4 steps to a beautiful spring floral arrangement

A couple of months ago, I asked one of my best friends Lindsay, if she would help me put together a spring floral arrangement for the blog. She creates the most beautiful stuff, and she’s been doing floral arranging for years. Some of her most recent jobs included tutoring students on floral arranging, working as a florist at Foxglove Floral in Provo, and doing florals for private events. So basically, she is a wealth of knowledge!

When she agreed, I was so excited. I knew she would create something amazing, and that she would be able to describe it in a simple, straightforward way, since she taught students for so long.

Having said all of that, here are four steps to create a beautiful spring arrangement:

Step 1: Start with the greenery. Trim them as you go to the desired lengths, to help them with water absorption. Place them in a vase/vessel (this arrangement looks really pretty in a shallow vessel with a wide mouth) with a generous amount of water in it, in a way that looks pretty as a base to you. Don’t overthink it. We used two different types of eucalyptus. If you put them in a grid pattern, they will help hold in the other flowers you will add later.

Step 2: Add the mass flowers, that will take up the bulk of the space in your arrangement. We added blue hydrangeas. Trim them to their desired lengths, and then add them around the base of your vase, so they are almost resting on the edge. For this arrangement we used three, so it can be viewed from any angle.

Step 3: Add the focal flowers. The focal flowers we used were pretty, pink tulips!  Trim them to their desired lengths and then add them in the vase, filling them into open spaces, and just placing them where you think they’ll look nice.

Step 4: Add the filler flowers. We used feverfew for ours. These are little fillers, that you can add into any little spaces that you’d like to be filled, or could just use a little something extra.  Trim them to their desired lengths before you add them.

 

Something Lindsay and I kept coming back to while we were working on our arrangements, was how simple and approachable floral arrangements really are. The medium (flowers) that you are working with is already so beautiful, that you can’t go too wrong with any arrangement. So just get started, play around with the flowers and it’ll turn out awesome.

How cute is she??

When Lindsay took the bouquet home she added a couple of ranunculus too. So that’s always an option. But it still looks so beautiful without them!

**Also, pro tip, Trader Joe’s has awesome and inexpensive flowers. They come in little individual bundles, so you can buy exactly what you are looking for and they’re pretty affordable.

 

DIY simple ceramic bud vase

I love all of the beautiful white or pastel colored, hand crafted ceramics I’ve seen all over the place. But I don’t love the price tags, on any of them. So I decided to figure out how to make some of my own. This bud vase was a super easy diy, and I am in love with the results.

It’s the perfect way to display a couple of little blooms this spring, to freshen up a small space. Also, its totally customizable which I love. You can make it look as pretty and neat, or as handcrafted as you want. You can also paint on top of it, use a glaze, or gold-leafing, seriously, the possibilities are endless.

I always put bud vases on my entry table. I think they add something pretty and fresh.
I love the idea of a bud vase on a little end table too. That’s not too much of a reality in our home right now, with little babies. But if you don’t have young kids, this could be fun.

Heres what you need to get started:

Polymer clay (in any color, but I love white)

-pencil

-wax paper

-baking sheet/oven

Step-by-step:

  1. Preheat oven to the temperature it says to set it on the back of your package of clay. (mine was 275 degrees)
  2. Wash your hands well to make sure you don’t get the clay dirty.
  3. Take desired amount of clay (I used about 1/5 of the polymer clay package), and condition it between your fingers and on a sheet of wax paper. Basically meaning smush it and knead it a bunch, just to get it to the point wear its super flexible and pliable. (this took me about 10-15 mins, make sure you’re really thorough about this to avoid getting any cracks while baking!)
  4. Roll clay into a ball on wax paper.
  5. Roll the ball of clay into more of a cylinder shape of clay.
  6. From here, with your hands, form the cylinder into whatever you would it to look like as a bud vase. For me, I tapered it in on the top to make the top of the vase, and then tapered it the smallest bit on the bottom, just to create a nice organic shape. (my vase ended up being about 4 inches tall, and 2 1/2 inches wide, just for reference)
  7. Use a pen to make an indentation on the top for the water and bud to go into. I made mine about 2 inches deep.
  8. Bake in the oven for the amount of time listed on your package of clay (every brand of clay is different, but mine was 15 min, for every 1/4 inch of thickness; so I baked mine for just under 90 mins, because mine was 1 1/2 inches wide at its thickest point). Watch it closely to make sure you don’t overbake it and get cracks.
  9. Put in a tiny bit of water, and a bud or two. Enjoy!

Have you ever made anything with oven-bake ceramic? I’ve tried a couple other little things; one of my favorites (other than this vase) is some ring cones I made back in December. I love being able to work with my hands and mold something, its so therapeutic to me. 

 

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