Thursday, May 14, 2009

A Grocery Store Bouquet

In an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, last week I made 2 bouquets with flowers I grabbed at Albertson's. I had a friend that was going to be heading to the court house on Friday and I wanted to practice to see if my skills would actually hold up in September to make my own bouquet.

It was the Thursday before Mother's Day so there was actually a wide variety of flowers to choose from, and they were on "sale" as well. I looked at the roses ($9.99 for a dozen) but my friend had asked for purples. Most of the roses were pinks or reds which wasn't gonna work for her. I went over to the mixed bouquets but none of them were really calling my name either. My last option was to pick from the selection of flowers that were 3 bundles for $12.99. If you have been to Albertson's you may have seen this section before. Each bundle is all the same type of flower. They did have sunflowers ... but since my friend wanted purples I put them down. (I will come back again another time to try with those) This is what I ended up buying:



I am not sure what they are called. They kind of looked like daisies and the bundles looked really full so I thought I would get a nice full bouquet. Once I got home I set up my little work station on the kitchen counter. I grabbed a vase and filled it with Reverse Osmosis water and grabbed my scissors. I then pulled and cut off all the leaves and then recut the bottoms of the stems and put them in the vase. It was during this first round that I realized that the bundles looked so full because each stem had 3-5 flowers on it. In my head I thought "this could be a problem" but I kept de-leaving until I was done with the whole bunch.



When I tried to make a bouquet out of the stems I just wasn't getting the look I wanted. The flowers were at various different heights and I wasn't getting a nice round shape. On to plan B ... I cut all the flowers off the stems. Most of them still had a long thinner stem, but some did end up very short. The also started falling into the water in my vase, so I grabbed 3 jars/cups and filled them with Reverse Osmosis water as well. As I cut the flowers I divided them by color into the 3 cups. This let me see the flowers that had the longest stems, as well as helped make my color selection go fast when I started assembling


Next I began my arrangement. I had read and seen a few online tutorials and I have watched enough DIY tv shows that I kind of combined techniques and did what felt natural.

I picked some of the long stems with the smallest flowers for the middle, then started working my way out and around. I remembered to cross the stems to get the correct angles and switched hands back and forth to keep the round shape.


I tried to create a "pattern" with the colors, but in the end I was just grabbing the flowers at will and putting them in the bouquet where I thought they fit best. When I got a good handful of stems I decided that the bouquet was as full as it was gonna get. They are small flowers so they started to really get smooshed the more I added. I am sure with bigger flowers the end result would have been a fuller bouquet.


You will have to come back to see how I ended up tying the bouquet (since I couldn't find raffia in my house) and covering the stems.

DIY Lessons learned:
#1 - check the stems to see if there are multiple flowers
#2 - don't pick flowers with delicate petals
#3 - have raffia, string or florist tape in the house
#4 - let the flowers drink before you start playing

I will definitely be doing another trial with sunflowers sometime this summer when I find them on sale. I think I will need more that the 3 for $12 bundles at Albertson's

Have you done any trial runs of your DIY projects? Did you learn lessons to help with the final project?

1 comment:

TheInspiredHousewife said...

I love them! Daisies are my favorite flowers, and I love how youv'e put the different shades of purple together. Beautiful!

Related Posts with Thumbnails