Flower Arrangements in a Wide Based Vase
Hi all! How are you coping with social quarantine?? I'm keeping myself busy with extra cleaning, lots of reading Under the Tuscan Sun, some online shopping of course, and arranging flowers! We have a fun little gift and floral shop here in Manhattan that I visit probably once per week to pick up flowers and it's also where I get cards because theirs are so unique. Anyway, I have this beautiful mixing bowl and for a while I was searching for a vase similar to it because I thought it would look gorgeous holding flowers. I gave up that search and decided to just arrange flowers in the mixing bowl- LOL. It went well! Every time I've brought a vase with a larger opening the florists have warned me that the arrangement won't look as good as if it were a smaller opening...what's up with that?? I disagree! I'll show you how I arrange flowers in vases with huge openings by demonstrating with a straight up mixing bowl.
You'll need 1. large vase 2. clear duct tape or shipping tape 3. scissors. This "technique" is what I used for my wedding flowers! We had huge cylindrical vases around the room filled with flowers and I had to figure out how to get a floral arrangement to stay in the vase without falling to the bottom of it. I used tape and you couldn't even tell.
It' super simple, really. Like shown above, tear off a piece of tape as long as the opening, cut the strip in half long-wise so the pieces are thinner, and make a grid. Larger grid openings will allow for your flowers to relax a little and smaller grid openings will stand the flowers upright, which means it'll take double the amount of flowers to fill your vase. I like using larger grids because I like a cascade of flowers rather than packed in flowers (both look beautiful, just my preference).
A basic rule of thumb for a flower arrangement is to pick up a few "statement" stems, a few greenery stems, and one or two tips of filler stems. I chose three hydrangeas for my statements, silver dollar eucalyptus and some of the leaves I pulled off of the hydrangeas for greenery, what I believe to be yellow estelle and some wax flowers for fillers. I usually lay my flowers out organized by type next to the vase to imagine where each stem will fit best. I always begin with the stem with the largest blooms. They'll take up the most space and you can kind of fill in from there. Always work largest to smallest. Above I have everything in the vase other than my last filler flower so I can get a final look and adjust stems around before I put in the final filler. I decided to use the filler flowers to frame the statements as you can see with the yellow estelle.
I finished framing the hydrangeas with wax flowers and also filled in any gaps where tape might be visible with the wax flowers. It's super simple to make arrangements on a larger scale like this with the proper flower sizes/variations and a support system (the tape)! I make sure to fill the vase (mixing bowl, lol) almost completely full because some of the flower set on their side a little so the stems aren't resting on the bottom. It's important all stems are getting water and without filling it super full they might not. However, if you're filling the vase fuller than usual, be sure to remove any leaves from the stems of the flowers that will touch that water. Leaving leaves on the stems and submersing them in water promotes stem rot!
Here is my final product! The only thing I would change is to add another stem of eucalyptus cascading over the side on the opposite side than what is shown. A little more balance would do this arrangement well! I hope you learned something from this little post today! I would definitely say arranging flowers and planting flower gardens is a passion of mine and I could blog about them all day! If you've got any questions please leave them in the comments or DM me on Instagram.
Thank you for reading!
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