Flower Arranging Class- Week 2

This week for Amy's Keepers of the Faith class, we did a silk flower arrangement. I went to Walmart and bought bunches of roses, irises, daffodils and daisies. I also bought some flowers at the dollar store.

For the girls we started with a terra cotta pot. (I ran out, so I used a cute pail I had on hand for the sample above.) The green stuff you see inside is called floral foam. There are two types. One type called Oasis, you get wet and use with fresh flowers. The other is made specifically for silk and dried flowers. I used half a block. After cutting off the corners with a sharp knife, I wedged the foam into the pot. If you use a container that is slightly bigger than the foam, just hot glue it to the bottom so it doesn't move.

Next, put a little moss around the edges to cover up the foam and use "S" pins to hold it in place. This also allows you to have the foam be a bit taller than your container if you want to have flowers spill over the side.

Next, using wire clippers, cut the silk flowers. Starting with the flower that will go in the middle, the tallest flower will give you an idea of how big your arrangement will be. We made round arrangements so that it could be viewed from all sides and placed in the middle of the table.

Then you place flowers at angles around the pot coming down to the front and sides. If leaves were cut off when you cut your flowers, add them back in with a fake stem made of wire or parts of the silk flower stem that you didn't use.

After filling in with the larger flowers, we used one other accent flower or berry. These were different texture and many of them were tall and kind of spiky or very airy to contrast with the bigger, fuller flowers. Most of the girls chose a contrasting color to work with too. A lot of the girls who chose roses also chose some white berry looking things that I had. It gave a very classic look. One girl chose bright pink Gerber daisies with blue little spray flowers. I wasn't sure how that would turn out, but it came out looking very Hawaiian, and very beautiful! (The girl is Hawaiian too.) Everyone's project turned out really well and I think the moms were surprised that the girls finished and had made such pretty arrangements.