One good thing about meeting with clients at home is that I have a perfectly valid excuse to buy fresh flowers (as a business expense, ha)! I always run to Whole Foods and buy whatever flowers happen to be on sale.
This week I grabbed one bunch of fuchsia spray roses which I cut down and arranged Pavé style in a small, 5 inch glass cylinder. Fresh flowers at home always makes me SO happy; such an easy pick-me-up!
What is Pavé style? It’s named after a jewelry setting…
Pavé (noun): a style of setting gems so closely that no metal shows
And when translated into floral arrangements, you get:
Via Design Sponge and Vale of Enna
The easiest thing to do for your holiday entertaining is to grab one or two bunches of a SINGLE type of flower, trim them down and arrange them in a shallow vase. DON’T buy the pre-made bouquet of assorted flowers… they are more expensive and have alot of unnecessary “filler”.
Design Sponge offers some GREAT tips for creating a pavé style arrangement:
- Try using one type of flower in varying shades.
- Carefully clean stems so they are free of greens and foliage, leaving only the blossoms and stems.
- Flowers should be cut so that the blooms fall just above the neck of the vase.
- Work from the outside in — start by setting flowers in a ring around the edge of the vase and work row-by-row toward the middle. You will be begin to create concentric circles and the stems will form a “grid” in the vase.
- With each successive layer of flowers, you will have more structure with the stems and you can use this structure to support the next layer.
- Keep a “dome shape” in your mind’s eye and work to make the inner layers of flowers stand slightly taller than the outer layers.
- Don’t be afraid of the flowers jutting out at an angle; with each new layer, they will stand a bit straighter and taller.
- By the time you reach the middle, you should have a firm network of stems to support the taller flowers and they will stand straight up!
HAPPY ARRANGING!
