Faux But Fabulous: Artificial Flower Arranging

Welcome to Rex Living, where everyday life gets a little more beautiful. So in my career as an interior designer, I am always encouraging my clients to bring in fresh plants, fresh flowers. It really adds that bit of life to a project and in a room that is so static, it kind of brings that little bit of life into a room. And don't get me wrong, I love fresh flowers. I would do fresh flowers if I could every day, all day long. But it's a lot of work. It's very expensive and they really only last for about a week and a half to two weeks. So in my own home, what I like to do is use faux flowers. Now I know that's a controversial topic. People have a visceral reaction to faux flowers. I'm going to go over a few tips here on how to pick really good looking faux and also how to arrange them. And I hope you stick around and get all the tips. So as you can see here, this is my winter arrangement. It has lots of pines in it. It's got a little bit of fresh rosemary that's now dried out from my garden, which is really nice to add a little bit of scent. It's got these protea here. Now these protea are something that I keep from season to season because they look really nice in my kitchen and they also appear to be very realistic and they're very dramatic and they provide a lot of drama to the arrangement. But this arrangement I've had since probably our Christmas party time range, which was early December. So it's definitely time for a change. The dark matte black vase I've had probably out since Halloween. For Halloween time frame, these protea actually look pretty spooky and you can add some black stems and make it really feel kind of very Halloween-y very easily. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to start by taking out these protea. And as I'm doing this, let's talk about what makes a good faux. So if you look at faux flowers and you're trying to find something that will fake people out, because really isn't that the intent is to fake people out, you want to look for ones that have color variation on the petals. Let's see here on this hydrangea. That's what real flowers look like. No real flower looks 100% one color all the time. So always look for the petals to have that color variation. Pay attention to the stems. The stems will rat you out if you're not careful. So just make sure the stems look relatively real. There's some in here. Grab this one. This is a faux ranunculus and it's got even kind of a furry stem, which is great for making it look real. But you always want to look at the color variation on the flower. Another thing to look for is that if it's got multiple flowers on the stem, look for ones that have multiple sizes. So see how this has a large and a small. You can see here, grab this one. This is a faux rose. You see it's got one tholium bloom, it's got a bud, and then it even has a tiny little bud. That is what nature looks like. So you want to always look for those things whenever you're looking for faux plants. Another great tip, especially if you are working with succulents or anything that kind of has that plasticky feel already where the plant doesn't really look real to begin with, like these Norfolk pines. This is so realistic looking because it already looks fake in nature, right? This already has a plasticky feeling to it, so the faux version of it looks super realistic. So look for those kinds of things. I don't work a lot with succulents because we're here in Atlanta and it's not really the vibe here, but of course if you're in Arizona, New Mexico, out west, even in California, you can work with faux succulents very easily and man, I'm telling you, they look very, very real, the fake versions. So now that we've taken these out of here, let me just throw away these bits of rosemary. We are actually going to change the pots since this one has a very wintry vibe, and we are going to switch to this big boy here. I like this for summer and spring because of the color, the glaze is very pretty, it feels very fresh, it feels very much spring-summer, and yeah, this is great for live or for faux arrangements. For a live arrangement, I might build up the inside and put a jar in there to actually hold the water instead of trying to fill this entire thing up with water. I also might, because the real flowers don't have such long stems like the faux flowers, I might tend to actually do a couple things. The stems, the long stems on the faux flowers, as you put them in, they create this sort of web on the inside that helps to provide structure and hold all the other plants up. With the fresh flowers, they don't always have these long stems, so something that you can do is you can actually put a grid of tape across the mouth here to provide some structure. So if we were doing a fresh arrangement, that might be something that I would do, and look for that in another video. We will do a fresh arrangement here soon. So as we're starting our arrangement, the first thing that I want to work with is our greenery, and our greenery that I will be using are these faux olive branches. I've got a few different types here, and something that I really like about using these faux olive branches is that the color is very muted, and I feel like that helps again to sell the realness of it, which is very nice. Let's see, here we go. Here are all of our faux olive branches. The color is muted, and I think that what really helps sell something as real is that the color is not so fake looking, and it's a little bit darker. It's what it would look like in nature. So I think that when you're looking for greenery to add into your faux arrangements, it's something that you should be looking for. Again, I've got this lazy Susan here, which is great for doing these arrangements so you can see them from every direction. So something else that it's important to look for whenever you're doing a faux arrangement, especially if you're changing it out through the seasons, is try to find things that are seasonal to the actual season that you're working with. So for instance, we've got this cherry blossom. It's spring right now, so the cherry blossom is great for that. It's actually something that's blooming right now. Some of my other plants that I'm thinking about putting in here are slightly out of season because they're a bit more of a summer plant, like this hydrangea. We're not far off from hydrangea season, but they're a bit more later summer, but I just really like the color with this. I think it's very pretty. I've got some blue hydrangeas for summer that I like to use that I will use for a more summer arrangement. These guys here, I don't know what these are called, but see how these look so real because they look so fake to begin with in real life. They're beautiful. There's so much color variation and because they look plasticky to begin with, they look very real. So I think the first thing that I'm going to go in with after the greenery are my protea, which are my flower that I feature in my arrangement year-round because they end up looking so pretty in my kitchen with my kitchen colors. And also because they're so green, they almost act as a little bit another touch of greenery here to go with the olive branches here. Stick one right over here. So that's a pretty good base for what we're doing. Try to always work in odds, three, five, seven, nine. That's a great way to make things very pleasing to the eye. That pretty much goes for everything you ever do in design is stick with the odds. So now I'm going in with these hydrangeas because they are the largest plants and they take up so much space. So you want to make sure that they sort of claim the space that they really need to look beautiful. As you can see, I'm just spacing them out. So something that, of course, none of you guys know about me is that I actually grew up in the wedding business. My aunt and my mother actually ran a wedding business where they did everything from the gowns to the catering to the flowers to the day of management. So I've kind of grown up around doing arrangements my entire life. And now that I am a designer professionally, it's actually come in very handy where, you know, we've needed an arrangement pretty quickly for a photo shoot or something. I've been able to run down the street to Trader Joe's, grab some plants and very quickly get an arrangement pulled together for a photo shoot. So the next thing I'm going to go in with are these cherry blossoms because they are tall and provide a lot of structure. I'm trying to get them hooked into that grid that's inside here with the different stems so that they stand up taller. I want to make sure that they are doing their job of providing height to this arrangement. So I'm making sure that they're not sinking all the way down to the bottom of the space. So now I've got some decisions to make in terms of what I do next. This is very pretty. It is definitely screaming spring, but I've got some other flowers here that I want to use. I might stay away from the more purply flowers here, the ranunculus and the snapdragons that I have here, only because the pink and the purple. See here, let me throw this snapdragon in here. It's pretty and it definitely provides some height. I'm really going for that softer feeling here. I'm going for that very spring feeling here and I want to make sure that I'm getting that softness. So I think I'm going to use these guys. Yes, very pretty. So in a way, this guy here has a very similar texture to the hydrangea, but at a smaller scale. And because it's at a smaller scale, it's providing a different texture, which I really enjoy. So let's get these dispersed in here. Again, I've got three of these. Pretty much all the time when you're buying faux flowers, they're going to come in these odd numbers. And then for instance, when I bought these ranunculus, it all came and they were bundled up three piece, but they're kind of delicate. So I actually got two bundles of them. Now I'm feeling like it needs a little bit more greenery here to give it just a little bit more heft. So, and it needs a little bit of this lighter green color here. So I've got, I don't know what this is. This is probably meant to look a bit like a lambs ear, I suppose. It's got a fuzzy texture, but really it's that silvery color, that silvery blue color that I want to add back in. So it goes with the protea here. And instead of adding it to the bottom like I normally would for greenery, I'm actually going to add it to the top so that it will provide that height and also serve as that brightness that I'm looking for with that silvery color. This is absolutely beautiful as is. I want to quickly look at these roses and just see if maybe I want to use these roses. If not, they will make their appearance in the summer since they are definitely a summer flower. Yeah, I actually think that's very pretty tucked in there like that. It's not the star of the show here. It's not the focal flower, but it does provide just one more texture in the arrangement. Grab all these guys here. It does provide just that little bit of texture. It's got the same colorway. It adds just that little bit of hot pink in there that I like just to brighten this up a little bit. And again, because it's got the different types of flowers on it, it's got the buds and the full blooms on there, it helps to really sell this as being a real arrangement. And as much as I say disperse your flowers, don't be afraid to go in with a clump of two of the same thing because I think that that really helps to, again, sell this as being something that you kind of just pulled out of the garden and threw into a vase here and threw it onto your island. That's looking really good. Use your Lazy Susan to give it a nice little spin. These guys that I clumped together, let's just make sure they just get a little bit more air time here. That is very pretty. One more tip for faux plants and faux flowers is make sure you dust them. They will collect dust, so you want to make sure that you are going in using one of those fluffy dusters or even like one of the Swifter duster things and get in there and dust off your flowers to make sure that they're not collecting dust. That will inevitably tell everybody that these are not real flowers. So anyway, I hope you learned something and please like and subscribe to living and I'll see you in the next video.