How To Create a Hand Tied Bouquet Using The Egg Mechanic from Holly Chapple

Hi, I'm Derek Woodruff, AIFD. I'm a floral designer of 16 years, and I own a company called Floral Underground. Hello, I'm Jody McLeod, AIFD, and I'm a 26-year seasoned veteran in the floral industry as both a shop owner and designer. Welcome to the 2018 Syndicate Education Series, and today we're talking about the Holly Heider Chapel, exclusively for Syndicate Egg Mechanic, and we're going to be making a hand-tied bouquet. And now this mechanic comes in two sizes, four-inch and six-inch, and I will be making a bouquet in the six-inch egg mechanic. So I'm going to start by threading through about three stems of foliage, and this is going to establish my form and provide balance to my bouquet. You want to make sure that your stems go through both layers of the cage, and then you'll hold it within your hand. From here, you can start to mix in some other greenery. Now the beauty of this mechanic is it allows you to create a beautiful oblong, horizontal bouquet. It doesn't take nearly the product or the time. The labor factor is cut in half, and it gives you that beautiful, gracious, flowing bouquet. I'm still making sure to hold all the stems in my hand so that when I'm done with my bouquet, I don't have to gather it. Another important aspect of the egg is that it allows you to automatically use the grids that are enclosed and creating that space in between your fresh greens and your florals. I can use these larger stems of foliage to create a really nice cascade. I think another thing that is extremely awesome about the egg is the fact that it's very lightweight. So your mechanic is very lightweight, and the overall feel for your bride or the bridesmaid is something that's very light and flowing. It's not heavy, bulky, and cumbersome. So today in his greenery application, Derek is using greeneries that have really beautiful long laterals, such as Ruscus, Plumosa, Seeded Eucalyptus, Mountain Laurel, and Pittosporum. So now that I've established my form with my greens, I can start inserting some more of my stems. Lionflowers work really well to start with, so this is beautiful stock. So another good thing about this mechanic is that even at this point in my bouquet, if I want to set it down to take a break, I can just walk away. When you're working at your shop and you have a spiral hand-tied bridal bouquet, your phone rings, there's no way you can put that down and come back to it and pick up where you left off. But with this new egg mechanic, you can totally lay it down and come back and everything stays locked and in place. When I started building my bouquet, I kind of built it from the back to the front so that I could kind of keep the back a little bit flatter. So the bride holds her bouquet right up next to the bottom. What I do find a lot of value in is that so far in Derek's recipe, he's used five stock, three stems of spray roses, and three stems of white Lysianthus. Now he's incorporating some beautiful peach carnations. So, so far we have a total of seven stems in this composition and look at what fabulous volume he's designing with such little product. Now that I'm near finished with this, I can use some more of my delicate stems and kind of work those through. And also a good tip just to cut off any knuckles or joint points to keep it from not going through the egg. So with an established bouquet like this, if I wanted to, let's say, increase the size of it, I could also use stems outside of the egg and the foliage will support that. That's really nice. And then before I bind it, I would collar it to cover the mechanic. To finish this off, I've just taped a piece of florist wire with some corsage tape and I can bind this really tightly just like a twist. The finishing touch to any bouquet is the ribbon. Catch!