How to Design with Casa Blanca Lilies

Hi, Kit here, Flower Duet, Flower Arranging Friday. We are going to work with oriental lilies. You may be familiar with the stargazer lily, the Casablanca lily. Yes, those are types of oriental lilies. We are working with a white lily today that's very similar to a Casablanca lily, has a beautiful fragrance. We're going to talk about when do you buy them for your event so that they'll be fully open, how to arrange with them, how to keep that pollen from marking up people's clothes, and a few other tips that you need to know when you're working with oriental lilies. So, glad you're with me. Stay tuned for our tips on lilies. Our first tip is how to arrange with them. So, they are beautiful when they open like this, and you'll notice the bottom bloom opens first, then the top blooms stay kind of in bud stage form. So, you actually want to arrange with them when they're all still closed, and that's when you want to purchase them too, and that can be a little tricky on your timing. So, you want to purchase them when they look like this. So, the buds, the bottom buds are about to show their color. They are maybe about to crack, like this one is about to crack open, and that is when you want to buy them, and when you buy them in this stage, then when you arrange with them, it's very safe because none of the petals are going to get damaged, and then once you arrange them, you let everything open in place, and that way you're not going to have damaged petals, and the reason why I say that is because these petals crease very easily. So, you don't want to arrange with them when the petals are open because that way what's going to happen is all of these flowers are going to, they're going to get creased, and they'll look really bad. They'll turn brown, and then they won't look fantastic for your design. So, the first tip is buy them when they're closed. The next tip has to do with pollen. So, pollen, what's pollen? So, pollen are these, actually these are the antlers that are used for pollinating the flowers out in nature, and right now these antlers, once the lily opens, the antlers are shown, and as the lily ages, these antlers get the powdery pollen on them, and that orange pollen, if it brushes off on someone's clothes, then it's very, it could, it stains basically. It's orange stain on the clothes. So, what you want to do is when you arrange with these, you want to remove all of the pollen before it gets to that stage, and when it's like this, when it's barely, when it's just opened, it's very easy to just pull them off, and you're not going to actually get anything on your fingers, but once, maybe you're not as quick to get the pollen, and it starts to do the orange powdery thing, even if you just pull it off with your fingers, you're going to get orange pollen all over your hands. So, that's where you take a Kleenex or a paper towel, something you're going to throw away, because you don't want to reuse it, because you'll just get pollen everywhere, and we do something called wiping their nose. So, you're just going to gently reach in to the pollen, and you're going to grab those antlers, try not to grab the middle stamen, and you're going to pull those off, and then that way, you've basically cleaned the stem of all of those antlers, so then no pollen is going to show up on there, and you want to do this process before the orange starts to happen, because if you go to wipe the nose, and orange gets on this part, the middle part of the stem, then the orange will go on that, and that'll get rub off on people's clothes, and you don't want that to happen to any of your guests, and you definitely don't want to happen to a bride if you're, if she's got lilies in her bouquet. So, all of these things need to be removed, hopefully before the pollen starts to get powdery and orange, and definitely you want to make sure you've removed any sort of pollen that might be left inside the stem. So, wipe the noses with lilies. All right, so we mentioned that we need to remove pollen from the lilies, so no one will run into it, but here I've had Casey accidentally, ha ha ha, get some pollen on her sleeve, and we're going to show you exactly how to remove it. So, you don't want to brush it off, you don't want to get it wet, you want to take some tape, and any tape will do. Right here we have some packing tape, and duct tape works, or scotch tape even, really any kind of tape. Okay, Casey's going to show you how to remove pollen. I feel like we're doing an infomercial for tape. So, you can see she just stuck it quickly, very quickly she did that. So, you just push it down, and then pull straight back up, and you can even go back down, you can flip it over, so that you don't get pollen back on your sleeve, but basically that's it, and you can see, I'll close up, there is no pollen left. All right, so we've gotten our lilies in, they're still closed, just beginning to crack slightly at the top, and before we start to put them in the vase, you want to take off the greenery, and it's pretty easy to peel the greenery off, you can just slide it down like that. So again, you don't want any greenery below the water line, that's always important, and when you're going to fill a vase with water, you want to make sure it has flower food in it, the proper ratio of flower food to water. When you're filling a vase like this, that we're going to let the lilies sit for a long time, and open, you want to make sure that flower food's in there, because it has an antibacterial agent that will cut down on the cloudiness of the water. Also, you want to make sure your vase is filled about two-thirds full, so that it looks nice, it's a nice look, and also these stems are pretty hardy, so they can handle having that much water in the vase, and they're going to drink a lot as they open, so you want to make sure you start with a lot of water. All right, so let's talk about height of vase. So first you want a really tall vase, because these stems are quite long, and you want this to make a big impact, so the taller the vase, the more dramatic it's going to look. You want to fill the vase two-thirds high, and you want to make sure you have it with flower food. This is going to sit in there for a while, so you want to make sure the flower food's in there, because that helps cut down on the bacteria, keeps the water nice and clean. You want to have it two-thirds full, so that the lilies have a lot to drink, and they can open quickly. You want to just use room temperature water when you're working in the vase. If you want them to open quicker in your studio, then you use warm water in the bucket to try to help those things pop a little bit. But we want these to open inside the vase, not before. So I'm going to start with one that's still kind of closed, which this one is, and I'm going to keep it about two times the height of the vase. You can see it's quite tall, and I'm just going to give it a cut and place it in. You can see as you place it in, I notice that the some little water bubbles release, which is a good sign. Those water's replacing the air that got trapped in the stem. So this one's the first one I'm going to do. I'm going to put 10 stems in this vase. So I don't want a wide, too wide of a mouth, because I want to be able to make sure that I can fit all the stems, but they don't want to have more stems, because they come in 10 in a bunch, or five in a bunch, depending on where you're buying them from. So I'm going to use 10, starting with one at the highest, and it's going to fall over, which is fine, until I get more of my stems in there. So now I'm going to add my next layer down. We're doing a layer cake, but we're actually building it from the top to the bottom, and I'll explain why as we go along. Next, I'm going to add my second layer, which is going to be a step down from the first layer. So this is our top layer, and now I'm going to step down slightly to the next layer, and when I say step down, I'm going to actually step down like a whole head of lilies, because I want everything to have a star, a starring role, and so how I'm going to do that is, I've already cleaned this stem, so I'm going to hold it up next to it, and I'm going to bring it down so that I can measure at the end of the table. I'm holding it to the edge of the table, give it a cut at an angle, place it in, and that's going to be my second layer, and as I put this in, I'm going to do four at this level, and then I'll place it around and try to hold in those other stems. So again, this is too tall, I'm going to hold it up. I want it to be a step down from that top one. I'm going to measure on the side of the table, give it a cut at an angle, place it in the side. There's another one, see, it's ready to crack. It's almost cracking right here. Hold that up. This is my middle one again. I want to bring it down, give it a cross. Same one with this one. I've already cleaned the stem, always clean the stem, no greenery below the waterline. Holding it to the edge of the table to measure, cutting it at an angle, crossing those stems below. When you do that, you start to build that architecture up, which looks pretty, number one. You're going to have nice, clean lines inside the vase, and it's starting to hold that top one in place. So now I'm going to add my lower-most layer, or my bottom cake layer, as I like to say, which will be the shortest, and these are going to have another extra little feature, which I'll cover next. All right, so we're on pretty much our final step, and that is going to be adding the bottom layer of the lilies, and these are my last five stems. So I've started with one stem at the top, four stems I stepped down, and now I'm going to add five stems around the bottom. Now we got these lilies, let's see, today's Thursday, so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. So we got these four days ago, so some of them haven't opened, as you can see, and some have started to open. And so what I did with those is I already removed the pollen, and some of those have opened. So when you have that situation, those are the ones that you want to put at the bottom, because we always talk about this, low, large, tall, small. So the low ones are going to be the ones that are most open, and then the tall ones are going to be the smallest that haven't opened, and so that's how we're building our layer cake. So usually just one or two maybe might open together on the stem. So this one has one open, so this one I want to have it just kind of resting on the lip of the vase. And so I'm going to bring it here to measure, give it a cut, carefully place it in, because remember, once the stems have opened, they're very susceptible to getting bashed and crushed. So you want to be really careful when you're placing these, and that's why I'm placing the ones that are open last, so that they don't get bashed. So see, you want that looking straight out at your audience. This one has two that have opened, and it also has a broken stem. So what I want to do is I want to first cut off that broken stem, and this one I'm going to put over at this angle. And again, I'm going to rest it on the edge of the vase. So I'm just going to move that one aside that I've already placed, put that down. See how it's filling in, starting to fill in nicely? So much so you can't see me anymore. Okay, so that's two, so I have three more to go. Okay, so these I have just waiting in a bucket off to the side here, so that they're all opening easily. I've got about only about 10 in a bucket, and they're all just circling it. So I'm going to take off these lower leaves because I don't need those. Oh my gosh, it smells so good. So here I want to have this one kind of coming out at an angle. Remember, these other ones are going to open, so I don't want to have to think, you know, give myself too much pressure that not everything's opened yet. They're going to open, so I want to also make sure I have room for the other ones I already placed in there to open. So you don't want to have too many competing for space. So that one's done, so I have two more left to add. Again, like we always say in all our classes, you're cutting and placing right away. You don't want to wait too long to place. Always cut at an angle so that those stems don't sit flat on the bottom of the vase. And so now I have one left. This one I'm going to add. I see I've turned the vase each time. It's a little tricky now trying to get these in between these other blooms. Gotta be careful that you don't break anything. So this one looks like I have a little competition going on here. Let's see if I can gently square that up. All right, this one's not cooperating. So what's happening is this one is competing with another one in here, so I have to take it off. And that can go in a small vase so that I can get this into the vase without hurting the other stems that I've already placed, because I think those are going to be pretty, but I can't have them bashing the other stems. Okay, so now I have a pretty even bloom around the base, and I'm just going to be waiting for some of these other ones to fill in. And if I can't wait, I could maybe add another one up high. But I already used my 10 stems, so I don't have that opportunity right now. But what I can do to fill in some of this is add a little greenery, which I'm going to do next. Okay, so what we've done is we've started with our layers at the top, and then we did our middle layer, and then we did the bottom layer of the ones that are kind of open. Some are very open, some are about to open, so it's going to get very full very quickly. But what we want to do while we're waiting for it to open is fill it in a little bit. So I have this great Italian Ruscus, and I've already cleaned the bottom part where the leaves were off the stem, because you never want any greenery below the waterline, no leaves below the waterline. And plus, if I put it in, it'll be easier to take it out if I don't like where I place it. So the reason why I like this is because it's pretty long stemmed. So I'm going to place some of these in between, and this just kind of cuts down on some of that empty or negative space, as we say in the business, in between these stems until it starts to open some more. And that way, if you were to bring this to, say, an office and it needed to last the whole week, you're going to want to bring it when it's just starting to crack like this, and then just let it sit for the week so it can open nicely. But you want it to look finished, and the way to do that is to add greenery. And again, you could have added this before, but I'm adding it now because I don't know how much I need it. I don't, maybe I don't need a lot, so I don't want to add more than I need. So I'm just adding it in to fill in some of that negative space so that you don't just see stems. That's what I'm trying to do here. So I'm not trying to, this is not trying to be a jungle in here. I'm just adding some greenery to fill in some of that space. And you can see I did not go really below the lip line of the vase. I have some short ones here, so that I might have coming off to the side to add a little bit of width. Not too much, just a little bit. And I might get another one of those, but you get the idea just to add some fullness. So just looking around. So now the real fun is when it opens and you get to see how everything just really starts to make this thing, this arrangement, really explode over the course of a week. So you want to, you want everything to be wide open for an arrangement, for say an event, and it needs to be all open. Then you're going to want to get your lilies between, you know, seven and ten days ahead of the event. You're going to want to arrange with them about a week before the event and then put them in the vase and let them open. And if you have them in a cooler then, you know, you're going to need to kind of watch on the time because they're going to slowly open, open slower in a cooler, which is very advantageous at times, but sometimes you need them to just pop. So let me show you what an arrangement looks like that we did on Monday with them super fresh and how it looks four days later. So you can kind of get an idea of how fast they open in regular like room temperature, like maybe 60 degrees over the course of four days. So I promised that we'd look at one that had been sitting after it had been arranged for four days so you could see the progress of how they open. And this one has more lilies in it than the example, but so there are more blooming. But you get the idea of how full it will be after four days. Still this top stuff hasn't bloomed yet, so it has a ways to go. So that gives you an idea of how long it takes for them to open. But once again it's very difficult to arrange with them when they're already open and not crush the stems, I mean the petals. So you definitely need to arrange and then patiently wait. So I hope you enjoyed this flower arranging Friday featuring Oriental Lilies.