Rittners School Of Floral Design
In Boston Presents....

How To Make
A Novelty
Vase Arrangement

This is a very easy vase arrangement to make, and it is alot of fun. We call these kind of designs "novelty arrangements." The concept of a novelty design, is that it is not a "serious" work of art, but rather a fun and whimsical representation of something. We have made all kinds of novelties ranging from sodas made of flowers to little dogs made from flowers. In this design we have a rather happy little guy who is just sitting there telling us "hello"

What You Will Need

We start this design by placing our piece of foam into a container. The base that we are using is a basket container. Baskets have become quite popular in the past few years for all kinds of arrangements. The one thing that you must consider is that if you place your foam directly into the basket, it will leak all over the place. So we strongly suggest that you place a plastic liner inside the basket, and that you place the foam inside the plastic liner.

In doing any floral design it is very important to cover our mechanics. That means that we don't want alot of the base in which we are working (eg. the foam) to show.

So let's take a little of our baker fern and place it on the top of the foam. Place sheet moss around the outside of the liner to give the overall design a natural look

To start the process of placing our flowers, take a handful of carnations and make a cluster in your hand. Tie with florist's wire very lightly and place into the base as shown in the illustration.

Next let's take some of our pom pons and surround the cluster of carnations. The overall effect is almost like a simulated sunflower.

To create a face we use a few chenille stems or pipecleaners. Some designers will glue these to the face of the flowers. Others will simply insert the ends of the chenille stems through the flowers. Create any kind of fact that you'd like!!! Take a few additional poms and place them around the center face a bit lower.

Completing this design is fairly easy. We added some bamboo behind the little happy sunflower to create height. Then we take 8 carnations and create a circle of flowers around the pom pons.

Finally, we take two carnations and extend them out on the top, and extend two more carnations down on the bottom. This simulates arms and feet.

This design was easy to do and could be used for a wide range of applications. We could use all orange for the center and create a little pumpkin face for Halloween. On the other hand, we could create a Santa face for Christmas, green face for St. Pat's Day, etc. It is a cute novelty that could be used for parties, to cheer someone who is not feeling well, or any time that we want people to smile!!

We hope that you really enjoyed this brief floral design lesson. At Rittners Floral School in Boston we provide floral design instruction that includes a wide range of different styles and techniques. Please come and take one of our hands-on workshop programs!!