First of all you should always be on the look out for beautiful flowers, no matter what. Well that is my philosophy at least. While doing the weekly shopping with Emma-Catherine this week at the local grocery I stumbled across some beautiful gladiolus, 7 stems, for $1.99. Not a chance I was leaving them there, so into the cart they went my mind already turning with ideas for what to do with them. So I got the baby home, fed and tucked away for the afternoon nap and started my fun. Here is a step by step tutorial for what to do with that standard pack of grocery flowers.
The perfect summer color. Almost a Tropical sunset look, lots of orange, peach and yellow. Lay your flowers out, inspect them for imperfections and take out the less than perfect blooms and foliage.
Next, on the left notice I took off about 3 inches of stem. This is fine because lots of other people have probably picked them up out of the water buckets at the store. This guarantees a nice fresh end for lots of ideal water uptake. Remember, if you are cutting with scissors you want SHARP scissors not something that will "chew" through the stems but give a nice clean cut. I use a very sharp knife to slice through stems but you pick your favorite cutting device.
Oh the next victim in our yard, the hosta plant!! As you can see I have bunnies living in the yard so I need to do some trimming not only the angle for my stem cut but nice sharp scissors to trim the rough edges. The leaf on the right should look more like the leaf on the left after I finish.
I trimmed all the stems at an angle, flowers and hosta leaves. I used about 7 hosta leaves to tuck in around the edge of the vase. The tall flowers go in the center and then just place your foliage around the outside to help keep the flowers from moving. If you had river rocks or stones for the bottom of the vase that would also help keep the flowers from moving around.
Containers.... Well, what do you have at the house. This is suppose to be an inexpensive fix for a plain jane table. So anything from a pilsner glass to a mason jar would work just fine. I had a taller more cylindrical vase I was able to use. Proportion wise you would want to have the flowers 2 to 3 times the vase height, as a general rule of thumb.
Then I started playing...
I took a single bloom, found a square votive cup, tied some liriope, another yard plant, in a knot, and made a cute little arrangement. You could use this at the base of the vase or if you were doing a party use it as a place card holder OR just an individual arrangement for each place setting.
Same type of container, instead of knotting the grass just let it fan out. Maybe you would use the knotted one for a gentleman's place setting and the simple grass for a lady's.
And there you have it. Some fun from the grocery store and all for $2 plus the foliage from our yard.
It took me longer to write about it than actually perform the arranging!!
No comments:
Post a Comment