Another advantage to sorting your flowers into a Styling Vase before you arrange them is that you’ll see the balance of color left once the decorative packaging is removed from the bouquet. Lots of times the packaging is as attractive as the flowers. In those cases you’ll want to use packaging if you can.

Bouquet Packaging Decorates Vase

For Tosin’s private lesson class we used bouquets that had fiber and cellophane wrappings (see the previous entry). So for her first arrangement we covered a ginger jar shaped vase with the square piece of hot pink fiber and tied it off at the lip with a piece of lime green ribbon so she wouldn’t loose the colors from her bouquet. The vase was then filled with preservative water.

I instructed my student to cut her three alstromeria lilies to the same length and place them into the vase crisscrossing them into position. From there she was to place the rest of her flowers into the vase, in compartments of three, using the initial three insertions as a guide, and working from the largest blooms to the smallest blooms – until all her flowers were used. She was told to keep a balance of color, texture, and weight in mind as she styled.

The hardest thing for her to remember was to spin the vase with each insertion so the arrangement would look nice from all directions. People have the tendency to keep adding flowers into one spot until they are happy with the way that area looks. And then they wonder how to complete the rest of the arrangement. They don’t know what to do with the rest of the area or with the rest of the flowers once they have a section done.

Student's First Arrangement

By working largest to smallest bloom, using all of each type of flower, and by spinning the arrangement in the same direction with each insertion its easy to balance the whole design and use all the flowers and you’ll have a formula that will guide you through almost every project.

This is Tosin’s finished first piece. What do you think?