Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi. I'm Denise Porcaro, founder and owner of Flower Girl NYC, a boutique flower company here in New York City. Welcome to my flower class. Flower girl NYC was born over 10 years ago. My background is in production design for film. However, shortly after college, I fell in love with the new medium and became obsessed with working with flowers. To date, Flower Girl has done many collaborations, worked on the smallest intimate dinner parties and single deliveries and arrangements to lavish large event. Basically, with starting with one flower girl seasonal arrangements that you're creating today, there's the potential of having these arrangements be multiplied, which is what we do on a day to day basis. What we do here. A flower girl is pulled from the New York changing season as well as try and bring flowers together as they would grow in nature. Three idea of not manipulating flowers too much and keeping them wild and lush is what we like to do. But still having a polished finished product today I will teach you how to make your very own flower arrangement from start to finish. I will teach you how to select the right blooms. Choose vases that will work for your arrangement and the supplies that you will need to work with. I will also share my knowledge and fund tips that I have gathered over the years to help you create your own seasonal creation from start to finish. I am looking forward to seeing the seasonal creations that you come up with based on the availability of flowers in your hometown.
2. Project Overview: what we're going to cover to take you through. Building your own seasonal arrangement will be how to choose and select the appropriate blooms. How to clean and care for those blooms, how to cut the flowers and branches to the appropriate planes and basically, how to put it all together involving some techniques such as clustering and different tips that I will share. At the end of this, you will come out with your own whimsical, lush seasonal arrangement.
3. Gathering Materials: you're gonna want to gather all of the elements that you need to work with. Basically all of your supplies. Think down to a well lit area as well as a surface that you don't mind getting dirty on a floor that you don't mind getting dirty as much as flowers are beautiful, they make a big mess. And the last thing that you want to be thinking about when you're focusing on your creation is the fact that you know you're stepping on the stems that you've dropped on the floor. You're also gonna want, of course, a good vase. Anything around your home can basically be a good vessel as long as it's water tight. This box, for instance, is wooden, so it wouldn't be watertight except for the fact that it has that liner. This is made for flowers, but again, if it could be a cretin, it could be whatever it is. What I would say, though, is to make sure that there it's somewhat even in the dimensions above and as well as as it is so diameter and the height. It will just make things a little bit more, even when you're going to start arranging another thing to keep in mind. And the reason why I'm showing a square is because even if you fell in love with something that is square, for whatever reason Vase for vase five by five by five by five they squares happened to eat up mawr flowers for whatever reason, more of a soccer circumference area. Um, I wouldn't think of anything too low or too wide. I think that five by five, which is this size or smaller, is what you should start with. If this is one of your first flower arrangements again, this guy is a little bit smaller and also will hold water. If you want to start a little bit smaller, the other thing that you will need is Clippers. This is what we use here. It flower girl, pretty standard professional grade clippers. They have a lock on them, and it's what were the most comfortable with. I suggest that you work with clippers that you are the most comfortable with. Of course they're sharp and of course you want to just they want to be comfortable in your hand. I would say that you want them to be a sharp as possible. So your old gardening clippers from the garage might not be the best approach here. This is another type of clipper. Um, this is a little bit better for more precise clippings. It's pretty, but it also allows you to kind of get in if you're going to not rip the leaves off, and instead you want to trim them off other things that you could possibly use our knives. Except that usually is for a little bit more advanced people that are more comfortable working with knives for the obvious reason, of course, flowers and water.
4. Choosing Flowers: Choosing your blooms is a very, very big and important step. Basically, the way to think about it is if it looks good when you're choosing it, it will look good in your vessel down the line. What I suggest is to pick 1 to 2 colors at most even one color and different hues of that color is a really good approach as well. Green is generally considered a neutral. The recipe we're gonna work with is two types of greenery, two large blooms, two medium blooms, a spray texture and a filler when working with greenery and deciding to choose what greener you want to work with, I always say to choose greenery that has some sort of added bonus, whether it's cool, interesting texture or bury or a pod. In this case, we have Camelia, which has is starting to bud, so it has the buds on it, and we have seeded eucalyptus, which has that dusty kind of color to it and allows for some good texture and good variety to just a standard green. And that, of course, has the berry on it, which has different shades within the little buried bunch for the large bloom. I chose the traditional rose, but in a color scheme that's a little bit less traditional, it's blushing and then has the green hue to it that ties into the other greens as well as the phalaenopsis orchids for the medium bloom. I chose the tool up because it's spring and the freesia because it's lovely and fragrant. Other medium blooms could be an M unease. Ridiculous. There's a wide variety of different things to work with. The spray for this arrangement is the Lizzie Antis. The reason why it's a spray is because it's not only one bloom on the stem. It has this spray here and basically allows for it to do a lot of the arranging for you for texture. I chose to go with even more berry to tie into the pods and texture that we ready had going on with the greenery. This bright green high period come very. I felt kind of added and tied into all of the other colors and bright greens that we had going on. I also chose to work with Thistle, one of my favorites. Thistle ties into the blue of the eucalyptus, so it kind of brings it all together, and it's just so fun and interesting to look at for filler. I chose to work with wax flower. It has this beautiful citrusy scent, and it's almost like a mini spray. It has all these tiny buds, and it will be your best friend later on, as it's a really great way to fill holes and kind of finish off the arrangement. This is what was chosen based on the seasonality and availability here in New York in the spring. Of course, your flowers will be based on what is available to you and the color scheme that you choose to follow. Keeping it simple. Remember to choose no more than two colors following the simple recipe that was mentioned earlier and really working with a color and flowers that speak to you.
5. Arranging Flowers: This is when the creative process really starts to get going. You're about to make your own flower arrangement. I've gone ahead and pulled the vessel that I've decided to work with, which is a five by five clear glass cylinder and filled it with water. Think roughly 3/4 to halfway full. You can obviously always add more water A little later. I've also go up, gone ahead and organized all of my greenery and blooms in their own pile. I just thought this would be easier for when you're pulling different things as you're building your arrangement. And of course, have your clippers ready to start. We're going to begin by greening our arrangement. We're going to start working with the Camelia on the seated eucalyptus. As a guide, your arrangement is basically gonna be double in size to 2/3 higher than the height of your vase. Depending on what size you're working with, we begin by greening our arrangement. This is basically creating the basis and foundation off the arrangement to come. We start with the Camelia and the seeded eucalyptus, so go ahead and start to green your arrangement, which is to cut your greenery make sure that you are taking all of the greens off of the bottoms, that they're not going into the water and you're gonna go ahead and criss cross your greenery. Don't overthink this too much. And definitely don't over green your arrangement. I mean, it takes some eucalyptus as well and take the greens off again and go ahead and put that in the vessel as well. And basically, the idea here is you're going to just keep repeating this until you have nice green coverage at the bottom of your vessel knowing that there are many other things to come. The idea behind taking the leaves off here is that you basically don't want any foliage in your water. All it's doing is polluting your water, and then your flowers will not last up quite as long. We will go ahead and add our roses as our next step part of the big blooms. In this case, keep in mind that even though these roses have been cleaned already, you definitely don't want any of the bottom petals. So, for instance, in this case, hitting the water so you'd want to take those off for the same reasons that we did earlier . You don't want any foliage in the water polluting your fresh, clean water for cutting? You want to be a little bit more precise than you were when you were greening your arrangement. A good way to do this for beginners would be to keep in mind where you want that bloom to land and then holding it up against the best side of the vessel to kind of eyeball where you want to cut it. Obviously, you should be airing on the side of keeping things longer because you can always cut more off as opposed to the other way around. Now we do the same thing with the orchids, being mindful that there are more than one bloom. Even though the bloom itself is big, it's also many blooms on the same step. This is our big bloom, because it's a big gloom itself. But then it also has a few blooms on it. So double double duty here. I'm gonna go ahead and take off this one. He just is wilting a little bit, Um, and go ahead and cut and place and again, these This is the area where you want to be a little bit more precise because you are building your flower arrangement. So it's different than the greenery, knowing that it's nature and the roses might fall or something might have a mind of its own . So I haven't game plan, but just know that it might have its own plan. So these air cascading someone to kind of put them around on the edges. Cinnamon add one more. And in this case, I'm gonna cut this guy off because there are more blooms here on this side. You can go ahead and place him in here, and I kind of used the rule of the thirds with that, Um so odd numbers tend to look better. I wound up with seven roses, Um, and three of the phalaenopsis orchids moving on to our medium blooms. We're going to go ahead and take 22 lips at the same time. The idea here is to show you clustering in this step, we're gonna continue what we've been doing going ahead and really thinking about visually where you want these tulips toe land, but also same things that you just learned, which is taking greenery off those leaves. Just kind of peeled right off. That's the nature of a tulip. So I'm gonna go ahead. I want these to kind of be a little bit higher. Um, and what I'm showing you here is the clustering technique. So we're going to do this in twos right now and maybe in threes with some of the other blooms, like the freesia later on with clustering, we're basically trying to recreate how things grow in nature. So two things next to each other or three things that go into the arrangement at the same time. So the idea would be that, you know, two things grow together, and it's not this very mathematical kind of idea. I'm gonna go ahead and cut these and then place them in again as a pair. So this is the idea of clustering. It also allows for us to nestle things, so creating different highs and lows. So some of the roses air high, some of them are low. In this case, there's two different heights of tulips. So let's do that again. Pull off the greenery. Uh, not only are you pulling off the greenery that you don't want to sit in water for the reasons that I've mentioned. But you also want to pull off any greenery that's bruised or doesn't look as good. Um, so that it doesn't kind of make your arrangement not look good down the line as it browns or changes. Of course, you can still just put one single tulip as you go. But clustering is definitely a good tool to show you a good tip. We'll do the same thing with the freesia. In this case. I'm gonna take three freesia at the same time. So I'm gonna take three freesia heads on these air. Beautiful. They smell amazing. Um, I'm gonna go ahead and again, take off anything that might not look as good tomorrow. Clean off the stems themselves and go ahead and put the freesia in as a triple. And I'm gonna cut that a little shorter cause I found a nice little pocket for right here on some of it's gonna pop out. And what I love about freesia is that there's some greenery. And then there's also the big bloom. So kind of, you know, adds to the color scheme that I worked with. Um, so I'm gonna go ahead and out more freesia this time in a pair. And don't ever feel like you can't go back to another bloom. If by chance you feel like an area needs another rose because there wasn't enough of this, like beautiful antique e blushing color here, and it became more white on one side. You can always go back. Keep in mind also that you have other things to come. So you don't want to overly stuff your arrangement. You want to leave room and air for other things to come. So go ahead and put these here and we're gonna move on to the texture the Lizzie. And this is our spray in this arrangement. Reason being because its many different blooms that are growing on the same stem. They're doing what nature does best for you and taking a lot of the arranging out of it with just the single stem things to keep in mind with spray. Because there so many blooms growing off of one single stem is that you want to be mindful to really make the full use of all of the blooms. So in this case, this is on a V here rather than cut here and be limited to just one. I'm gonna go ahead and cut and have it to pieces, being mindful that you want to give it a fresh cut right before it goes into water. So as I'm talking to you right now, this is sealing up. So you're gonna cut right before you go into water. So gonna pull these a few little leaves off, and then I'm gonna give it a cut, and I'm gonna put it right here and again. You see, the different kind of height that that already gives. I'm gonna go ahead and do the same thing with this one. Pull that off and I'm gonna put this Lizzie an office right here, and I'll do that one more time. I'm gonna leave this one a little bit longer. I'm gonna pull this off. I can't even get it. Put this Lizzie and this here, making sure that you're playing with the different heights and leaving room for other things to come. We're going to be adding texture with these break green hypericum Berries. Be sure to remove any Berries that have brown or don't look that great. And then I'm gonna go ahead and cut it. And I found a nice little pocket right there for that high. Pyra, come. This guy needs a trim, and this leaf doesn't look that good. So I'm gonna go ahead and cut this one and put this hype here it come over here. However, now I'm running into a very matchy matchy, um, linear kind of look, and I don't think that that works again. Remembering that rule of the thirds, I'm gonna go ahead and take 1/3 hip, Eric, Um um and add it, That's trim the greenery off again. Again. You can go in and clip that green were if off if you want, but it just works the same way. If you peel it right back on, I'm gonna cut this hip here. Come and I'm gonna add him right here. And I think that helps it balance it out without feeling too matchy matchy. So our next element that were adding four texture is going to be the thistle. You can think of it the same way as you did with the spray. Basically, it grows on different levels and a different points off of the same stem again. It is tying in the blue hues of the seeded eucalyptus. Um, as well as giving these interesting kind of potty things toe look at. So we're gonna go ahead and treat this again as you would a spray. So you want to make sure that you're using all of it, Um, again, No greenery in the water. And I'm gonna go ahead and cut this thistle here on the V and use this piece first. And then I'm gonna go ahead and use this piece as well, and I'll do that one more time again. Here's your thistle. Cut this guy off of the main stem this time. Put him here Just kind of peeking out next to the eucalyptus. Something fun and eye catching. And then I'm going to go ahead. This'll guy over here kind of marries this height the high of the Lizzy Antas, um, to the low of the work in and it kind of brings it a little bit more together. Our last step is working with our filler again. It's this beautiful wax flower in this kind of poppy pink, but also with a lot of the different hues that we already have going on. So it has the whites. It has the greens, it has different shades of pink. And it's gonna bring the arrangement together, not on Lee, visually because of the color scheme, but also if there any holes to fill or any heights that you want to marry Also in this step , what you're going to keep in mind is that you have been working from one angle this whole time, so you're gonna want to go ahead. And as much as I've been putting things around in different places, you're gonna really want to go ahead and think of it not only from the full circumference of the arrangement, but also from different heights. That someone's eye, if they're sitting at a dinner table or if they're looking at from above will totally look at the arrangements. This is really the time where you want to use as I referenced earlier, your best friend, the filler to kind of go in and finish off the arrangement. So we're gonna go ahead and start to trim this wax flower and nestle it in. So again, really nice place to kind of go in deep and kind of allow it to nestle in here and then spinning your arrangement, looking at it from below, I'm gonna go ahead and this one's gonna stay a little bit higher to kind of match up with the height of these other things that are going on and again looking at it from other angles. You can do the filler in bigger clumps, or you can do them in small little pieces. Honestly, I recommend doing a little bit of both. So it again allows for that fresh picked from the garden, Um, kind of feel. And I think the sky and one more piece I see these were some finishing touches, a seal leave here that just happened to be tourney, which I didn't catch earlier. This is the step where you really want to spin your arrangement and look at it from all different angles. So you're spinning and looking at all different angles both from above and also from, you know, different angles that maybe a seated guests would be looking at it. And keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to keep adding more flowers, it could just be about readjusting or moving a bloom to fill in a space you definitely want there to be the sense of air, Um, and not have it be too overly stuff. There's something really beautiful about different levels and nestled things, and kind of the whole arrangement that you had in a pile coming together into your own beautiful creation.
6. Final Thoughts: you've created your very own flower arrangement. Now you get to sit back and enjoy it. A few things to keep in mind to keep it looking at best as long as possible is definitely change your water pretty much every other day and give it a fresh trim. If possible. Make sure that there's no debris floating in your water as well as that creates bacteria that is polluting the fresh water with all of the many, many classes that we teach here, a flower girl. Even with the same medium and the same exact flowers, there's no to arrangements alike. Everyone's personality shines through and the arrangements are vastly different. I look very, very forward to seeing what was available to you in your town or what season you worked with and seeing your personality shines through and your beautiful creation. Definitely be sure to post them and thank you for taking this class
Denise Porcaro
