Is it finally spring in your neck of the woods? If so, fill your home with flowers! Even if you don’t have tall beautiful blooms outside your windowsill ready to cut, your local supermarket or neighborhood florist can probably help. Now it’s time to arrange your beauties. Here’s some help…
Experiment with colors: Make stunning arrangements by combining different varieties of flowers and blending complementary colors. Use your paint store (or any hardware store that sells paint) or online to determine the “color palette” for each room that you’d like to enhance with a flower arrangement. You don’t have to match predetermined paint palettes exactly, but just getting close is a feast for the eyes. For example, purple flowers go well with yellow tones of wall paint…red flowers blend well with beige wall colors. Then combine your purple flowers with pink varieties (we love wild roses!)…and your red flowers with orange. The possibilities are endless!
Make small flowers work with big: To lengthen stems that are too short for a vase, stick each in a plastic straw and then cut the straws to the proper length for the vase. A straw will also keep a droopy stem straight and cooperative.
Crisscross for perfect spacing: To help keep different-weighted flowers evenly spaced in your vase, put transparent tape across the mouth of the vase, crisscrossing it according to the size of the vase and the number of flowers you intend to put in the arrangement. The tape will make it easier to do the arranging because it will hold the flowers in place…just make sure you have enough bottom foliage to cover the tape.
Help your floral arrangement last: Protect flowers from harmful bacteria that cause stems to rot by adding one-half teaspoon of antiseptic mouthwash (such as Scope or Listerine) for every quart of water in the vase.
We love this May-Day craft!
Thanks to MarthaStewart.com for help with this tip.
