Floral Design 101 Vase Design Floral Design Basics LBR Educates

Any arrangement lives as long as the last flower that dies. Hi, I'm Sandy Schreck and welcome to our Design 101 series. Today we're going to be creating a vase design with an internal stem grid structure. We're going to start off with using a seven inch cylinder. This has a four inch opening. It's a grand cylinder and I like the lower profile and also a little bit of the wider opening so we're able to spread our flowers out a little bit more. As I'm a beginner what I'm going to do is bring my vase right to the edge of the table. Then I can utilize a technique of just being able to hold the flower where I want it. In this case we're going to start with the outside and so in order to kind of get the right size of the proportion I'm going to go two and a half times up in the middle. So I'm going to start with a two times vase length here to start off with. This stem I've already pre-cleaned but you want to take off any floral materials that are under the water. So you can see going with my next stem I'm going to come in I'm going to clean off those foliages that are going to be under the water line and those can create a bacteria so you don't want to have foliages in under the water line. Now that I have one in there so I could measure this again and come up but I can use this and I'm going to come across and as I'm holding it you can see the stem is down below the vase. I can hold it in place and I pinch it with my fingers and that marks where I'm going to cut it and I give it a nice cut at an angle and I can come in and put that into the vase. So you can see the first two insertions hit an X in the middle and that's the basis of our stem grid structure. So the next piece that I'm going to come in with we're going to be coming in a similar and a little bit different height and on this one I'm going to come over the top of that X and form a triangle with our flowers. This is going to add a great depth and dimension so we have them a little bit different heights but one coming over the other and so the next I'm going to come in pull this back to the edge again so when I go here now I lay this flower in by holding it so that that rest of the stem goes below the vase I can see when I cut this where that's going to land and then I come in over the top again of that X and over the top go in the other direction there and my last one over the top here. So now that I have my outer rim in that's when I'm going to add some foliages and this really allows me to get the nice broad expansion of my floral materials and my salal here will come in and just help to accentuate that stem grid that I had started and it also keeps the foliage out of the water. I see sometimes people start with the foliage and then when they're putting the flowers in it ends up getting pushed down into the water. Another thing that I wanna is one of my little pet peeves is that sometimes the salal leaves have some damage and we never want the customer to think like is the critter still in the arrangement so I always take off those damaged leaves so that it's a professional application. So there you can see how we've just added some foliage in. I still have a clean vase and you can see those crossing stems forming that stem grid in there. Next I'm going to come in with some of the chrysanthemums. There's a lot of novelty palms out there and I like the buttons but we're really using a variety of long-lasting everyday flowers and this is going to lead to ultimate customer satisfaction. Any arrangement lives as long as the last flower that dies. I had somebody come to me early on in my career like oh my gosh those flowers lasted forever and I'm thinking they're two months old they're not quite two months old but they're a couple weeks old and so it really kind of became aware to me that that arrangement lasts as long as the last flower that dies. So you do want to put in some carnations, some novelty palms, some of these different pieces and then also think about different textural elements. So we have some hypericum that has that waxy finish. We're going to add some lilies right up in here in the middle. So now I've got a really good stem structure going and so I'm able to add the focal lilies in. If I would have started with these earlier I would have a lot more potential to damage them and I can put them up here and they have space to be able to open up and really become the great focal flowers that they are. So just staying on that those I did two everything else I did in threes and now I'm just going to come in and turn around and kind of see where I might need some of these different textural elements. So you can see here that I had pre-cleaned those on hypericum. I definitely pull the foliage off. It's one of the first things to go on hypericum. So we want that great waxy finish and then figure out where we're going to go with it again. You can see that a couple of those I just cut with my knife without doing the measurement. So once you become more of a seasoned professional then you really kind of make those height judgments in your head but you do want those flowers to go all the way down to the bottom of that vase. That way you make sure that they're always getting water. We know that they'll drink a lot right away and go down and so that's one of my pet peeves is when I see the flowers up in this area they have the potential to be out of water sooner. So the last technique that I want to show you to finish on here as we put these things in it kind of smashes down. So I'm going to have you take your fingers and just come into that bouquet and just pop it out of the vase a little bit and so you can see how that adds just a little bit more value and and spread on it so that our customer's perceived value is higher and so you could just take a finishing look at that and then send it out to delight your customers. So just to recap some of the techniques that we did. The first thing that we did is we pulled our empty vase right to the edge. Then we're going to start off with the exterior flowers coming in at two times the height of the vase. So we're going to use our vase to measure with the vase on the edge of the table. You're able to use those flowers and measure where they're going to land in your arrangement. To start off with we started doing X's across with those stems and then coming across that X to form that stem grid. The next technique is placement within the design. So doing those triangle placements to really give you good color balance and textural balance throughout the bouquet. And then we did inserted one flower at a time and once the exterior was finished that's when we added some sallow in that kind of finished that stem grid through the middle and just gave us that extra finishing textural touch. And lastly coming in with a few other textural elements that added different long-lasting and different textures such as the waxy or the button novelty buttons. And then our focal lilies right up on top with plenty of space for them to open up and delight your customers. I hope you enjoyed this video and learned a lot. Make sure and take a look at our LBR educates library. We have quite a few videos there to learn additional techniques and so we'll have the link below if you have any questions or want further information comments about the techniques that we used today make sure and put it down in the comments. If you want to be notified of all of our future videos make sure and hit that subscription bell so that you'll get an email anytime we upload something. We have quite a variety of videos on our LBR YouTube playlist from business education to cooler tours and new product interviews. So it's a great opportunity for you to be able to see inside Lund Bush and see what the great things that we have going on. So I hope you enjoyed this vase 101. I'm Sandy Schreck for LBR educates and I hope I inspired you to make some fabulous florals.