I love visiting flower shops. They’re colorful, they smell nice and I can get so inspired by simply going in and and walking around.  What’s even better than the flower shop is visiting an actual flower farm. Lucky for me, I have a friend who owns one. Can you believe that? My friend and her husband own Southerly Flower Farm, which is a beautiful farm full of unique flowers. I recently got to spend the day at their farm along with a few of our friends. We spent the afternoon picking flowers, sipping on whiskey, eating delicious foods and learning about all of their flowers. It was a good day. As I trekked home with my flower haul, it got me thinking about how I was going to arrange them. So I thought today I’d share some some tips for making your own DIY floral arrangement.

It’s important to note that even if you don’t have cool friends that own their own flower farm, you can still use these tips. Whether you’re hanging out at a farm or purchasing flowers from your local grocery store, use these tips to make your flowers look flawless.

This post will give you a little guidance and a few tips on how to easily arrange flowers and quickly put together an arrangement.  Trust me, it’s easy.  I still need a bit of practice but I love learning about this subject.

Tips for a DIY floral arrangement

Obviously, to put together a beautiful arrangement, you’ll need flowers. Visit your local flower shop or market and get some good ones. You’ll also need a vase, scissors and clear floral tape (optional).

The size of the vase is vital. You don’t want to use too large of a vase and have the flowers look sad and lonely but you don’t want to overcrowd the flowers either in a vase that’s too small.

Arrangements should be about 2 times the height of the vase.  The cleanliness of your vase will be very important to your flowers survival.  Make sure the vase is clean before adding your arrangement.

To ensure you cut your flowers at the right place, hold the flowers where you’d like them to be on the outside of the vase.  This way you’ll be able to accurately cut the stems. Remember to always cut the stems at an angle with running water.  Cutting the stems under water helps them not suck up too much air.

You should also remove the lower leaves of your flowers and make sure there are no brown leaves, only green ones.

Now the tape. If you ever wonder how all of these beautiful bouquets are sitting so perfectly in odd shaped vases, it may be because of tape.  Simply crisscross the thin tape across the top of the vase (like you’re playing tic-tac-toe) and viola! Your flowers will have more help staying in place.

Filling the vase

Make sure your arrangements have a decent mixture of flowers.  Line flowers will determine the height of the arrangement.  A good example of line flowers are gladiolas. Typically, there shouldn’t be more than 2 line flowers in the same bouquet but really, you can do what you want.

Next, you have your focal flowers like roses, hydrangeas and lilies. These flowers should be placed towards the bottom of your bouquet.

Lastly, you’ll have your filler flowers or accent flowers.  These are smaller and they fill negative space. The most common flower that you probably think of when talking about accent flowers are baby’s breath but there are tons of other options. If you’re not a fan of baby’s breath, you can use a variety of sprigs and berries.

Additional tips to remember:

• replace the water in your vase every two days; water should always be clean
• re-cut the stems when replacing the water
• to add a little pizazz to your flowers, you can use flower-safe spray paint – works great with hydrangeas
• design in odd numbers to create a balance

Hope you’ll go out and get creative with your own DIY floral arrangement.