Now that I’m getting ready to graduate from Advanced Floral Design, I feel like I’m finally qualified to finally share a little tutorial with you. The other week in class, we worked with fresh pine, and I fell in love with the arrangement, so I thought it’d be fun to share a simple Christmas floral arrangement, with pine and Christmas colors, that you can make at home, too!
The Cast:
You will need: Scissors or clippers, knife, soaked floral foam, round container, a few sprigs of pine (I had three different kinds, two wispy and one more stiff), three red carnations, one white lily, two white larkspur, one mini carnation with several laterals, one hypericum berries, and water. I also had a couple stems of leather leaf filler, but ended up not needing it.
I soaked my floral foam overnight in water that contained plant food. When you soak your foam, let it sink down on its own. If you push it down into the water, you will get dry spots in the foam and your flowers will get thirsty and die!
Steps:
1. Cut your floral foam with a knife to fit your container. You’ll want the foam to stick out the top a bit.
2. Start greening your foam by adding pine. Establish your arrangement’s height by putting a sprig of pine that’s as tall as your container in the top center of the foam. Add a piece of pine to all four sides of the foam. You’ll want a good inch or so of stem in the foam so it’s sturdy. You can strip the stem of needles with your knife, or just pinch them off with your fingers.
3. Fill in with more pine and greenery on the sides and top. At the end, you don’t want any foam showing, but you don’t want to fill the foam up too much before you add your flowers!
4. Group your carnations on the front and center of your arrangements. One of my instructors told us that flowers make more of an impact when grouped together by color.
5. Add a white lily bloom to the right side of the arrangement. Cut the stem pretty short so the lily is flush to the foam and container. My lily had a couple buds that I trimmed off and added to the arrangement later. Some people like using buds, some don’t. They add a more natural feel, which I love!
6. Add the two stems of white larkspur on the left side of the arrangement to balance out the white.
7. My mini carnations had several laterals (several flowers off of the main stem) that I separated and added to the back of the arrangement to fill in between the pine and the lily.
8. I added my lily buds behind the lily bloom.
9. Time for the hypericum berries. Aren’t they gorgeous? I snipped off each lateral and stripped the leaves before adding them to the arrangement. I added them anywhere there was a space that needed something.
10. See all that foam? We don’t want that. Time to fill it in with more pine!
The final product:
The front. (At one point I decided I wanted to move one of the carnations down a little. No problem if you want to change something up! Just be sure to recut the stem before you stick it back in the foam.)
Right side.
Back side.
Left side.
Arrangement Care:
This arrangement will probably last me until Christmas with proper care! I add water to my foam arrangements daily. Pine arrangements love a spritz of water, so I mist my arrangement daily, too.
Voila! Depending on what’s available at your florist shop or grocery store, feel free to switch up the flowers or greenery as you please. I used red carnations because they’re cheap and hardy, but red roses would look lovely, too.
Let me know if you try your hand at a winter floral arrangement!
, scissors/clippers/or knife (I use Oasis brand scissors and 
).
Happy Thursday, everyone!
I’m pretty pleased with my first arrangement!
Tulle and Trinkets 