Its Like Building a House

Making a bouquet is similar to building a house.  You must have the right foundation and support or else your arrangement can snap or fall apart all together.  So much more goes into making a strong, long lasting, beautiful bouquet than meets the eye.

This arrangement containing stephanotis and carnations is actually a time consuming arrangement that requires lots of preparation before the bouquet can be assembled.  





The first thing to remember is to keep your fingers wet.  The oils from your hands can damage the petals and make them turn brown.  The flowers come with a green stalk on the end of them.  To begin, I removed the green stem from the flower.





The fuzzy looking sticks that are laying in the water are called stephanotis stems.  On one end they have cotton attached to them, similar to a q-tip, that soaks up water. These are inserted into the flower so that the flower can be used for arrangements and bouquets.






Next, I inserted the stephanotis stem backwards into the flower to remove the rest of the stalk that is left inside the flower.





I then turned the stem around and inserted it into the flower so that the cotton part rest gently into the middle of the flower.  This allows the flower to stay moist as well as provides a place for the pin to be placed in the middle of the flower.

When I was done, I had several nice flowers to be placed in bouquets.  All that is left is placing a pin in the middle of the flower and arranging them into a bouquet like the one above!

Another bouquet that I made on the same day also required much preparation to the flowers before it could be assembled.  This bouquet contains football mums and carnations (see, I told you I like carnations!).

Carnations can have weak stems when they are arranged into a bouquet.  For this reason, it is important to place a wire around the stem in order to add support.




When building a house, you don't want to build your house upon the sand but instead upon a rock, a strong foundation.  When creating a flower arrangement, we don't want to create something that is going to fall apart before it reaches the hands of a bride.  We want an arrangement that will stand strong through the ups. . and stresses. . .of a wedding day!

~Hannah
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