How to Arrange a Dozen Roses in a Vase DIY Like Pro!

Coming up on this episode of Design to the Nines, I'm going to show you how to arrange a dozen roses like a boss, like the professionals do, so stay tuned. Hi, I'm Natalie with designtothenines.com, the place where if it has to do with the home, you're gonna see it here from DIY to interior design to real estate, we've got you covered. So if that sounds good to you, I'd really appreciate it if you hit the subscribe button now, and if you like what you see here, hit the like button, and I would really be grateful. With Valentine's Day fast approaching, I thought it would be so fun to teach you how to arrange a dozen roses like a boss, like a professional designer, and I just thought that that would be a really good skill to teach you, whether that you want to do a dozen roses for a loved one, for yourself, why not? The first thing that I want to do before we ever get started is, there is an old saying, whether you think you can or you can't, you're right, and I believe this to my core, that the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is believe that you can do this, because you can, and I'm going to show you how, I'm going to walk you through it, and by the end, you're going to be able to do this, and you're going to rock it. I worked in two floral shops when I was younger, one was like a mass production floral shop, they discounted their prices, and it was all about production, just produce as many dozen roses as you can, and the techniques that were employed there versus the next floral shop that I worked in, which was much more laid back, it was more about high end and quality, their approach was definitely different, so there is pros and constables, but I really preferred the method that I learned at the higher end floral shop. Now at the production shop, they would literally take the bunch of roses and take a potato masher and just scrape off as much of the greenery as possible, and whip it out as fast as possible. Now this damaged a lot of the stems, and so therefore the roses didn't last as long, so I don't really recommend that at all, but what I prefer to do, and it does take a little bit more time, is I individually pull off the leaves on all of them. Fortunately on these roses, there's not a lot of thorns, if you have those, I take my clippers and kind of clip them off, or if you use a knife, you can use that and kind of get the sharp part of the thorns off. These ones don't really have thorns, so I don't really need to worry about it, but I do like to some greenery at the top. Some people rip all of the leaves off, I like to leave a little bit of foliage at the top, so I do that. So I'm going to just take off anything that could touch water, because anything, any greenery that actually touches the water could make the water murky or green. Also, I like to leave on as much of the petal as possible, just because you're paying for the flower, so you you want to keep as much of the petal on as possible. However, you do get a few little, you know, ones that are not as perfect, so I pull a couple of those off. I try to keep that as a minimum. Now you're going to want to keep your petals, you can throw it in a little romantic bath or something like that. You can do some fun stuff with rose petals, so I always keep those. Okay, so you're going to want to make sure you stay tuned to the end. I'll direct you to where to go to figure out what color of rose you should get and what's appropriate for what occasion, so that will be some fun information for you. So we've got our flowers cleaned and ready to go. They're beautiful. These are, they look like a black magic, so I'm just going to call them a black magic. I think they call them something else at the floral wholesaler, but essentially they're a red rose, so that's what we've got there. But in one shop, they would put the flowers in first. Every place does it different, but it all ends up basically the same, but for me, I found the best results by building a little bit of a base first and then adding in the roses. So I am going to start out with salal or lemon leaf. We're going to start by just crisscrossing these and going around the edge. What you want to avoid is everything being straight up. Now if you think about the way you see like a tree in nature or a bush, they kind of swoop down to on the edges, so you don't want everything really stiff and upright. I've seen some arrangements like that, but we're trying to avoid that. We want it to drape a little bit, so we're going to get in a little bit of this lemon leaf or salal and just build a little bit of a frame. And I love this as, you know, I've seen some dozen roses where they use primarily a lot of leather leaf, and we will use some leather leaf in this, but I don't, I'm not a huge fan of leather leaf. It does serve a purpose, and so we'll use a little bit of that in ours as well. So now I've got a good base of the the lemon leaf or salal, and I'm just going to add in a little bit of leather leaf. I like to use two or three types of greens. I usually add plumosa to mine, which is really like a soft fern type of greenery. They were out of it today at the wholesaler, and so we're going to have to make do, and I've got another option for us. So we'll put in also one little tip. This, these leather leaves, they usually when you get them, they have a bunch of fibers or like debris. I don't know if it's moss or something from when it's harvested, but it's really messy, and I usually like to rinse that off because otherwise it can make your water murky. So as far as the water's concerned, I put the water about halfway full, and I add about a quarter of a teaspoon of bleach to help kill any bacteria. It won't harm the roses. You'll be fine, and it will just keep things lasting a little bit longer. Okay, so if you can see, we've got a pretty good foundation going. You don't want too much greenery to begin with. You want enough that it will support the roses, but not so much that you can't fit them in. You're shoving it in, and all the greenery gets bunched down into the water, so we're trying to avoid that. So we've got a pretty good foundation, so let's add the roses. What I like to do is try to find your longest ones, and this one I always like to start with the top one of having one that's a little bit of a tighter bud, so that will be the center one. We're just going to cut the edge of the stem on a diagonal, and that way it adds more drinking surface for the stem to be able to drink up the water, and put this right in the center, and it might not be perfect right now, and we'll fudge around with it a little bit later, but we will, and now we're just going to start putting them in on the angle cut, and just putting it in in a crisscross manner, right, and again we're going to try to create like a soft mound, not everything straight up, but you know just kind of like a nice half round. Okay, so we'll just get some of these in here, and then we can start moving some of them around, and you're going to lose me because it's a big arrangement, so if you can't, I'm high, so just keep putting them in, trying to space them out evenly, keep spinning it, and filling in holes. Okay, so I got a stool because I'm really short, so you could see me, but I'm about to put in my last one, and I think it needs to go over on this side, and I'm going to actually put this one on the outside because it's a little bit shorter. So now you can see that we've got them all in, they're not all exactly perfect yet, so this at this point now that you've got them in, you can just kind of move them around till they're more evenly spaced, and try to make sure that the tallest ones are in the center. You want to try to cut off as little as possible because you are paying for the length of the stems. Okay, so we're at the point now where we need to add in a little bit more greenery to hold the roses that need to in place because they just need a little bit more support. So we're going to add some more lemon leaf, tuck that in, so we're going to put some greenery in the middle to keep those separated, and we're just going to keep doing this until we get the roses to stay where we want, and get the nice full look that we're going for. See this little curviness? That will help frame it out on the edge with that nice kind of draping effect around the edge, so try to use some of those around your bottom. I'm going to throw a couple of extra pieces of leather leaf in just to fill it in a bit. I try to pull off some of the top sometimes, not always, but I find they're too pointy, so to soften it up I just kind of pull off the tips of them, and I try to put them in at an angle and on their side because I feel like it lays better that way. This just is adding a softness. Like I said, everybody has their way of doing things. My way may be different than other designers, but my way works for me, so you've got to find what works for you and what look you like, but I'm really happy with how this is turning out. So around the edge you may want to shorten a couple of them. Try to do it as minimally as possible, but it helps get the shape. Okay, this is where we start filling it in a lot with greenery, giving it a nice wow factor. You want it to have a lot of impact because it's a dozen roses. Okay, so this is looking really good. What you want to do is keep spinning it around. Make sure it looks good from all sides, so you keep spinning it. If something needs adjusted, then pull it out and put it where you want, but we're about done. Now, like I said, I like to use a little plumosa. They didn't have it today. The plumosa just adds a really nice, soft, and very elegant look to your dozen roses. What I'm going to do instead is add some lanone. Why can't I say that word? So our dozen roses is pretty much done. It's arranged how I want it. It looks great, and honestly you could leave it as is and it would be beautiful and amazing, but I decided that I want to add some filler. Let's try this again. Limonium. It's this beautiful, soft, purpley type filler. Now, you could use baby's breath if that's the filler of your choice, but whatever you use, you don't want to go overboard. This is just to be an accent. You don't want to overpower the roses. You want the roses to be the star of the show, and you don't want to do anything to detract from it. All right, so our arrangement is done. I'm really happy with how it turned out. What do you think? How did it go for you? Let me know in the comment section below how it went, and if it all worked out for you, and if you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'm always here to help. I'd love to help, and yeah, so you're going to want to make sure you follow me on all the major social media websites. Check out my website, designswithnine.com, because there will be an exclusive guide there that will explain the meaning behind each color of rose and what is appropriate to send, so that will be there on my website, and if you liked what you saw and you'd like to see more of it, hit the like button below, and also make sure you subscribe to this channel for more tutorials to come, and make sure the notification is turned on. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for watching, and stay tuned for more episodes.