Trick for Arranging Flowers

I'm horrible at arranging live flowers.  It's like I try to cram everything in the same place and end up with one side really over-weighing the other one...but using this little trick it's a breeze to make sure you have things evenly placed.  It makes me *almost* look like I know what I'm doing....

Ignore the flowers in these photos, I used some leftover flowers my hubby gave me to get a bit more life out of them before they went into the trash and mixed in some of the knock-out roses & greenery from right outside our front door.

Supplies Needed:

• Container to use for arrangement.
• Floral Tape (or other waterproof tape for the milk glass I actually like waterproof medical tape best)
• Flowers & Greenery for arrangement
• Snips or Scissors

Instructions:

1. Take out your container and place it on a solid surface.  I like to use our milk glass leftover from the wedding, but a simple glass square from Dollar Tree would also work great.  Try to choose something with a wider opening so you can build your arrangement out with a bit more space.
2. Use scissors to cut strips of your floral tape that stretch the width of your container opening.  If floral tape is wider you might need to snip it in half width wise for ease of arrangement.
3. Starting at one edge of the opening carefully place tape strips across the mouth of the container making sure to evenly space them apart all the way to the other side of the container.
4. Turn the container and repeat this process going the other direction to create yourself a grid of sorts.
5. Trim the stems of your flowers to be the depth of your container.  Make sure to leave a couple that are a bit longer to use in the middle.
6. Starting in the center, using slightly longer stemmed flowers, carefully insert one flower stem into one open square of your tape grid.
7. Carefully add flowers to the grid working from the center to each edge to help create a rounded type of arrangement.
8. Once finished with your flowers, feel free to go back and insert bits of greenery into the arrangement to fill it out a bit more.
9. Display!

Thanks so much for this, you will be a life saver when I go to do my centerpieces!!!  I was wondering do you think if I tape off the vase ahead of time (i'm thinking months in advance) the tape will be ok?  Thanks again for sharing the tip I am bookmarking it :)

This is great! I took a flower arranging class last night and I just learned more from your post than I did from my class! Hahaha. =)

Barker86: If you try the tape thing ahead of time and find that it does or doesn't work, please let us all know! Solutions are always helpful to store for later.

Sunnydebs:  you can do a couple of things to keep the tape hidden. 

1. Most of the time the lower level of your flowers sit along the vase top hiding the tape, this is where using floral tape is useful since the green blends in.  
2. I tend to use waterproof medical tape cut in half on the milk glass since it being white helps it blend in.
3. In the photo above I hadn't finished trimming the tape since it was a quick tutorial photo, but typically I trim the edges so there is much less tape visible on the outside of the vase. 

The other tip I didn't mention was to give yourself more stability you can always place a piece of floral foam on the inside bottom of the vase before you setup your grid.  The tape grid will help hold it in place.

Hope that helps...