Hi, I am Rebecca, co-owner of Petal’s Edge Floral Design in Alexandria, Virginia. And today, we are learning how to make wedding centerpieces. In this clip, we will show you how to make centerpiece in floral foam. So, right now, we got our floral foam. Here we go. And the first thing you need to do with your floral foam is soak it. Get it wet. So, first we are going to cut a piece to fit approximately what we are going to need. And that would be about a third of the block. So we could sort of make an estimate and sort of take your knife and just slice through it and sort of cut a little bit like, I do not know, butter or something like that and put this aside. We will take this piece. Then you will need a bucket or some kind of container to soak the floral foam in.

So fill this with water. This also will work in your sink or your bath tab or whatever works to get this down in the water. And then you will place it with these holes down into the water and then you want a very gently just let it soak up the water by itself. You do not want to press it down. You do not want to like force it or anything like that. Just let it soak up the water and you will see how it will change colors. It soaks up the water. Just wait. And we are almost done. There we go. So, you got this wet floral foam and lift that out of the water and gets up the water aside. And we want to take all these. We are using again a square glass piece and for this arrangement, what we want to do is hide the floral foam in either cause obviously if we put this right into here like this, you are going to see that ugly green foam in there and you do not want to do that. So there is a lot of different ways we can hide it. But in this arrangement, we are going to hide it by using coffee beans. Brown is a really popular wedding color of these days. So coffee beans are a great way given that there are on a lot of brown flowers to bring brown into your color scheme. But other ways, you can fill this. You could do the same technique and you can use fruit slices like lime or lemon orange. You could also use dried beans like kidneys or garbanzo beans for different colors. And anything else you can come up the same leaves that we did in that other clip. You can line the vase with leaves on the inside and use that to hide the floral foam. So, to do these, what we need to do is keep the wet floral foam away from the dry coffee beans. What we like to do is use a zip lock bag with a top cut off but any kind of plastic liner basically works. And we will open up the bag, and you want to put your block of floral foam and then close it. And then just sort of carefully fold the plastic around and tuck it underneath like that, just so that it is when you put it in, it is not all messy. And then we just drop it in there and when measuring your floral foam, if your vase is an exactly the same size, just make sure you leave enough space all the way around the floral foam and the bag to get a layer coffee beans in there so you can hide everything. And then what we will start to do is just poor the coffee beans into the vase. And what I would like to do is sort of dig a little bit on each sides so that we make sure that we do not accidentally overfill one side and then line up with thing pressed all the way over to one side, so just put a little bit in all the way around and make sure if there is any plastics are sticking up stuck it down in there and keep going and then you get more coffee beans and you just keep filling it up until it is completely filled. So then this is the coffee bean vase completely filled with coffee beans, all finished and so this will be the finished product here.

So after we finished that and we are ready to begin an arrangement, we have got these big pieces of bags taken off and we do not need that. So what we are going to do is trim that off. Just loosely cut it off and it does not have to be neat or anything like that and if you lose coffee beans along the way, just pop them back in there. One thing to note with coffee beans, they do smell. They are very aromatic. So if you are going to use this technique, make sure you set your coffee beans out and like a big bucket, like take them out of the bag and pour them in a big bucket or something open and let them air out maybe on a back porch or something like that for a week or two. So the essence stay and they do not smell very strongly. You do not want your entire reception smell a coffee beans. So you got to trim. Now, we are just going to put a little water because even though it is soaked with water, it does you need the water around it to keep it hydrated. Otherwise it is all dried out as the flowers take up the water. So there we go. We are ready to begin our arrangement. For the arrangement, we have some white hydrangea. We are using some white tulips, some of these pink stalk, pink tulips; these are Dutch tulips and some of these hot pink renunculus we saw before. And also as a nice accent to compliment these coffee beans, we are using some of these cool fiddle head ferns.

So we take the hydrangea and of course we will take some of these extra leaves off and we will trim the hydrangea and then we are going to stick it in to the floral foam. Now, this is the tricky part with working with floral foam. Once you out it in, you can not pull it out again because the floral foam will not recover. The hole will be there forever. This stuff can not be used multiple times. It is used only for one arrangement and so you want to be really careful in placing it. So this is kind of a technique you want to pack just a few times. Also, to note, do not put it in and then pull up the stem a little more. That will create an air pocket between the bottom of the floral foam and the bottom of your stem and if it does not fill back up with water, you will wind up with no place for your and no way for your flower and take up water and then it will die. So, it just takes a little practice.

So well, you know, I think this is going to be a little long. So I am just going to put it in there. I think you are going to want to angle it and create it the way you would with the last arrangement we did. We had the three pieces of hydrangea sort of making up the base of the arrangement. So we are going to do that. Put the hydrangea and in this corner over here. And you just want to pick carefully where you put your hydrangeas, you do not have to pull it back out again and we will put the last piece right here. Okay, so then, the next part is to start filling out the arrangement with the other flowers. I like to use the stalk next. We are going to use five pieces stalk in this and we will just trim it to fit. And we are going to put it in this hole here in the center to balance it out. And again, now, I am just tucking it in to this floral foam here so you can see. We are just going to tuck it in to the floral foam and the floral foam gives you a lot of control where you put it because where you put the flower, it will stay in that place. So next, we are going to put in some tulips. Tulips in floral foam are little tricky cause they have a soft stem. So you just have to be very careful and reach down in there and guide them in carefully. So the stem does not bend. Okay? Again, same concerns you want to keep thinking about, you know, that keeping that dome shape, keeping that rounded feeling of your arrangement. And we are almost done. Here we go. We have got all the flowers in and we are just going to accent with a little bit of these fiddle head fern here just to bring in that chocolate brown color from the coffee beans. Just drop that back in there. The fiddle head fern I would like to leave it out just a little bit, so it is sticking out from the arrangements just a tiny of it, because that way, you can see it. People really love the shape of it because it is unusual. If you are looking for something that is a little different for your wedding, doing something like this is a good way to go. The coffee beans I think will have your guest going “How did they do that?” And only you will know. And the fiddle head fern is such as an unusual shape that you will definitely get. I think people taking. Alright and there we go. There is the completed centerpiece.

Well, I hope that you have learned something from these techniques we have demonstrated here today and that you know, you give them a shot for your event possibly, give them some practice and see if you can get them down, but if you are having any troubles do not hesitate to call in a professional. Thanks a lot and we will see you here again soon.