Mayesh Design Star: Sustainable Floral Table Runner

Hey everyone, my name is Alyssa Lytle. I am the founder and educator over at Flowering Minds which is a platform that teaches florists how to run a thriving business both creatively and financially and I am formerly known as Color Theory Design Co. although now you can just find me on Instagram at lyss.lytle. So today I am so honored to be here and I am excited to show you how to create a cascading floral runner for a table and I will be using wood, ocean pouches which is a sustainable replacement for floral foam, wire, moss, and flowers. So let's get started. So to start off I am using three by one pieces of wood. I've drilled holes in the ends and you can attach the pieces of wood to each other with wire or zip ties. I used wire in this case. I'm just draping it right over the table. The length on top of the table is two feet. The length hanging off is two feet with an additional one foot at the very bottom that you'll see a bit later. So this is great because you can design these pieces of wood as you'll see in a moment in your studio and then transport it to your event and just place your table runner pretty much ready to go. So here we have a soaked ocean pouch. I just put it right on that piece of wood just like that and then I'm going to add a little bit of moss at the top because for this one I am binding it with bind wire. You can also use zip ties. I like to try to use wire whenever I can because it's something you can unwind from the design and then reuse another time. So it's always nice to try to use as many reusable mechanics as possible. So I am just looping it over the ocean pouch and tightening it right at the on top of the moss and that's going to prevent any breakage of the pouch from the pressure of the wire. I'm wrapping the pouch and the wood about three times You want to make sure you get it really nice and tight because as you add flowers you'll notice that everything gets looser starts to shift so you want to make sure it's starting off really really tight right from the beginning. You should be able to lift it up turn it on its side and not see any movement and voila! So I have attached three to each piece of two foot wood. As you see I do have that gap in there on purpose so the one I'm designing in right now is a little bit further from the other two because I like the designs to have a feel where they're not just like one big chunk of flowers. I like it to feel like there's areas that are more sparse and that there are areas that are more full. So to start I really wanted to make it feel like there was just a pile of thistle on the table so I'm utilizing the ocean pouch to keep the thistle in place while trying to create kind of a pile-like feel with the thistle. I think this is a kind of a cool look that is trending a little bit and I like to combine it with a more classical design with the rest of the flowers. I love concentrating flower varieties together because I feel like it really helps highlight that specific flower rather than mixing it up and making it feel kind of more like confetti. When you cluster flower varieties it really creates a more impactful look with texture. So now I'm adding the cottage yarrow and as you see I'm trying to add some shape. I don't want it to just spill over the table with no fluffiness if you will. So I really want the end of the table to feel really nice and fluffy and I love the cottage yarrow. It's such a simple flower but you can create such a beautiful cloud-like feel with it if you have enough of it and again by using it just with that one variety I do end up mixing other flowers in but when you're concentrating it together I just love that look. So now I'm adding lisianthus. I don't want every single ocean pouch to be equally as fluffy because then again you have that kind of thick sausage look so you have to kind of like control yourself from keeping the stems too long on each part of the design. You want some of it to feel a little bit tighter and some of it to feel a little bit looser so the design kind of comes in and out as your eye goes along the runner. So here I'm adding a bit of sedum and I really like the sedum in this color palette because it's really really neutral even though technically the lisianthus and the cottage yarrow are neutral. The cottage yarrow is still really bright in that just like a lighter lighter tone and then the lisianthus has a bit of a bright yellowish feel so I'm loving how really neutral the sedum is. So I'm going to mix that in to kind of tone down some of this the bright tones of the lisi and the cottage yarrow and again as you see you know you have to keep it kind of tight as you are hiding the mechanics but as the design goes on you can make it fluffier and fluffier and feel more airy but at the very beginning it's going to feel a little tight you just have to be patient with the design. So now I'm adding more thistle in a different location and my goal here is I love that look that there's a pile of thistle on the left and now I want to add another touch of thistle but I don't want it to be symmetrical so I'm making sure it's on a different level it's a little bit higher and I still want to give that concentrated feel that it's kind of piled up there rather than being really airy. So now that I have my kind of three sections blocked off the thistle the lisi and the cottage yarrow I'm kind of mixing it up because I don't like it even if I am grouping varieties I don't like them to be really tightly grouped I like to group them and then I like to add in the varieties and mix it up a little bit so it doesn't feel so planned and just kind of too controlled I don't want it to feel too controlled I want it to have a bit of a natural feel and that is why I like to group them in the first place because varieties in nature obviously they do grow where they're just clustered by variety but then you also get like the intertwining of things as they grow wildly amongst each other so I really like to group varieties and then kind of mix it up a bit. Now here I realized I felt like it was way too flat across the bottom the depth of the flowers going across was all the same so it's creating a really straight line so I brought out the thistle so it's kind of coming towards us more than I brought out the I left the lizzie where it was because if I bring it all out it will all be a straight line again now I'm adding some of that sedum into the cottage yarrow section to tone down that brightness and to kind of blend in all of the sections together now we have the cascading section voila and this is what I work on my knees and you get to see me try to get up and down over again but here I am again starting with the thistle I want to create another feel like there's a little pile of thistle at the very bottom so I'm starting with the very tip and as you can see there's a two foot piece of wood hanging and then connected to that to that there's a one foot piece which is what I'm working on now that kind of creates a bend so it's not just a straight piece of wood and you can also see that I have clustered my ocean pouches in the same way where two are together and one is apart and then there's one at the very very end and again this is because I don't want it to feel like a ton of mechanics that I have to cover up so I can just kind of make sure the wood is covered up but those areas can feel a little bit more minimal and then where the ocean pouches are they can feel more lush and that prevents you from getting that sausage look of too many flowers everywhere so here again same thing I like to kind of add flowers by section so I'll add large numbers of the same variety at a time so I'm adding a lisianthus section up at the top to kind of meld it together with a cottage yarrow that's on the table oh and you can see that I added a velvet linen and all I did was dry off the work table and the mechanics were completely done draining so they they were self-containing that water that's one reason I love the ocean pouches once once they drain a little bit they won't keep draining out water so I just dried off the table put on the linen and I am using a little flower frog on the floor you can't see it at this moment but I am kind of using it to prop bring the oh there I go it's sliding to bring the piece of wood out away from the linen because I'm just don't want it to get dripped on as I'm designing so here I am blending the cottage yarrow and the lizzy at the very top kind of making it feel like one piece rather than two pieces and I'm creating a really really airy section which oh my gosh I just am loving this cottage yarrow it's just like in really good condition I love finding standard flowers that you can create really beautiful installations with another one that comes to mind is stock I love doing this with the if the stock is the right color you can create really beautiful cloud-like installations with just a lot of stock so any ingredients like this are great for installations because you can get a large quantity they aren't like a premium you know crazy expensive flower but they look beautiful from afar and that's the whole point of an installation so now I'm adding that section of sedum again same thing I love how it's kind of toning down the blues and the tans and peaches it's like a really neutral color and so I'm going to be blending that throughout all of the different sections so here I am adding thistle I want to kind of blend it in to the rest of the flowers because even though they're really concentrated together by variety I still want it to feel a little mixed up like I said earlier so now I'm adding thistle in throughout the cottage yarrow and the lisianthus and lastly I am just covering up mechanics so I'm putting in really really short pieces the important thing about when you're covering up mechanics if you really love how the design looks but you have mechanics to cover up you need to keep in mind that the stems need to be fairly short because the more you add to cover up the mechanics the more your shape will change that design you love kind of transforms and disappears so I am very carefully covering up the mechanics without overdoing it and then lastly the part I was really excited about adding is this blue cornflower it's so electric blue it doesn't even quite translate enough on video I think it will more so in the in the photos that you'll see at the end but I'm adding this cornflower throughout the thistle and a few pops throughout the lizzie and cottage yarrow areas but mostly concentrating it in the thistle because it's really blending in the thistle but it adds this electric pop that I just really love it gives this design kind of a more contemporary feel I also love how delicate it is I don't have any teeny tiny delicate flowers in this so adding it at the very end is so fun and that's definitely what I recommend doing is adding your most delicate flowers at the very end bringing it to life with the airy floating blooms kind of above the the sections that are feeling a little bit chunky and so I am just adding it at will and you can see those those vibrant sections of thistle like really coming to life with those pops of blue so there you have it this is the very top you can see how the cornflower really transforms that blue and kind of beigey feel it actually feels like blue against beige I just love this color combination you can see how I created sections of flowers but then I really mixed them up as well so they're not just perfectly sectioned off and then as you see here on the edge where the lizzie and the cottage yarrow are it's super super fluffy and then going down to the bottom it gets more concentrated so you have a lot of contrast using contrast in texture contrast in density so you have some areas that are super super tight and they feel like piles of flowers whereas other areas you have kind of a burst of light and airiness so all of this contrast really adds to bringing together a aesthetically pleasing design so thank you so much for staying tuned and watching this video I hope you enjoyed it and I will see you next time