It's been a great weekend and thanks to the Labor Day holiday, I still have one day left before heading back to work. I just love a 3-day weekend!
This Labor Day weekend traditionally marks the end of summer, although it was 104 degrees today, so I don't think Autumn weather is coming anytime soon for us. We were invited to an end-of-summer party and the invitation said "bring your favorite drink". I would normally bring a sweet treat to the party, but I know my friend loves flowers, so I decided to bring her a "drink" in the form of a festive flower bouquet.
I had seen giant martini and margarita glasses at Target, so I went there to see if they still had them. Of course, that had been several months back at the beginning of summer, so I was unable to find them today. Luckily, Michaels is in the same shopping center and had several of them in stock with the other glass vases. They also had the floral foam and some plastic limes that would work great in the arrangement. Next, I went in search of green flowers. I didn't find any all-green bouquets, but there were a some arrangements with a few green flowers mixed in with other brightly-colored flowers. I wasn't sure how other colors would look in the bouquet, but as it turns out, they looked very pretty and helped break up the green tones.
This was my first time working with the wet floral "oasis" foam, but it's really easy to work with, so I will be using it again the next time I need to make a flower arrangement.
I love how it turned out and I plan to make others in the future:
Here's how I put it together:
Start with a couple of basic flower arrangements in your choice of colors. You likely will not use all of the flowers, so you can always make another bouquet if you want. You can never have too many flowers!
Grab a giant glass if you can find it or just use several smaller glasses for some cute mini bouquets. I put a regular glass beside the large version so you have a feel for the scale.
Use the floral (wet) foam, also known as floral oasis. The foam absorbs water to keep the flowers fresh. I only used a couple of the blocks for this arrangement.
Allow the foam to soak in water for several minutes:
Crumble some to use as filler around the big block. Soak these crumbles as well:
The foam I found was not an accurate "margarita green", so luckily, I had some lime-green tissue paper on hand, so I stuffed it into the glass hoping that it would look believable.
I tucked plastic wrap inside to help waterproof the paper.
Another layer for good measure:
And provide some extra security with a zip-lock bag liner; I cut off the zipper and used only the bag:
Insert the wet foam into the glass:
Add the crumbles around to fill the gaps:
Cut flowers to the desired length and begin inserting the stems into the foam:
Continue until you've filled in all the gaps:
I added some final details at the end, including a drinking straw, some paper umbrellas and a plastic lime:
A very festive bouquet!
