Great question! Ultimately, styling your flowers is a matter of personal choice, but we absolutely have some tips to get you started.
Before we even consider how to arrange the flowers, think about your vase – the size of the opening of your vase is very important. For one of our classic or single sized bouquets, a vase with an opening that measures 3-4” across is ideal. For a double bouquet, vases with a 5 - 6” opening are great. Our triples are really quite full and they need a vase with an 8 - 9” opening. Choosing a vase with the correctly sized opening will help your flowers look much fuller and more impressive.
Once you’re ready to start arranging, begin with textural stems and greenery. These are your ruscus, thistle, eucalyptus, berries, etc. We recommend that you start by about placing ⅔ of your foliage stems into the vase to develop the overall shape of my arrangement and reserving the remainder to fill any gaps.
Then move to your focal flowers - roses, mums, calla lilies, protea, etc. Place your focal flowers into the arrangement to fill it out, and keep an eye on contrast and balance. Contrast catches the eye and will keep your arrangement interesting. You can generate contrast by placing stems of different types and colors in close proximity to each other. In other words, don’t place all your pink flowers together in a tight cluster; that pink color next to a deep green creates contrast. Balance refers to the way that you disperse colors and stems throughout the bouquet.
Consider stem length as well; pulling airy stems like anemone or queen anne’s lace out a bit so that it sits 1” or so above your other flowers creates visual interest.
Then, just fill any holes in the arrangements with the greenery you reserved before and you’ve done it! You’ve designed an arrangement.
A couple other useful tips for you along the way:
- Cutting your stems so that your blooms sit 1-2” above the lip of the vase will keep your bouquet from looking to long and lanky for its vase
- With that in mind, err on the side of cutting stems longer than you need. You can always shorten a stem, but getting length back isn’t possible.
- As you’re working, strip any foliage from the stems that will fall below the water line in the vase; this will dirty the water and shorten your bouquet’s vase life.
- Remember that flowers are natural products; every stem is different and will have a slightly different shape. Let the way the flowers are moving speak to you and inform where you place them in your bouquet.