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

How To Make A Two Minute Vase Arrangement II

"A two minute vase arrangement?" you ask..."What's that?"

Very simply this.....

There are times when a retail florist has to be able to stylize floral art very quickly. The problem......A number of customers are waiting while a designer can't keep up with the demand.

Or a customer comes in and needs something almost yesterday!!

So you find that the ability to be able to make something attractive, yet quickly, can really be quite useful....

That's why we call this unit "How to make a two minute vase arrangement...." because you'll find that you'll be able to stylize a really showy design very, very quickly!!!

What You Will Need

Let's start this design by placing some foam into our container.

Although this design is one that we can quite literally throw together in a couple of minutes, we want it to still be visually appealing and impressive....

One way to do that is to create height in this design right from the start....To do this we'll use river cane....River cane is also sometimes called bamboo. We get it from our wholesale house. It gives a very natural look, and is easily cut into smaller pieces.....

Place a few pieces of river cane in an almost step-like arrangement into the foam...The tallest piece is approximately three to three and a half feet tall.

Next lets add some of our spiked flowers into the design....Now I am deliberately being vague about the flower because we could use just about anything that is spikey in nature, from larkspur to snapdragon.........

Place your spiked flowers as shown in the photograph. Notice that in addition to the strong vertical component, this design also has a strong horizontal base line section as well.

Let's establish a line smack dab through the center of the design.

To do this we'll use our yarrow.....Starting with several pieces at the top of the design........

We gradually work our yarrow stepwise down towards the base of the unit....

Placing the yarrow into the center of the design creates more than a focal point....It creates an entire vertical center region that attracts the eye to the design.....

The yarrow has created a nice visual rhythm through the middle of the design.

To create a counterpoint, let's add the two football chrysanthemums into the bottom part of the design.....

Notice how they are placed in a diagonal, going in the opposite direction to the two bottom yarrow.

The beauty of this design is that it is quite large, yet can be put together almost instantaneously

Contents can be varied to come up with an enormous assortment of possibilities. Consider picking randomly one of each Numbers I, II and III below.

I. For example spiked materials could include: gladiolus, miniature glads, larkspur, delphinium, forsythia branches, curly willow, ting ting, rib cycas leaves, pussy willow, eremurus, bells of ireland.

II. In place of the yarrow consider substituting: sunflowers, daffodils, carnations, fujis, anthurium, gerbera, godetia, lilies, orchids.

III. In place of the chrysanthemums consider substituting: roses, daisies, cymbidium orchids, allium, lilies, gerbera, carnations, pincushion protea.

Play with these combinations, and you have literally hundreds of designs from this one lesson!!!!!!!!!!

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!!