How to Design Delicate White Florals in a Small Elegant Bowl

Hi, Kit with You Flower Duet. Thanks for coming and joining me on another journey through with flowers. Today I went to my local Trader Joe's. I bought four bunches of flowers and I'm going to show you how I put them together in this little tiny bowl, which is a very on-trend thing right now. So I want to show you how to do it and stay nice and ethereal and light and economical. I'm going to show you how I did it with my ruler so that you know that your proportions are correct. I wanted to try to design a very delicate arrangement in this small bowl. It can maybe be expanded to be about out to here and up to here. Let's see how big the bowl is and then we can decide how big we're going to make our arrangement. So the top of the bowl is four and a half inches wide and it's only a little over, looks like two and a quarter inches tall. So that doesn't leave a lot of height. So we're going to go maybe up to about, we're going to go maybe four times the height, so up to about eight inches tall, which would be about here. And as far as width is concerned, we can go out pretty far. So if it's four and a half inches, we can go out about this wide. So we're going to keep it pretty rounded, almost like a ball of flowers above it. And we're going to keep it somewhat monochromatic. We're going to go with mostly white flowers. I actually stopped at Trader Joe's this morning to show that you could do this kind of arrangement with maybe a little cereal bowl you have at home, some floral foam, and some Trader Joe's flowers. So you don't need to go down to the flower mart to make this beautiful design. So what I have here is one sixth of a brick of soaked floral foam. Remember floral foam holds about 10 cups per brick of water. So we're at about maybe a cup and a half. So of course it doesn't really fit in this way or this way easily. I want to use the most surface area I can. So I'm actually going to shape it by cutting it sort of at a downward, inward cut so that it's almost flush with the top of the bowl. Once I have it in place, because this might get moved and I don't want the flowers to shift because it's such a low bowl, I'm going to use suspenders of floral tape. So I'm going to go across the top. Nope, that's not sticking. So let's try again. So sometimes if your floral tape is old, it might not stick as easily or if the bowl is slippery or wet. So I'm going to try to use the warmth of my hands to get that glue to stay in place. And I'm going to go across, not so that I'm crossing the middle because I want to be able to have that middle open for my flowers to come straight up out of the middle. If I want to have a little extra security, I can take little pieces of tape. Instead of going all the way around my bowl, I can just tape where they meet on the side of the bowl. Just small little, like maybe one inch pieces. Or I can go all the way around. Depends on how much time you have or how much tape you have. This uses a little less tape. I'm overdoing it. I probably don't need that much tape for the amount of flowers I'm going to use or the type of flowers. But I want you to see that this is what it would look like. And you could also use clear tape. I just used white because it blends in with the bowl, but also so you could see it. We have four kinds of flowers here. I got them at Trader Joe's. It's going to be really loud while I open the plastic. So when you're opening the plastic, you want to be careful not to tear it off sometimes or rip the flowers through. You want to kind of open it like a present like that. If you've got the flower food, make sure you use that to soak your, you know, put in the water and then soak your floral foam with the flower food already in it. Or as your flowers drink, pour the water with the flower food in there. You'll notice I don't have any greenery. I'm using asters, butterfly ranunculus, baby's breath, and a California sage. And what I want to do is kind of disguise my bowl here. So I'm going to carefully take these, this baby's breath. So when you're using baby's breath, you got to kind of shake it apart because it will get tangled. And then I'm going to take small little pieces of it, maybe only about the size of my palm. And I'm going to go all around the base, these really small pieces and try to disguise that tape I just added and the green floral foam. And so what I'm going to do is go all around the outer layer like so and keep going around and I'll come back and show you what I do after that. So I stuck about an inch of the clean stem of the gypsophilia or the baby's breath into the outer layer. You can see with my dark background that I've gone around the bowl and that used almost one whole stem of baby's breath. So then on another part of the stem, maybe I can use just half of this, what I'm going to do is also, careful and untangle, I'm going to go in the middle, so on top of the floral foam and I'm going to really try to go, push it all the way down so that it goes all the way until I can't push it any farther so that it really does a good job of disguising the green floral foam and that white tape that I put in there. And you can see that, you know, baby's breath, people think, oh it's an expensive flower, it's, it's, you know, it's cheap. You know, to be honest, it's more expensive than a rose by stem and it takes a lot more labor to work with it and sometimes there's breakage or there's things that are a little bit brown, so you have to buy more of it than you think. So baby's breath is actually an expensive flower and it takes a lot of labor to work with it, so it makes it more expensive. So now you can see I've almost pretty much like covered the bowl. At a glance from your angle, it's hard to see where that foam is, but it's there. So I've done this nice sort of layer. So now what I want to do is take my sage, which has a nice sort of drape to it, and I'm going to take pieces off the main stem. So I'm just pulling these pieces off and when I got this this morning at Trader Joe's, the checkout guy's like, that smells good and yes, and you know, it's nice to add something with a nice scent into your design. So what I'm doing now is I'm pulling off the bottom parts of the sage so that when I put it into my foam, I don't have any greenery going into that foam. Remember, greenery should never be below the water line of a vase and when you're working with floral foam, the water line is the foam. And if you notice when I was doing this, I was cutting and placing within 10 seconds. So when you're cutting and placing your stems to go into the foam, you're cutting and then placing immediately. What we're going to do here is I'm going to place each one of these into the side of the foam so that it's just, it's touching that lip of the foam just like we did with the baby's breath and I'm going to radiate out like, like sunshine, like a sunshine sort of radiating out and I'm going to keep in mind that three times the width of the vase, I don't want to go too much farther out. The longer you keep your stems, the more flowers you're going to need and I just bought these. I have a few over here in the side that I might add that I would have liked to have bought at Trader Joe's this morning, but they didn't have them. So I know I had them here at the studio. So again, this would be a total, a total arrangement that you could get done by going to Trader Joe's for your flowers. If you don't have a wholesale mart near your house, when I say Trader Joe's and you're not from a place where there is a Trader Joe's, then your grocery store. Most grocery stores these days also sell single stem bunches. All right, so I've gone around the vase like a sun. So now I might go around like and in five places add a little bit more, just to add a little more girth to the different parts of the vase. So there's just a little bit more going that. So you can either add more than one stem at a time that you've peeled off and cleaned. Remember we want to not go too long. We're not trying to get too long here. So I'm separating my baby's breast so I can see what I'm doing. So I just added a little bit more. Now what I want to do is I want to come up and remember our height we measure with our ruler and our height we don't want to go over eight inches. So let's get my ruler back and from the tabletop we don't want to go over eight inches. So that's about where I am. I'm not much higher than that. So we're going to go about looks like about as wide as where we are tall. So about eight inches, eight to ten inches wide and eight inches tall. So once I have my top ones then I can start adding that mid-range of stems. Now when I'm adding these I want to be cognizant that they're going out like a fountain. So I'll keep adding and then I'll come back. So I chose the butterfly ranunculus because they're very delicate, beautiful flowers and I like the greenery that's on them. So I'm going to cut them at an angle and I'm going to have them coming out all around the design like so and if they have a bud on them I'll save that maybe use that later if I want it. So how many am I going to put around all around? Well it depends on how many stems I have but let's try at least four around the base. So that's four around the base. Maybe one more low on this side. Let's see. All right, five. I like that. Now let's kind of come up. We need to come up into the design. We want that height. Let's see if we're measuring. Remember there's not a lot of foam in here so we're not trying to get too many stems in here. We want to try to make an impact with the fewest amount of stems we can and have it look like ethereal and light not, you know, an airy I should say. So let's have that one's going that direction. So let's have one coming up going in this direction. Got to really find a place in the foam where the stem will go in. If it doesn't go in easily then you've got to move, pull out the whole stem and place it into a different part of the arrangement. Okay so we have, you know, pretty much done our height here. I like this one. This one's pretty too. Let's try to do this one right in the middle. Remember I left that middle open so I have no tape there. Got a little bit left so I can go maybe low with this guy. Add some drama. This one's small. Radiating out maybe this way. All right so I'm pretty happy with my butterfly ranunculus. So now let's add some asters. So the asters are these really darling little white little fluffy flowers and we're going to do the same thing. We're going to radiate out so you always, anything that's kind of on the larger side can go lower in the design and then the smaller ones can come up high. But in this design I think, I think you're going to be okay if you have, you know, the larger. These are such small flowers so even if you have the quote-unquote larger ones you can keep them, you can keep them high in the design if you want. So as I'm adding, you know, flowers around and adding the the floral foam is getting less and less noticeable. It's still somewhat noticeable but I'm not that concerned with with it being like people are gonna be like oh my god I see floral foam. I'm usually we're like oh you know you don't see any foam that's a foam paw. But I don't mind it right now. I can still go back and add more baby's breath at the end because I have, I still have some. So I have some tall asters that are going to be really pretty up high. I mean some small ones I should say. So I've done the low and the high so then I have to do this middle range with asters also. So let's see, try to find some that maybe have more than one bloom on it because that would take up some nice space and you kind of want to do it so you're not stacking them right on top of each other so that they you're kind of adding them in different zones throughout the design. So you're going here then here then here you know at different spots. Okay I'm going to keep adding and then I'll come back. I have some white ranunculus that I had at the studio which I was looking for at Trader Joe's but they didn't have them today. I'm sure I could find them another day. So I'm just going to add a few of these. They're a little bit bigger and I'm running out of room in my floral foam so I don't want to force them in too much and I don't want to take away from the other flowers I've already added but I think they'll add some nice weight to the design. So I'm going to add these ones that are pretty full. I'm going to add them low where they're heavy, heavier in the in the arrangement and then any of these smaller ones I could bring up bring that look up into the design so you can notice oh there's ranunculus white ranunculus in the design too not just the yellow butterfly ones like so. Again I know I keep saying it but running you know we'll be running out of room very quickly in here so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to get all of these in. Okay let's do a size check because remember we're trying to stay within that you know three times the width three times the height of the vase so let's see where we are. So height wise we're just around nine and a half inches tall and width we're about 12 a little over 12 like 14 inches width which is kind of what I said we do be a little more than 12. Height I thought we'd be around 8 but actually I think it looks very natural compared to the bowl it doesn't look too big but what I feel like I'm missing is a little bit of the baby's breath in the middle of the design so I'm going to go back to my baby's breath and because it's such a small thin stem I should be able to get it in easily. Now instead of doing the short pieces like I did in the beginning I'm going to use the longer pieces and I'm going to make sure it's seen up in the design of the vase just like baby's breath is supposed to be used which is filler and this way I'm going to use it the way it traditionally is supposed to be as one of our you know sort of member of the party. Baby's breath is beautiful it's ethereal sometimes it has a really nice scent you know a delicate scent and a lot of flowers don't so it adds really pretty scent to designs. We just did a wedding recently where the bride wanted baby's breath everywhere you know in the arrangements and the ceremony and her bouquet it was a beautiful the boutonniere for the groom had baby's breath in it was all white wedding it was beautiful classic and very dreamy so it does break easily so you got to trim it away so you always need to maybe buy more baby's breath than you think it's not it's very delicate but like I said that the stems are nice and thin so they go in easily see how that just filled in really beautifully and then if I have any leftover pieces which I do I'm going to go low bring some of that baby's breath fullness out at the bottom and that again will help disguise the tape on the sides it'll help disguise the floral foam and it'll just kind of round out the design so it doesn't look quite as stemmy without it because we don't we didn't use any greenery so when you don't use greenery you you do run the risk of having a very stemmy looking design and I'm not a big fan of that so I like to hide the stemminess because I really want to just see the flowers I think I've used most of the baby's breath again if if you have you know baby's breath blooms at different times even on the thing so if you have some that are a little bit brown just peel those off and then the rest looks nice and pristine and white the more full it is obviously the older it is so there we go a beautiful ethereal rounded design in a teeny tiny bowl and what a great impact and how beautiful and delicate thanks for joining me kit words with flower duet