large faux flower arrangement

Life is busy. Fresh flowers are beautiful. But they require daily water changing, and then when they die the space you have them in is empty and you need to fill with something for display! With three busy children I don’t got that kind of time on my hands. 😂 So I’ve started incorporating faux flowers into my home. You’ll recall I even started using faux flowers outside in certain areas! Faux real! 

For our dining room, I’ve always had this giant manzanita branch centerpiece (see example here and here.) For the holidays I challenged myself to try something new.

Challenge: Create a large faux flower arrangement with faux flowers for my Thanksgiving table, and then take the exact same flowers and  use them to decorate my Christmas tree!

The idea being a) investing in something with seasonal longevity and b) holiday decor decorating would be easy. You simply clean up from Thanksgiving, empty the vase and bring it right into the family room to decorate the tree! Voila! We are saving time and money left and right here, people!

items to build this large faux flower arrangement:

• A vase. Any vase will do as long as it has a decent mouth width to fit a bunch of stems. Vase shown here has diameter of 4″.
• Choose at least three different flower types. Full flowers work best if you’re making a giant arrangement like this!
  
• Two to three different varieties of greenery.
• Floral Styrafoam
• Wire Cutters
• Floral Tape
• In this vase are 9 hydrangea, 9 dahlias, 15 roses, 7 pieces of lemon leaf spray, 6 pieces of dried heather and 7 pieces of salal leaf spray.

how to create arrangement

I hope to soon create a how-to video, but for now I’ll try to explain best I can.

1. Cut styrofoam floral foam until it fits the diameter of vase mouth. Floral foam should sit on top of the vase mouth, and not go inside the mouth (otherwise when you push the flowers in it will fall through to the bottom of the vase.)
2. Use floral wire to secure it to the vase. I use a criss cross to secure it.
3. When you add stems insert them into the styrofoam at least 3″.
   
4. Begin by adding 5 pieces of greenery. One in the center sticking straight up and 5 around the sides. Place the ones on the side horizontal to the table.
5. Cut the flowers as needed to get the desired height you want. Be sure to eyeball before cutting!
6. Add greenery at 45 degree angle all around the arrangements.
7. Place your largest flower all around the vase – I prefer to use an odd amount. In this arrangement I started with the beige hydrangea.
8. Add second largest flower all around filling in spaces. Here it’s the mauve dahlia.
9. Add the smallest flower – this arrangement uses ivory roses to fill in holes. I prefer to add in odd numbers – so one or a group of three.
10.  Add varying greenery to fill in your design. In this there is gold heather and solas.

And voila! A very large faux flower arrangement perfect for a standout Thanksgiving table! You, of course, could do this smaller. A grouping of three different vases would be pretty of varying heights and you could do the same thing by repurposing them for your tree!

All faux floral used is from AFloral.com.

shop pretty vase options!

See how I used in on the Christmas tree by reading this post!