Hi. I’m Sandy with Afloral. And today, we’re talking about fresh flowers and using fresh flower foam. So I have a piece of fresh flower foam in this bowl and I’ve attached some waterproof tape or sometimes with the called oasis tape, and it’s waterproof. So if this gets wet, it must be dry to adhere. But if you dip this in water or you pour water on it, it won’t come unattached. It comes in several kinds. This is green and we have clear, and this is a quarter inch, and then we have a half inch which is a little wider. So depending on what your needs are, clear, thin, quarter inch or a little wider, half inch and the greens. So you get quite a few choices here. This is very nice stuff. This way, you know that this foam, if it’s loosened here, it’s taped down. Now, it’s secure. You want to make sure that you have some of this waterproof tape available to you.

Now, when we work with this fresh flower foam, we want to make sure that it’s soaked—really, really soaked well so make sure it’s very heavy. And then when it’s ready, you can put it in your container and we’re going to start by putting some greens in our container. This will give use the shape we want our centerpiece to be. It will fill in, cover up this piece of plastic foam. You don’t want anyone to see how you’ve designed here. You want to use it but you don’t want them to see it. So we’ll cover that up with some lather leaf or Baker’s Fern that we call this. And then, I like to use a variety. So I will add in some seeded eucalyptus. This is almost like a flower in itself because it has these seeds on here. They look like little berries. Again, use your design knife. Cut your stems on an angle. It makes for easy insertion into your foam and we’ll have some seeded eucalyptus in there as well all the way around.

At this point, we can then start to add some flowers and I have some beautiful flowers today. Would you look at these Gerbera Daisies? I love Gerbera Daisies. I have pre-wired some of the stems to make sure that when we deliver this or take this to our friend that this flowers stay just where they’re supposed to. I’ll show you how to do that in a minute.

You want to make sure that you put your stems into your foams as far as they can go. If you can get them down to the bottom of your container, that’s wonderful because that would help them last longer because—where is the water reservoir? You need to water everyday and it’s of course at the bottom of your container.

This flower, I’ve added a wire to it and then I’ve used some of these stem wrapping tape. And this is a nice way so you can’t even see that there’s a wire on there and the color of the tape is so close to the color of the stem that you don’t even know. This really isn’t necessary in a centerpiece because you won’t see the stems anyways. But if you’re doing a hand tied bouquet for wedding, you might want to try the technique and I will show that to you. When you’re ready to do this, you’ll take a piece of wire and your stem wrapping tape, and you’ll put the wire right up into the chalets of the flower. I know that that’s a little hard to see. I just lay it next to it. No twisting of the wire or anything, and then just spin the flower and wrap the tape right around the flower. This is a wonderful way to hide your workings. Take it all the way down, cut off your wire and nobody will know that you’ve wired that stem.

Again with this centerpiece, we’re working with threes because we’re creating a round centerpiece. If we were going to create an oblong centerpiece, then we might use four because that’s more of a rectangular shape so you can use four for that. Now, aren’t those beautiful?

To go with the Gerbera Daisies, I have some red roses. Again, using your knife, cut in an angle. Make sure that your roses are at inch of the fresh flower foam all the way to the bottom so that there’s a lot of water available to them. And again, we put three in the middle so we have three Gerbera Daisies in the middle of our centerpiece and three at the bottom. We’ll do the same with the roses. Three roses at the bottom and three roses at the middle. Remember to take your bibs off before you insert any flowers in the oasis so that it does not create a large hole.

For accent flower today, I’m using some Lycianthes and I also have some miniature carnations. Lyciantheses are one of my favorite flowers. I have many favorite flowers. I guess flowers are just my favorite. So we have some Pink Lycianthes. Each thing that I’m putting in here, each flower, is in groups of three, three in the middle and three at the bottom. Sometimes, you need two groups of three. I think you can use six flowers around the bottom but it’s still always working in threes. Once I have the Lycianthes in here, then what I will do is add a few miniature carnations. I have a beautiful variegated miniature carnation, kind of a burgundy and white. So we’ll use several of these in here as our filler flower. This is a good way to combine colors and miniature carnations are not very expensive. They last a long time and you can actually even dry them if you want to give that a try. Well in this, the carnations will dry in here and the Gerbera Daisies and Lycianthes will not. You can see how nicely the carnations blend the colors, and another shade of white so we have white, pinks and burgundies.

And you can stop here or you can add a small filler flower such as Heather or Statis. We’re going to use a little Heather. This is because it’s such a tiny little flora that gives you another texture or shade in your design. And you’ll see, it gives a little spiky look and that’s kind of fun. So what we’ve done is we’ve taken a block of oasis, put it into our container and then taped it down with a waterproof tape, that’s a very important thing especially if you’re going to be moving your centerpiece at all. And then, start arranging the flowers using groups of three in the middle and three at the bottom. And our focal flowers where our roses and our Gerbera Daisies and then we start putting our pillar flowers the Lycianthes, miniature carnations and Heather. Isn’t that fast and easy. Good luck. Give it a try. Enjoy.