Baby’s Breath Believin’

The other day we had my parents and sister over for my mom’s birthday (Happy Birthday Mom!) and while out grabbing some groceries I thought I’d pick up a few fresh flowers. I love making flower arrangements so generally look for whatever is relatively inexpensive and seasonal – I can often be heard saying “no need to wrap them, they’re just for me”. Then I come home and make a nice little arrangement for the occasion!

However, there were some pretty slim pickins’ the othe day and nothing was striking a chord. I thought I may get a few gerberas but at $2.49 a pop I’d have to get quite a few for any impact. And then low and behold I spotted one of the ready-made bouquets for $12 that contained eight of them! I did some quick math and headed to the check out… but not before I grabbed some baby’s breath too. YES, baby’s breath! Why? Becuase I love a challenge.

I can hear you all saying “baby’s breath? Are we talking about the same baby’s breath seen in 1980’s corsages along side a pink taffetta grad dress and mall bangs in a Sears portrait?” And to that I say “Yes. Yes we are.” You see, I had a vision – a vision to make you all baby’s breath believers. Convert you, if you will.

Forgive me that I don’t have a picture of the bouquet ‘before’ but I’m sure you can all envision your basic generic grocery store bouquet comprised of a few different blooms and a truckload of filler. And if you can’t then I beg you to forgive me anyway. Hey, I’m a new blogger, I forget to take ‘before pics’. Cut a girl some slack.

To begin I took a vase that I had on hand and filled it with floral preserve (the little packet your bouquet comes with) and water. Any vase will do but for this arrangement I pictured something low and ‘full’.

Then I made grid using regular satin scotch tape. The grid helps you plan out your arrangement as well as help hold your flowers up!

begin assembling (starting with your ‘main’ flower)…

Start to fill in your arrangement using complimentary blooms. If you don’t have an eye for this sort of thing then the ‘pre-arranged’ bouquets are great because they already come with complimentary blooms and colours. You can see here is where I started adding my BABY’S BREATH for bulk. I liked that it was so light and airy yet helped fill out the arrangement. Plus did I mention that I like a challenge…

The bouquet came with one LARGE frond that was very pretty but would not work with this type of arrangement so check out what I did…

Step one: Snip

Step two: gather together by pushing up from bottom along stem and then tape:

step three: stuff:

I got four bunches out of the one frond. Not bad!

Next, take some of the filler leaves (you won’t use them all most likely as these generic bouquets usually come with SO much) and add to the edges:

Another neat trick to making your bouquet look custom and designey (yup – a made up word for you) is to use a non-flower element. I had this little shimmery stick from Christmas that matched my palette so in it went!

Add some ribbon around the vase:

And you’re done! Not bad for less than $15!

Here are a few close ups:

Are you beginning to become a baby’s breath believer?

AND just to show you I’m not fakin’ it for fun, here’s another arrangement I did in the same vase back at Christmas.

Do you think you’ll give Baby a chance? As Patrick once said: “No one puts baby in the corner”. Happy flower arranging!