How to Make a Floral Runner Centerpiece | Flower Arranging Tutorial

Hey everyone it's Allison with Bloom Culture and in today's tutorial we are going to teach you how to make a long floral table runner or a rectangular centerpiece. So with our long floral runner or long centerpiece I like to go with a foam that's a little bit more narrow. This is about four inches wide and I don't like to go larger than that. The reason being is it just becomes too wide and it kind of inhibits everybody's movement. You know you want to set your your plates down especially if the table is double sat you really are sat on each side of the table. You really want people to feel like they have room and not have to maneuver around the centerpiece so going skinny and long is the way to go here. I've also found that in this design with going skinny and long that you use about half the amount of flowers that you would with something that's a little bit wider and it doesn't change the look at all of the designer feel. It looks beautiful it looks full and it looks like a gorgeous centerpiece. You'll see that there is a special little tray that fits this foam and it really just protects your linens or your table runners. First like with most of our floral designs you'll want to soak the floral foam. Remember don't push it down don't submerge it yourself just gently place it in the water and it'll soak and submerge on its own. Okay once you have your floral foam soaked fully I usually hold it at an angle over the bucket or over the tub or sink and let it drain a little bit and then once it stops dripping I bring it into design with. These are specifically called 18 inch raquettes so if you're looking for something like this they come in different lengths and sizes as well. So just like with all of our other designs we are going to start with greenery. In today's tutorial we've got three to four different greeneries that we're going to work with. I typically suggest using a minimum of two a maximum of four. It gets a little redundant if you're not doing a full greenery centerpiece. You can also use a ton of greenery if you're to cut down on your floral costs greenery is more affordable and goes a long way. First we're going to start with our leather leaf. These are really long and beautiful pieces of greenery and I am going to try to extend the length of this 18 inch piece. If we're working with say an eight or nine foot farm table or rectangle table it would be nice to only have to use two of these. So if you use the greenery to help elongate the length of this you'll have to use fewer of these which I think is really important if you are being budget conscious. But let's be honest who's not? Okay always always start with cutting at an angle and I am going to insert at the ends of these just like I said to elongate our design a little bit. I don't love doing symmetrical designs but in this case I kind of want these to be similar lengths just so that we know how long we want our pieces to be and see how these are just barely reaching the tips of the table I think is really important for us too. Again I'm going to continue to layer in pieces. I like to break down or cut greenery down to where I can use multiple pieces. This really again helps elongate your product and when you want to use smaller less lengthy pieces on the top it's really smart to to break that greenery down. I'm going to continue filling this in on the sides and on the top. Like I said earlier I want these pieces which are at the longest point of our design to be longer and then with the sides or the shorter sides of the piece I want them to be a little bit shorter. Again I don't want it flowing into where people are going to be eating. I want it to be long and skinny so that it can be a beautiful centerpiece on the center of the table without reaching or encroaching into people's face. I continue just to design along the edges. You want to cover up your mechanics as we call it or the perimeter the edge of the design so that people can't see the tray and we do this mainly with greenery but we'll come through again with some of our floral and do that as well. So continuing on I just finished greening. I use as with most of our designs varying lengths of greenery varying lengths stem lengths and then thicknesses. So I like to thin out like I said some of these pieces. We don't want to use this thick piece all over the perimeter of it because then it would just be a solid mass of greenery. So I like to use these guys and just insert them fairly evenly. I think that's a really easy rule of thumb to follow. You don't want everything necessarily to be symmetrical but you do want it to be balanced. So fairly evenly throughout the design is my approach. Leatherleaf is a really affordable really durable greenery so I love to use it whenever I can. I don't have this one on a lazy susan but I do this one's a little bit different in that we're not designing in a vase that you can easily just rotate. So I might suggest designing on one side and then going to the other side of your table and looking at from a different vantage point. Since two people are going to be sitting on either side of it you want to make sure that it looks good from all angles. But I'll likely just be using the camera to give me an idea of placement. All right this is starting to take shape pretty quickly. I say this in most of my designs starting is the hardest part. So if you feel intimidated by that that's completely normal but once you start and start placing a few different pieces you'll start to find a rhythm. You'll start to find that it doesn't have to be perfect that if you don't like a placement that you can always have the freedom to take it out and to use it somewhere else or just to toss that piece if you're not loving it. But I think we've reached the point in this design where I think it looks really good and we want to move on. Since we don't want to use just one type of greenery we can move on to our next type. Next we're going to move on to a greenery called lemon leaf or salau. This is a really great broad leaf that gives you a lot of coverage and covers a lot of surface area. We're going to do something similar when placing this along the lines of the lengthy sides of the lemon leaf. I'm going to take a few longer pieces and place them as well just to give the arrangement a little more reach and a little bit more length past the end of the floral foam. Working with the curve of the stem I think it looks really pretty kind of curving up and creating a little bit of movement right there. Again not every stem length being exactly the same and working with various stem lengths is going to be super helpful in this design and any design really just to create depth and some movement. Again I'm being really cautious to keep the long pieces on the ends and then shorter pieces as we move in on the interior of the design just because I don't want people to feel like they're having to fight the arrangement in order to enjoy their meal or their conversation. Another thing to note is when you are placing your greenery or any stems make sure not to put them directly straight in or you know directly and horizontally. You want to angle everything just at a slight angle and that will just help with the design and create room for the rest of the stems. Now I'm going to say like with most of our rules of thumb that that will be broken from time to time that you will insert something straight up and down when there's room for it to create you know whatever moment you want to create there but not everything will be going in you know right horizontally or straight in vertically. So just like we did with the other greenery make sure that it's dispersed nice and evenly. All right at this point I am going to turn the design. I want to make sure since I'm designing away from myself that the back side which would be the front side to someone else looks just as good as the side that I can see. So just gently switch it around in a 180. That's not looking bad. It's not looking bad at all. Okay in today's tutorial we are going to use some really beautiful protea as our focal flowers. Sometimes with more expensive flowers like peonies, proteas, other really expensive flowers you'll want to use them sparingly. Sometimes you won't even get to use them in your centerpieces but if you use them really sparingly and very purposefully you can get a few in your centerpiece and I want to show you how to make that impactful. What I don't suggest is just peppering them you know one two three or in places that people can't you know maybe one person can see it but another person can't. I always like to say put your money where people are going to see it. So this is where the rule of three comes in and I like to group these in in a beautiful grouping of three so that when we when we place these that people can see like oh these are some really unique protea and I like to again varying stem lengths so something's going to be a little bit taller something's going to be a little bit shorter but this just really creates a beautiful focal point and you don't have to have you know a ton for what you feel like would be a really big arrangement. So after placing our three beautiful protea focal flowers I'm going to move on to some other roses that are also going to be considered our focal flowers. They have opened up huge they're absolutely gorgeous they're like the size of my fist or the size of my big hands size of your face but these are also going to be a really impactful beautiful flower to work with. This color is so pretty but like with all of our other designs I like to spin them it never gets old how big and beautiful they become after you spin them and again working with various stem lengths you don't want something you know this long to be stuck in there but you can keep it a little bit longer because you don't want it to get hidden in the um in the greenery. You'll want to clean up some of your um petals it's totally normal to have a brown or a chewy petal here and there you just want to make sure that you take that out you'll just pinch it and get rid of that try to get it at the base and pull it out and if there's other petals that were damaged by it I go ahead and pull those out too you just don't want that um that chewiness or that grossness to spread onto the other petals. Here we go we're do a nice spin on this one as well it can be a little wonky to get started so pretty I'm gonna cut this one a little bit shorter put it right smack that right there so pretty and again you can't see these on the back end but I will rotate the arrangement once we're done I'll put another one back there. With the placement of the roses there really isn't a rhyme or reason I am trying to evenly disperse these we've got this focus right here and then with other flowers that will come in and we'll make small groupings throughout the arrangement but I do want to show you that you can do this without using just a ton of flowers so we are just using six of the magenta roses and then we're going to move on to another focal flower which is called um the deep purple rose that has a beautiful variation of color. These arrangements also don't have to be just for a rectangle table or you could also place these at the front of a sweetheart table or in the center of your head table you could put these on a barrel you could set these at the beginning of your aisle and then move them to your reception. Okay moving on to the deep purple roses again with this beautiful variation of color we are going to start doing some placement with these as well I love doing something like a monochrome palette like this it doesn't have to be this specific color but you can do this with pretty much any color palette to where you just have highlights and lowlights bright hues dark hues more gentle lavender tone hues with really any color palette. I'm going to use these again spinning these along in our design if you are going to do any placements on the edge I would suggest leaving your stem length a little bit longer to have some of that reach. All right you want to take off some of these petals these guard petals if they are undesirable and then we're going to keep layering in these roses into our design. Okay now I'm going to move on to some linear flowers if they have a little bit of chewiness at the bottom that's totally normal just make sure that you've cleaned up your stems so that it doesn't muddy up the foam when you insert it give it a nice clean cut and then I like just to accent the length with these it doesn't mean that you couldn't use them throughout the interior of the design but I just find with linear blooms they have such a beautiful curvature to them that it just looks really pretty on the lengthier sides. I'm going to tuck this one in right next to our protea I think it's like really really pretty. Sometimes with stems that are hollow working with foam you need to be really gentle when you're inserting them I just kind of smushed that one so I'm going to cut it down a little bit shorter doesn't mean that you can't use it you're just gonna have to use it a little bit shorter. Okay before placing these last two I think I'm going to rotate it again and just make sure that I'm liking the placement of everything keeping in mind that there will be people that are viewing it from both sides I definitely see a little empty point that we could probably use okay once we have those placed I'm going to move on to some spray flowers in this design we're going to be using Alstroemeria it is a beautiful hearty flower it's gorgeous I love it the great thing about spray flowers like spray roses mini carnations Alstroemeria is that they have a different scale to the bloom and there's multiple blooms per stem so it's not just one solid flower or on the line flowers where it has multiple blooms at the stem it has multiple blooms at the end of the stem and I think that it really covers a lot of surface area and really provides a great texture and a different scale some of these I'm going to tuck in back here which again I'll turn around so you guys can see but I like to keep the flowers on the longer side of the arrangement a little bit shorter as I've said throughout this design and tuck these guys beautifully in there and then I'm going to add some of them that are a little bit longer possibly again play with your placement of these guys I think right here is going to be a good one you want them to feel a little bit balanced throughout the design so you know I like to do test runs on placements and if I like it I will keep it there another great thing about these is that you can break them down even more you can cut off multiple blooms so if I want to use these two in a different place I can still have this long stem to use somewhere as well and I just get more bang for my buck which is really awesome I'm going to put these two right here you can get really detailed whenever you break apart some of the sprays and I really like to kind of go into the interior of the design and tuck a few flowers in here and there so that you have these pops of color where there's just a solid mass of greenery and you don't necessarily just see greenery in some of the deeper parts of the arrangement all right we are going to be moving on to our Minerva Carnations they have an incredible variation of color on these guys you'll see that they're lavender kind of a dusty purple and then they go to a really beautiful bright pink and I think that this really marries well with our design here we've got kind of a big hole in the middle so I am going to address that with some of these carnations again not using the exact same stem length will really help create a focal point here I think kind of stair stepping across the middle of the arrangement looks gorgeous we might come back in if we have a few flowers at the end with some different colors and some different textures so moving on we're going to move on to some of our detail and our filler flowers our detail flowers we're going to use a deep plum mauve astrantia and then we are going to use a bright pop of our wax flower to really accentuate the design and then also add different textures and scales see the astrantia looks gorgeous with this palette and it's another spray flower but I would say it's more of a detailed spray flower but it still has a different scale and a different texture than our alstroemeria it also comes with what I call a satellite so I always kind of take that off and group those together and they can also be another bunch throughout the throughout the design now one thing to note in floral design is yes there are professional practices and there are professional approaches and traditional designs but for the most part when you are just learning or when you're DIYing I think a great rule of thumb is if you like it if you like it and you think it looks pretty then go with it I wouldn't overthink it I wouldn't be too hard on yourself or too judgmental this may look really easy for me because I've been doing it for over 10 years um if you like it then that should tell you okay I'm doing something right okay we are going to be finishing up with our beautiful wax flower it has a gorgeous color that really lends itself to this palette and just like the name it's called boiler flower so we go in and we fill in any spots that we think need something but we don't have a larger flower to fill it in with or we just want a different scale to it so a lot of different uses for our filler flower but you just want to keep layering in like we've done with the rest of design if you feel like there's a hole um just go in with a few sprigs or a few sprays of your filler flower you're going to want to make sure that you clean off the stem so that everything is clean whenever you insert it into the foam and just continue to place around the arrangement okay now that we have all of our filler flower placed I like to go back in if I have any leftover greenery from my recipe I like to go in and do a little bit of filling here and there too just to make sure that I can't see any foam or if I want to just add a little bit of reach on the ends this is a great place to do that okay well that completes our rectangle floral runner centerpiece you can use these on farm tables rectangle tables your head table a sweetheart table the places you can use this design are limitless if you have any questions please leave them in the comments below or you can always email us at hello at bloomcultureflowers.com and I'm Allison with bloomcultureflowers.com and thank you so much for watching