Easy flower arranging- from the grocery store

Pre-made "bouquets" are an easy and inexpensive way to get an assortment of flowers. Combining them with simple greenery from your yard and finding a little help in the produce section, can take pre-made to...  if not professional, at least pro-sumer. (pro-sumer is my new favorite word. I found it when I bought a new camera and I've been waiting to use it in a sentence!)

For a photo shoot this week with Marianne Strong Interiors, I picked up two "bouquets", a bag of peppers, some sunflowers, and spray roses from the grocery store and used the some yard shrubbery for four mix-and match-arrangements.

The 5 keys to flower arranging for me...

1. don't be afraid to cut the stems and don't be afraid to re-cut.
2. pick the height and the width and add two flowers to mark the size
3. group small flowers in three's to make a bigger impact.
4. use a cascading flower or greenery to cover the rim of the vase.
5. vary the greenery... and save money by picking it from the yard!

As seem in my drawing below for building a planter, the same principles work for flowers. The tall piece, the side piece for width and a cascader to cover the vase edges.

Here are my results~


The peppers were added to an all white and green arrangement to change it up a bit and make it more "kitchen-y".

White and green bouquet from the grocer was divided into two arrangements this one is more green and features a pink tinged ornamental cabbage. The other is a simple green and white- both for nursery flowers.

This is the largest arrangement. It incorporates the greenery from the bouquets, spray roses, sunflowers and the mini peppers. The peppers are on bamboo skewers. The flowers are held upright with a crisscross on tape over the vase before the flowers were added.