Easy-to-make fall flower arrangements

Welcome back into Good Day DC. Take your Thanksgiving tablescape up a notch with gorgeous flower arrangements like these. The best part, where you can make fall bouquets in under five minutes, all thanks to a few hacks. Here to show us what to do is the owner of Virginia, the Virginia Florist, Kendall Rife. Good to have you, Kendall. Hi, thank you so much for having me. Of course. These flowers are absolutely gorgeous. Thank you. And I'm really excited to learn how to put together a nice tablescape or a nice centerpiece in just a few minutes. So what is the key? Where do you start for anyone who's like, okay, I want to get a little creative. This time around for Thanksgiving, what should they start thinking about first? Yeah, so my first recommendation for something you can do at home that's really easy is bud vase groupings, which is kind of what we've done here. I love to mix height styles. You can use different flowers in each one, and it really helps give you a nice base for your table centerpiece. And then from there, you can really use things that you have at home. You can use seasonal produce. Like you see, we have some pomegranates here. These are artificial artichokes, full disclosure, but you can use real ones, whatever you want. And it really helps give your table kind of this collected personal feel instead of something like you purchased as a matching set. I love that. When it comes to the colors too, because I feel like there's so much intention right here. But you can make that nice and subtle. When you think about the colors, how do you know what to match what? With what? Yeah. Well, if you're thinking specifically about fall, you can think of those typical fall colors like burgundies, burnt oranges, some yellows, but something we're seeing a lot this season is actually some unexpected pops of color with your fall color palette, which is even like a blue, or you can do a mauve like what we've done here, some pink, some purple. It gives it kind of a fresh feel without... you know taking too much away from that traditional fall look. I love that. Talk about some of the center pieces that you have here and if there's time we can build one. Yeah so I kind of just built some different things to show you some different options. This one if you're somebody who likes a more neutral color palette you can kind of base it with whites and greens and then add in some of those fall colors some berries even as a really nice fall touch and then the rest of them are kind of your typical Okay, so when you're starting with the flower arrangement, What's the technique? Do you start from the middle, or where do you start placing it? Yeah. Well, if we're talking about bud vases specifically, since we're kind of talking about what people can do at home. I always say trust the process. There's really, when it comes to something like this, no rhyme or reason. You can do whatever you like. My recommendation is to kind of find your color palette first so you know what flowers you're going to buy. And that's what you kind of want to have throughout your centerpiece. So for this particular one, I went with the mauve. I went with some burnt orange, kind of yellow here, as well as burgundy. So that's what you're going to kind of want to base your theme around. And you kind of want to stick a couple of each kind throughout, so you can see I don't I have this mauve stock in every single vase. I have it in a couple of them. Same thing with these really pretty dahlias, the mums. You want to sort of have a focal flower. So that would, in this case, be the dahlias. And then you kind of want to have a line flower, which is the stock, something that's taller. And we'll give you some height and some structure, sort of help shape your look. And you also want to have some filler flowers. So we have the little mums here that I've kind of scattered throughout, as well as these berries, which just helps give it like a really textural, kind of polished look, like something you maybe did buy at a florist, but you actually did it yourself. Yeah. Yeah, and trust me, if I made it to that point, I would be very impressed, even with my house. It's not as hard as it looks. How much is too much? Is there such thing as just a centerpiece that just has way too many flowers, or just not enough? I mean, it really depends. I would say, I mean, obviously we're florists. We're pro flower. Like, the more flowers, the better. So in terms of too many flowers, I would say no. I think the biggest mistake people make when it comes to trying to do centerpieces for their table is height. You don't want to have anything really taller than like 12 inches because you don't want to be playing peekaboo with your guests at the dinner table. That's never fun. So you just want to make sure you can see everyone easily and have good conversation while still being able to admire your centerpiece. Such great tips. Kendall, you are awesome. Oh, thank you. How can people get more information about the Virginia Florist? Yeah, so we have a brand new website. You can visit us at itsthevirginiaflorist.com and come to our shop. We're located just south of Old Town Alexandria in Bellevue. You can call us, email us. We're here for whatever you need. All right. Love it. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Thank you. Nice to meet you as well. All right, stay with what you're working on over there.