Flowers are a wonderful way of decorating a venue for a party, event or wedding, furthermore they are a beautiful addition to the home and a thoughtful gift to a loved one. If you understand the basic principles of creating your own bouquet you be able to create some spectacular displays.
You will need:
• Flowers: up to 10 for a small bouquet, up to 15-30 for a medium bouquet, 30-60 for a large bouquet.
• Decorate foliage, or decorations such as feathers .
• Ribbon or bouquet plastic wrapping to decorate the finished bouquet.
• Knife or scissors, a stem stripper.
• Vase or bucket, partially filled with water.
The first thing you need to do is prepare your flowers. To do this you should remove most or all of the flowers leaves and foliage, and all of its thorns, allowing the flower to use its energy to blossom rather than keeping leaves alive, decorative foliage can be added later. While submerging the stem in water, cut it at an angle approximately 5cm from the end of the stem. Put this flower in your bucket or vase whilst you repeat this process with the remaining flowers.
Consider the flowers that you have and where they would look best, for example if you have one large flower you may want to make this the centrepiece, or if you have 2 larger flowers along with medium and small flowers, you may want to create a parallel design. Create an image in your mind. When arranging your flowers you will need to work from the centre outward, so select four of your chosen centre flowers and align the stems to form a cube. Continue to add flowers around the cube, building your bouquet from the inside out and adding foliage and decoration wherever you like.
If your bouquet is going to be displayed in a vase, you can place the arrangement you have made into the vase as soon as it is finished. If, however, the flowers are being given to someone as a gift or are being used as an alternative decoration, the arrangement will need to be bound together to keep its design. Using small rubber bands or tape bind the arrangement twice, one a few cm’s above the bottom of the stems, and secondly a few cm’s below the heads of the flowers.
For presentation, you can wrap the flower arrangement in decorative bouquet plastics, or wrap ribbon around the stems of the flowers pinned into place using decorative pins pushed into the stems of the flowers. There are various ways in which you can decorate your flower arrangement, get an idea of the look you are going for, and check on-line at the supplies that are available to you.
For something a little different, why not try making an underwater flower arrangement. Prepare your flowers as usual and cut the stem enough so that the flower can be fully submerged into the water. Get some wire wrap approximately 3cm of this around the bottom of the stem of one of the flowers an leave about 8cm length of wire before cutting, repeat this process with all flowers you want inside the vase. You will need to find a stone to wrap the excess wire around and help weigh down the flowers. You can add sand, pebbles or stones to hide the wire and stone weight, but remember to add these before the flowers and stone weight. Finally, add water leaving a 2-3cm space from the top of the vase, and ensure you top this water up every other day.
