Tag: Decorating

The holidays are all coming up. And this can bring many feelings to different feelings. When adulting, the hardest part of the holidays are when finances are tight.

To help lighten the mood and bring a little cheer with the gift of flowers.

I’m going to show a simple and easy to make arrangement that you can personalize any way you want because it’s a blank slate. The beauty of it is that I reused some items and others were given to me. I had no out of pocket expenses to share this post with you.

So let’s start with the materials.

Vase

What inspired this post was the vase that my mom had sent me some flowers in.

Unfortunately I can’t send you a picture of what the floral arrangement was that my mom sent. Mostly because I want to keep the blank slate in your mind and spark your creativity.

What I like about this white pumpkin is that if you remove all the floral it is literally a cookie jar. So feel free to use this idea any time of year and use cookie jars, old tea pots, water pitchers, even a shoe box (hello baby shower with baby shoe boxes!) Literally, use what you have on hand that brings you inspiration.

If you’re using a cookie jar or anything else with a lid, let me show you the parts of this vase and how it works.

This lid stand/holder is very specific for floral. I’m sure with today’s online offerings, you could find these. But you’re going to have to know what your lid size is and go from there. I have one other cookie jar, but the lid is smaller and this stand/holder definitely will not fit in it.

However I do have two options off the top of my head that I could use from items I have in my house.

I have porcelain dolls from my childhood, and this stand/holder immediately reminded me of the doll stands I have that go around my dolls’ waist. The tension part is too small to fill the lid like in this pumpkin vase, but with two or three I could position them in the smaller lid to make the tension and platform to raise the lid.

Another option is making one from a thick gauge wire. If your local store has a DIY floral department or aisle, you will find wire thick enough to hold its shape and hold the weight of a lid. If you want to price comparison shop, go to an automotive shop or aisle. You’ll often find that you will get a better price in that department, but also walk out with a larger quantity of wire.

Once you have the wire, you can make your own custom holder/stand by leaving several inches of one leg sticking out as you then go in and create a loop of wire inside the lip of your cookie jar lid. I would make a few loops inside that lid to ensure that when you move and manipulate the legs that you don’t shrink your loop and allow your lid to fall. Once you’re confident in you loop, bring out a second leg and then use wire cutters to cut the wire. You can always add more than two legs if you feel like you need to add more stability.

Inner Stability

For lid placement, you will need something to anchor the stand into.

I’m choosing to reuse the oasis that came with the flowers my mom sent me. This is an amazing product because it not only allows you to place flowers like a pin in a pin cushion. It also allow absorbs and holds water, keeping your flowers in water much longer than free standing in just a vase of water.

If you want to use silk flowers that you have on hand, feel free to use a Styrofoam ball or block. (I don’t recommend styrofoam for fresh flowers because the plastic will kill your flowers and won’t allow them to be properly hydrated.

Once you’ve decided what you’re using as a structure (of if you’re even using a structure), you may find that you need to piece bits together to keep them from falling into your cookie jar and becoming lost. Flower stems are enough to keep bits together. However if you need everything to be in place before you get started on your flowers, know that toothpicks or a couple inches of wire are your best friend.

TIP: Please note that placing a toothpick or wire in a 90° angle is going to cause frustration. The weight of wet oasis and flowers are going to collapse. So instead, angle the toothpick at a 45° angle. That way when gravity starts to work against you, the toothpick will hold its place. This will be further reinforced by the flowers that you soon add.

Flowers

I wanted to use these fillers specifically because they are often overlooked for being used as flowers on their own. Maybe you have a lot of fillers left over from other arrangements that you made. Or maybe your budget is tight and these are the only flowers that are in your price range.

There are so many other fillers that you can find in your grocery store. So please keep your eyes open. And not all stores offer the same offerings. The grocery stores don’t supply very many filling options. However, stores like Trader Joe’s offer the best selection of filler flowers in my area. And their prices are quite affordable.

TIP: If your local store doesn’t offer many choices for filler flowers take a look at what is available for discounted flowers. They’re the ones that have the more delicate flowers that are wilted. These discounted bouquets are often cheaper than just fillers flowers, but the fillers used in these bouquets still have a long life to them. There are a huge number of flowers that will last weeks without even having water available to them. So know that even all that you can afford is a heavily discounted, on its last leg bouquet, if there’s a decent amount of fillers included, you can make a decent arrangement even if you have to throw out the wilted roses, lilies, and other delicate petal flowers.

Arranging

When looking at using long stems of filler, like eucalyptus, you will be happier in how these stems lie when you hold them up and see which direction they are naturally bending. (See the right picture below.) If you want the stem to cascade down, angle the bend down and also put it in the oasis by entering from the bottom and putting the stem upward. This can be seen in the picture on the left.

See the difference between placing firm eucalyptus stems. Using the left picture (above) the stems you see in the bottom right corner are the stems that I angled from the bottom of the oasis and pushed upward. The one stem that is in the upper left corner is the one that I pushed from the top and downward. But this stem I also used a second trick. Even with the curve of this stem, it had the tendency to stand upright. So I curved the stem in a C shape and kind of hooked the stem in the oasis. Then I put the pumpkin lid over this stem to weigh it down. Even with this trick, the stem never gave a cascading down effect like you see with the bottom right corner stems.

How you place the stems is everything about how it stands up or lays down.

The baby’s breath is much easier to shape the way that you want. For this cookie jar I used about four stems of baby’s breath and snipped them down into smaller branches. And with an arrangement like this, there’s no need for long pieces. All you need are the “scrap” pieces or bits that are the size of your hand or smaller.

If you “scrap” pieces or the bits that you cut down are too small, it just means that you need more of them to fill larger spaces.

One work around for filling empty spaces quicker is to take larger pieces like this. In the below picture on the left is a stem that is about the length of my elbow to my wrist. It could have been trimmed down into four smaller stems, but I wanted to fill a large hole with just this one piece.

To close up the gap spacing between these branches, slide your fingers up the main stem, gathering all the stems up the main stem. That gathering bunches all the stems up to achieve what you see in the right picture. You will have to hold you stem in this position until you push it into the oasis. At that point, the foam holds bunching in place.

Before you place your first gathered stem, I want to draw your attention to a stem feature that has the potential of causing you some up front frustration.

If you have an arrow tip like you see above, it’s easiest if you just snip that off. It causes resistance, when pushed in the oasis, that you don’t need, because those stem numbs have no flowers.

Look further up on the stem and you see what it looks like when you have attached flowering stems. When I don’t need the height from the stem, I snip it right there at the base of where all the stems merge. Then I slide my fingers down to make more of an arrow point instead of a tear drop. That fat end of the tear drop is difficult to push into oasis. However, if you make a sharper point, or a smaller surface area to push in, the stem slides right into the oasis.

If there are any other merges in the stem, it’s easiest if you pinch it smaller to get it to go into the foam. Depending on how large of a cluster you have, there may be a few of these joints that you have to manipulate into the foam.

Final Adjustments

Once you’ve filled in all your empty space, there’s a few decisions to make.

• Do you add more of one filler or the other?
• Was there too much and some needs to be removed?
• Does placement need to be adjusted?
• Is something missing?

I looked at the final arrangement here and went through these same questions. All the holes I filled with baby’s breath as that’s what I chose to be primary flower out of these two fillers.

The thought crossed my mind to add more eucalyptus. But I opted with the creative decision of having less leaves on my pumpkin “vines”. So that meant instead of removing branches of eucalyptus I chose to weave the branches through the clusters of baby’s breath.

As far as “am I missing anything?” that is the question that is always there when you have a blank canvas for an arrangement.

Right now this is how my pumpkin sits in my living room. But it also allows me to keep this long lasting arrangement in season through the rest of the year. For Thanksgiving, I could add fall leaves or any other fall accent pieces. For December all the fall accent pieces can be pulled out of the oasis and winter pieces added. For example, I would put in snowflakes or mini presents. In fact, I’m eye balling some mini glitter snowflakes while writing this. The question is if I want to keep with the white color and add silver glitter snowflakes. Or do I want to add a splash of color and put in gold snowflakes?

But that’s the beauty of making a simple arrangement like this. I can dress it up and change it.

In fact, I could keep this up for the New Year and put in foil clusters that look like fireworks.

For now I’m just going to have to contain myself and not entertain my kids. It’s so easy to grab their small stuffies and other toys and use them as props to make little scenes. We don’t do Elf on the Self in our house, but just like there’s millions of Pinterest posts on Elf on the Shelf ideas, there’s just as many possibilities for arrangements like this. It doesn’t matter if you have a pumpkin cookie jar like vase (like I used here) or a teapot or coffee cup. No matter what you are using as a unique vase, you have just as many options to accessorize and decorate without limits.

How would you dress up a pumpkin arrangement like this?

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