How to Mix Faux and Fresh Flowers Like a Pro Florist

Hello, my name is Katherine Bergman. I'm a floral designer and avid gardener with over 30 years experience designing weddings and events. Welcome to my channel where I share professional tips and techniques for creating beautiful extraordinary floral arrangements with you each week. Today we're going to learn to create this spectacular arrangement and also how to mix silk flowers with real flowers. So are you ready to make something gorgeous together? Let's get started. Today I'm going to show you how to mix faux flowers with real flowers. The reason is I'm filming this video in January and I wanted to make something spectacular for my garden club display. So every month my garden club has something called table for two where we take turns setting up a beautiful table for two with flowers, beautiful china, whatever you like. So this month is my month and I've been sick so I haven't been going to the flower market but I wanted to do something spectacular so I thought what do I have that I can use. Now over the years I've collected a lot of silk flowers high quality silks and I thought you know what I'm going to cheat a little bit and use some faux greenery and flowers to make this a big spectacular arrangement and then supplement the faux flowers with fresh flowers I just bought at Trader Joe's so I didn't have to get up in the middle of night and go to the flower market. I'm going to use this really fancy looking gold vessel which is actually an ice bucket that's really tarnished that I sprayed gold and the reason I'm using this is because I'm going to be using really fancy Bavarian china so I thought you know what why not go all out right and I'm going to use some flowering branches some white cherry blossoms that I bought on Amazon as well as some of this beautiful wispy greenery just to set kind of a spring-like large sort of messy line in this container so that instead of doing a small arrangement with tulips and roses I can do a spectacular larger arrangement without breaking the bank. So if you're going often to Michael's or Hobby Lobby or other craft stores always look for quality silks and collect them over time they often have sales like 40% 50% off at Hobby Lobby and just look through their inventory and see what what strikes your fancy. I also like to look on Amazon it's hit or miss on Amazon sometimes you order something that's supposed to look like this and it comes and looks terrible well you can always return it right so generally when I look for faux flowers I look for something that has realistic colors I think the number one dead giveaway that a flower is very plasticky or fake is the flowers are the wrong color or color you never see in nature like don't buy a teal rose you know or a you know burnt orange cherry blossoms because there's no such thing right so I usually stick with white and pale green and maybe some pale blush but I generally don't go for any strong colors and then you'll see a lot of crazy colors out there and I don't know I'm not a fan so these look very realistic to me I also bought these wispy greenery branches because I love the movement and you can't always get perfect greenery like this all the time like right now it's winter this is supposed to be I guess kind of like nandina and most of the nandina out in the garden are red or orange I did cut a few green ones but they're not not long like this I'm going to start by greening in this lightly now this vessel doesn't have a huge opening and we're trying to get a kind of a large spectacular arrangement in here so I'm not going to green in too heavily so I went foraging in the garden today and found a few stems of green nandina the reason I wanted to use the nandina is I feel like it'll just echo what we're going to use in the big um big branches so looks that makes this more realistic and it transitions nicely and so generally speaking I don't green in very heavily if there's not a lot of foam to cover now this foam is all hidden inside the vessel so you only have the opening to cover and because we're going to do add a lot of different materials in here I don't want to take up all the foam space with greenery so I just green in lightly now one mistake I often see novice floral designers make myself included is greening in too heavily you don't leave much room for your flowers to add in later so you take up all your foam space with greenery it's um it's an easy mistake to make because you see all this exposed foam and you think oh I got to cover it right being the ace students that we are we always want to cover it but um you always go back later after you added the majority of your flowers and add a little bit of greenery to hide the foam and more and more lately we've been using greenery as a feature and not just for covering foam and I'm really happy so for a long time the designs that were popular basically had like no greenery right everybody just wanted these masses of hydrangeas and roses and now last few years people like that more natural look with lots of greenery and I like it a lot more movement and more garden style so I've just screened in very lightly with an andina this is going to be a one-sided flower arrangement mainly because um you know when we do the table it's kind of against a window and nobody sees the back of the arrangement so I'll just um do the arrangement and keep turning it so you can see what I'm doing next we're going to set the main lines of the arrangement with the faux materials because our faux materials are the largest materials we have I'm going to first do the cherry blossoms because they are going to be featured more prominently than the greenery the greenery is just to reinforce the cherry blossoms wonderful thing about faux materials you can bend them to your will right however you want so this is what we have so far I was careful to add the branches in on three different planes because I want it to look three dimensional right and that's one way to achieve it is to make sure that you're adding things in on different planes I often see one-sided arrangements with the stiff back where they you know you've seen those at churches you know and the funerals and sometimes even weddings where they the old-fashioned florists will do like a palm leaf backing totally flat and the flowers are resting against it and it's awful I think so we've got these on different levels here the flowering branches to create a very natural kind of line and this is also a trick to show you how to achieve a large arrangement without a ton of materials so if you are doing something for entertaining or you need to make a big arrangement but you don't want to buy a ton of flowers this is a great way to achieve it by having some faux flowering branches around so you'll achieve an airy and light yet spectacular arrangement now I'm going to add in my greenery branches the greener branches are just kind of to reinforce your flowering branches I feel like this is a little sparse so instead of adding more flowering branches making it look too heavy I'll add this wispy greenery in the background and I'll set off your flowering branches a little bit too this is my longest line and these are some of the tricks we I've learned over 30 years doing weddings often your your client has a certain budget but they still need a spectacular display somewhere in the wedding and you know setting these wispy lines creates a very large arrangement without using a ton of flowers so this is what we have this is the bones of our arrangement and this is the size of our arrangement which is pretty big right and then we're going to fill inside with some roses and tulips and it's actually going to come together much faster than you think for the main flowers we have these beautiful peach roses these beautiful kind of apricot peach roses pink tulips and some violet pink spray roses as well this as well as some novelty pale green carnations so it's going to be sort of a pastelly springy display of flowers now I'm going to add some quick dip those of you watch me every week know I love the quick dip right so quick floral life quick dip is something I've been using lately that's wonderful comes a little little bottle like this or a large you know gallon size and then you just put it like a couple inches of it in a little jar and dip your your stems in there before you insert in your foam or into the vase as well as during processing and it makes your flowers last really long I'll link this in the description below because this is really a game changer in terms of lasting quality and you could reuse this so what I usually do is put this in a jar with a lid and once you use it you could close the lid and reuse it over and over again until it gets really gunky and gross and then you can start fresh okay so I've got these beautiful versilia roses in this apricot color that I love and I'm kind of creating a low cluster at the base of the arrangement just a sec set a low focal point then I'm going to come in and add some of the violet pink spray roses I chose the violet pink to kind of contrast with the apricot color rose I want to sort of a mixed pastel palette for this arrangement and I thought the blue undertones of this mini rose with the yellow undertones of the apricot rose are just wonderful complementary colors that will it's kind of unexpected color scheme right and it also is very expressive of spring and um just very cheerful that's kind of what I wanted to express with this color palette don't need a lot of uh this apricot I mean excuse me the um the violet-y colored rose just a few I think to contrast with the apricot then I'm going to add a few taller stems of roses here okay this is what we have so far then I'm going to add in some tulips I also chose like an almost lavender color tulip for this arrangement because I just thought that that contrast with the apricot is so pretty love tulips sometimes they're tricky to work with because they get floppy the heads get floppy and they keep growing in arrangements right so for events when we use tulips we don't add them in until like a day before the event because if you add it in too soon then sometimes they will grow and flop and be in all sorts of weird directions that you didn't intend okay I added in some tulips just to show you what it looks like color-wise I'm going to add some more in so now I'm going to add in some of this really pretty pale green dianthus it's a single dianthus dianthus is just carnation and some mini carnation in a pale spring green I thought it'd be very pretty in this arrangement add a hint of that pale green to set off our our pastel palette here and it's like sort of like a little filler flower kind of wispy and kind of bobs above your arrangement and that's kind of the look I was going for okay this is the arrangement so far see we're almost done added in the tulips the dianthus and I have a few stems of faux tulips here this is some really beautiful tulips I found online and they're real touch tulips and they have like very realistic foliage as well as these beautiful little buds I don't know if you can see the little buds I thought I'd use a little bit of this because I like this color and it's a parrot tulip another thing to look for when you're looking for faux flowers is the greenery sometimes the flower itself is nice but the greenery is very fake looking sometimes what I'll do is I'll just pull off the greenery and take that off completely because a lot of times the leaves are what gives it away it looks terrible I wanted to add some of these parrot tulips in here for a different texture and also for a longer stem because the tulips I have are not super long stem and I'm using the buds mostly because I think the buds are so realistic looking so pretty and then now I'm going to add in a few of the blooming tulips just a few and that's what we have right now so you can't really tell the faux tulips from the real ones right broke one of the real tulips too short to use there are a lot of very realistic faux tulips out there and tulips are often hard to work with and it's not available all the time they are available at the flower market all the time but I don't think you know if you're going to your local grocery store they're available all the time so that's a great one to invest in just buy some really high quality faux tulips and you can use it all year long in your arrangements that's why I started buying flowering branches is because they're not available for anyone during the time when it's not spring and and I love using flowering branches because I love how airy it is without creating a lot of weight it could create a lot of drama so I have a lot of faux branches now I'm just going to go ahead and finish greening in I see some exposed foam back here so I'm just going to use an endina and green it in so that the foam is not showing okay I worked on the back let me just make sure we don't have any foam peeking out from the front see a little bit down here Nandina is a great greenery to grow if you have the climate for it we definitely have a perfect climate for it in northern California and there are a lot of different times one I might want to add this year is called lemon and lime I saw it featured on I think it's southern living magazine or something and it's a pale green lime green Nandina that doesn't turn red of course I love the autumn color ones too but it's nice to have that greenery around all year to use and of course the beautiful berries at this time of year and I think we're good everything is greened in I'm going to turn this around to take one last look at it to see if we are missing anything no I think it looks really nice maybe add a tulip here for pink color here we have a spectacular romantic spring-like arrangement created with full flowers and mixed with fresh flowers well we're all done and now you know how to mix beautiful high-end silks with real flowers thank you for joining me today I hope my design inspired you to create something fabulous this week as you know I love hearing from my loyal viewers each week so send me a comment to let me know where you're up to this week and share your designs with your fellow flower lovers in the community section of my channel and if you enjoy this video please like subscribe and join me here again new designs and floral creations are always on the way so click the little bell to be notified when I put out a new video so until next time remember flowers are nature's little luxury and I will see you in my next video