Foolproof Fall Flower Arrangement

Do you like the alliteration of this blog post??

Me too... but what I like even more was how simple (and inexpensive) it was to pull together this flower arrangement.

I went to the supermarket and picked up three small bundles of flowers:

One bundle of berries, one bundle of mums, and one bundle of astroemerias... not sure what those look like??  It's these:

I spent less than $10 and I think that the arrangement turned out really pretty - WAY better than any of the pre-made bouquets in the store.

Not to toot my own horn, but I think I kind of have a knack for flower arranging... one of the things I've learned is that keeping the flowers in the same color family REALLY helps you keep it pretty and elegant.

In this case, I stuck with deep reds, maroons, and raspberry shades.  I absolutely LOVE how the astroemerias have green in them that fades into a deep red... it really brings a lot more dimension into the arrangement.

In general I think that sticking to a single color family works so well, because when you pick different flowers in different colors, there are a lot of different textures going on, so it confuses the eye and can easily look messy..  Having different flowers in the same color family is less "confusing" to the eye, so it ends up looking planned, while still being "interesting".  

In this case, it's autumnal reds. My old faithful is white, but blue's and purples (with hydrangeas and iris) would be really pretty, and orange hues would also be amazing - and especially seasonal right now for Thanksgiving (with roses, tulips, branches, leaves, berries.... the list is pretty broad).

One of my other secrets to more professional looking floral arrangements is to cut the stems short.

It takes .2 seconds to plop your supermarket flowers in a vase with their long stems... and it shows.  It ends up looking cheap, but taking the extra two minutes to cut them down and arrange them in a shorter, wider vase, and it ends up looking like something you picked up from a florist.

Finally, I like to stick with flowers that all look fairly different from one another - if you have too many ruffly flowers, you can't tell that they are different (which there's nothing wrong with that) but by picking berries in this arrangement, its more unique, and dresses up these otherwise really cheap looking flowers (I mean mums??  Just ask my mom how much she likes mums on their own)

I'm thinking of wrapping the vase in burlap for Thanksgiving week, since it's really the last few days our home will be decorated for fall.  After that, it's going to be a Holiday bonanza around here!!

Happy Thursday :-)