There are several flower arranging tips that are useful to know when creating flower arrangements at home. If you would like to make flowers bouquets like a florist, you may be surprised to find that all you need are a couple of inexpensive craft items from your local variety store.

1.) Stem Wire. 2.) A block of oasis foam for fresh flowers or Styrofoam for cloth and plastic flowers.

Tips for long lasting fresh flowers:

Add and dissolve two or three aspirins in fresh water as a flower preservative. Before you arrange your flowers, re-cut the stems while they are under water. Rose stems should have about an inch, to an inch and a half, cut off. The water-cutting will keep air from getting into the stems and help your flowers to last longer. Support rose heads and other heavy headed flowers with a stem wire. Stick the tip of a stem wire up and into the base of your rose head where the rose stem is the most thickest. Wrap the excess wire in a downward spiral around the rose stem. Thus the name stem wire. This will keep your roses and other big headed flowers from drooping and dying before they have fully bloomed.

Using Oasis foam and Styrofoam:

To stabilize and arrange fresh flowers, soak a block of oasis foam in the preservative water until the block is heavily soaked through. Using a knife, slice the soaked block according to whatever vase, plate, basket, or container size you will be using to hold your flower arrangement. If you are using cloth and plastic flowers, it is better to use Styrofoam. Set your wet oasis foam, or Styrofoam, in the container as securely as possible. Depending on which foam and container you use, you can use hair pins, floral hooks, tape, stem wire, clay, glue, pebbles, rocks, ribbons, or whatever works easily to your creative benefit. Once you have this set in place, it is time to begin arranging your flowers into a beautiful bouquet.

Creating a Bouquet:

A favorite design of many florists is the Dice design. For instance, a five rose bouquet arrangement will often be given a number five dice design where two roses are in back, one is in the middle, and two are up front. A bouquet consists of at least two main plant products: flowers and fillers. Baby's breath is one well known example of a filler that is often applied to roses. Fillers, like baby's breath, are any small plant products that will fill in-between flowers. A third plant product may consist of grasses, leaves, ferns, stems, or palms. These plants give distinctive definitions as backdrops, centers or as edging around a base. If you want a domed shaped arrangement, use your longest stemmed flower for the center and cut back on the other stems accordingly. If you are using more than one set of primary flowers, such as roses and bachelor buttons, you can use a five dice and 4 dice pattern or any combination as long as you keep balance in your floral pattern. Defined swirls, waves and curves are also very appealing patterns when using less for more impact. Regardless if you are using cloth or fresh flowers, making big or small flower arrangements, make sure to stabilize your flowers in foam and arrange them in your favorite well-balanced patterns.

Now that you have these flower arranging tips fresh in mind, perhaps you would like to check out some of the floral websites to see if you can spot the types of dice designs that are often used in floral bouquets.

Learn more about this author, Vickie Gross.
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