Flower Design 101 ⁄⁄ CENTERPIECES

Hey beauties! Flowers with babies, always a fun time. I'm in the garage working on flowers for our friend's daughter's wedding. I have more centerpieces to do. There's 14 bridesmaids and one bride. So I got bouquets and boots and all that stuff. But I'm going to show you guys really quickly today how I make a centerpiece. Yeah, these are all just so beautiful. I can't wait to show them to you. So half the tables are going to be mini bottles and hydrangeas. And the other half of the tables are these centerpieces. And I'm loving how they are turning out. They just can't go wrong with peonies, café au lait dahlias, pillow boars. All of that is just straight gorgeousness. Especially in my garage. So this is how you make a centerpiece. Half the centerpieces are in these food bowls. So I am using wet floral foam as the base. You can make two centerpieces a lot of different ways. But that's how I'm doing this one today. And first we're going to start with our greenery. So what I like to do is just cut a bunch of the greenery, bring it over to my workspace, which is my classy garage, and get started. So I'll show you how to do that. Okay, so we're going to start with our greenery. And I like to just, using puffer tree berry. It has a nice way of hanging off the centerpiece. So I'm just going to play with it and put it on the side. If you're making a centerpiece at home, a lot of the greenery you can just find in your yard, on a walk in neighborhoods, and just kind of snip some from some neighbor's pile of greenery here. And this is another nice way. Let's say you want to make a centerpiece. Get some floral foam. Find some greenery around your yard or some neighbors. Go buy the flowers from Trader Joe's or a wholesale flower mart if you have a license. This is all ordered from, with our resale license, a wholesale mart. But you can just buy flowers from Trader Joe's or whatever. Silver dollar eucalyptus. Just kind of adds a nice soft green color and texture to flowers. So you build your green base first. Now I did this for several years as a florist. I never really had any professional training. I've kind of just taught myself over the years. Heather and I did together. Someday I'd love to go to... This is wax flower. This little guy right here. And it's just a nice filler. So we're doing all of our greenery and filler first. I've got that, and then I've got some Dusty Miller here. Again, another nice texture. Light green, kind of soft color. I feel like this stuff is really popular. Dusty Miller, it looks a little sloppy and silly on its own, but if you just group it together and just know that there's going to be flowers over it, it'll look pretty from this side angle. But right now it looks a little struggling, as most of these things do right now. So Dusty Miller, you want to just kind of group in a couple corners or angles. You want to try to keep your greenery full and low so that the flowers can kind of come sit nicely on top. And the floral foam, if you decide to work with one of these, basically you just soak it until the bubbles stop for a few minutes. And then the key to this is once you stick things in the foam, you kind of don't want to take them out. It keeps everything hydrated the freshest that way. This angle is probably looking really interesting. I like to view things from the side on different angles, so I like to keep kind of moving it around so I can kind of see where some open spots are. I also have this Italian Ruscus. This is just kind of a nice loose leafy plant. That place is over here. So my style is kind of a little bit more wild and free spirit a little bit, but not too crazy. I like to kind of keep the greenery coming out the sides this way, and then the flowers can kind of bloom and fall over the edges. The sides are almost all full. And next I'm going to start on my flowers. This is kind of a golf ball type flower filler. I'm going to add this on the side. Carly has very good taste and lucked out. Spring is the best time of year when it comes to flower choices, if you ask me. And she's got just peonies galore with just the most stunning hydrangea and dahlias. I mean, it's unreal. And this is Queen Anne's lace. It's just kind of a really pretty wildflower filler. It creates some height and dimension. Now that that's done, I'm going to start on the flowers. Just another angle for you down here. I guess before I put this in. But I have a lot of stuff spilling out this side. And then this is all going to get pushed down. A lot of stuff coming out this side. And after I start putting flowers in, I usually go back and add greenery where needed. Check out this cafe au lait dahlia. I mean, it is massive, you guys. I'm going to start with this. I'm going to kind of have it be on the side and overflowing on one of the edges so that it doesn't take up the whole thing. I've got a white peony here. Look how fluffy. So beautiful. Hydrangea. I'm not a huge fan of hydrangeas, but I like them. A lot of people are obsessed, and I think it's a good just way to fill up a centerpiece. And then I like to add a few things kind of coming over it so it kind of looks a little layered. So I've got this Patience David Austin garden rose. They just are really pretty. A lot of texture, and it looks very ruffly. And oh my goodness, they smell insane. We have a lot of flowers, so these centerpieces are very full and well-loved. But you don't always have to pack in the flowers like this. They can have just as dramatic of an effect with fewer flowers. These are some of my favorites. Look at these beautiful, they're called hellebores. And they are just so fun and beautiful. I think I'm going to use them in the boutonnieres, but they just are really stiff, and they add like a fun dimension to these. So again, just creating more height, dimension. And a lot of flower arranging, you just play with it. You keep going, you take things out, you put new things in, you kind of fill as needed. You kind of have to just take a step back and look at your whole thing. The different angles and whatnot. I don't know, this side is kind of eh, not very fun for me. So I'm going to bring in some of these spray roses. These are called white magellica, and they're just a really pretty spray rose. They're really light blush pink, and they kind of just group together pretty once you put them at the bottom. So I feel like this area needs a little bit of dimension and color. So I'm just grouping it together. Kind of like so. You might be able to see that better with the light off, huh? Here it is from this angle. As you can see, there is a lot of variety and texture in these. A lot of height coming from, you know, the queen's and lace, and the hellebores, and texture from the different flowers and greenery. But this is how it looks on one angle that we just did. Here's the side. Okay, so look over here. The side, I see that there's kind of a little bit of a hole, so I need to fill that with greenery or some sort of flower. I think I'll go flower. And then over here, this is the side that was really just kind of like eh, too much hydrangea. So I added some spray roses here for just some dimension. And again, I think I'm going to need to add some more greenery up here and something over here to kind of fill just that gap, just a little bit hollow. Okay, I think I'll take this dahlia and add it right over here. I think that'll be a good amount of texture. There we go. See how that just filled that whole gap really nicely? And now we need something on this side. Before, too much hydrangea whiteness. I did this one stem that had these three and it just looks, I don't know. There's just so much more texture and dimension going on that makes me happy, happy, happy. So, again, I kind of give it one last look. Spin. Looks good on this angle. Boom. Done with one. Just speed these up. I have five more to go. Five more of these pretty little guys. That's the one we just did together. Yeah, that's kind of the fun. They're all a little bit different but they all generally match and look the same just because of the same ingredients. I think these are beautiful and I think I hope that Bryson will be happy. After this, I'll show you how I'm going to just do these bouquets. And there you have it. Flower Designing 101 in a garage. Glossy.