created. So I just do kind of a quick look, and I see that this echinacea got really buried in here. So you can either pull it up, or you can pull it out. I'm going to put it over here. And some of this box glove got a little squished, so I'm just going to kind of pull that out a bit Tuck this yarrow in. Okay, so now we are going to trim the ends nice and tidy. Before we do that, we want to kind of measure our base. We want this nice collar of greenery to sit on an edge. So about here. Don't cut off too much. You can always trim more off. I like to cut my stems at an angle. That way there's more surface area to drink up water. Okay, to bind your bouquet together so it doesn't fall apart when you put it in a vase, you're going to find a nice sturdy stem on the outside. You're going to loop that rubber band right up to the top where you've been holding. You're going to wrap it around, and you're going to find again another sturdy stem. After I put the rubber band around here, I just kind of trimmed up the bottom to even this out a little bit. If you do a nice job making this pretty flat, we can open this up and it should stand on its own. Okay, so if this is going to go onto a table, you can go ahead and put this in a base of clean water. If you plan on using this for any event or a gift, at this point you would want to wrap it in some ribbon. Make sure that you cover your rubber band when you do that. All right, everybody has a little bit different of a method for tying ribbons. I start above my rubber band or my tie because we want to cover that up so that nobody can see that. Then I go down with the ribbon and then back up. I like to tie it in a knot, but you can do a bow if you like. I hope you've enjoyed this video and it's given you a better understanding on how to create a gorgeous bouquet using the spiral technique for any event or to decorate your home. For more inspiration, you can find me at wildblossomstudio.com or on Instagram.