Hi! I am Rebecca, co-owner of Petal's Edge Floral Design in Alexandria, Virginia. Today, we are making a wedding centerpiece and in this clip, we are going to talk about how to choose the right flowers and the right colors for your wedding centerpiece.
So to just to review, here are some of the basic flowers that you might see in a shop or in a grocery store where you get your flowers. Mini calla lilies are very popular with brides these days. Roses stock—really pretty flower with a fairly unpretty name, tulips, this is a Dutch variety, this is a French variety of tulips, Peonies, also a very popular and favorite flower. Hydrangea comes in a lot of great colors, people really like them and then some of the weirder things you might see Celosia, kind of a fun flower. It has got funky, velvety texture to it and finally, green artichokes but I brought this out mainly to show you that you can use things like fruit in your wedding flowers just to bring in something different.
So now let's talk about choosing the colors for your wedding centerpiece. In choosing the colors for the flowers, you want to think first about what colors you want to use for the wedding. You may take your inspiration from your bridesmaid's dress or possibly your invitations. So if your bridesmaids are wearing say pink, you want to think about possibly using shades of pink in the flowers.
You may not want to only use pink. You may want to choose another color to complement the pink and that's great. But in choosing that second color, you want to be very careful and intentional about it. Just the same way, you wouldn't necessarily put on pink, purple, and yellow all in one day when you are getting dressed or put on the entire rainbow of possible colors on your body to leave for work in the morning. The same goes for flowers.
You want to think about when combining the colors how they come together and we recommend keeping it simple. You want a nice, clean color palette. Something that might go with pink really nicely would be green or maybe burgundy. You want to keep your flower colors combined in the general color spectrum. So if you are choosing purple, green, and blue for your wedding that's a good, nice, cool color scheme.
If you think about red, orange, and yellow, those are hot colors. They are warm. They are sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum. So say, if your color is purple, a good complementary color to purple might be choosing blue or green. If you were to choose red, red and purple might fight a bit with each other because they are so opposite each other.
Same goes for yellow or orange, picking those colors for your wedding. You may not want to choose yellow to go with purple or yellow to go with blue because they again might fight with each other and be on the opposite sides of the spectrum. Of course, there are—you can always break the rules but you really want to think about why you want to pick those colors, and why you think they need to come together.
So in choosing the flowers once you have picked your color, you want to think about, the next thing you want to think about is texture. And just to go over what that means in flowers, different flowers have what we called different textures. Something like a rose or a tulip for example, have what we would call it coarse texture. It's a sort of heavy blossom on this top of the long stem, a large heavy blossom. However, something like the stock here has got what we would call much more fine texture. Lots of little blossoms along a stem, lots of little petals. Hydrangea would also be considered something with a fine texture and possibly peonies here because they have these little petals, very lacy little petals in the middle.
So in thinking about texture and the kind of texture to choose and the kinds of textures to bring together in your flower arrangement, you want to think about what your style is. If you are someone who really likes modern design, something with really clean and contemporary looks, you may want to choose only these coarser heavier textures like a rose and tulip together or just tulips together, because those are going to have a much more clean, modern feeling to them. If you are someone who likes a lot of garden style, if you like the feel of a soft, romantic, armful of flowers you just picked from the garden, you may want to incorporate more fine textures like stock or hydrangea, or even peonies. Or and this is most common, if you are just sort of like a classic, romantic, elegant look, combining textures is usually the way to go. You get a really nice look when you bring the different flowers together in combination.
You want to make sure you don't pick too many different kinds of flowers, maybe four or five. That will limit you and probably get you the best, most simple arrangement. One thing to be sure of, not all of these flowers that we have talked about today are going to be available at all times of the year. So look for different flowers that you see at your time of the year and choose from amongst those.
Next, we are going to talk about how to bring your flowers home, how to care for them, and how to store them while you are working on your arrangement.