ARRANGE YOUR FLOWERS LIKE A PRO

So you’re cheap.

Wait, wait, wait. No one wants to be called cheap.

You’re thrifty. Smart with your cash.

You’re wisely saving your money now so you and your wife/partner/girlfriend/lover can retire to a little cottage in the mountains and tool around the country visiting the grandkids in your motorhome, right?

Or maybe you’re just saving for the next big video game.

Either way, Valentine’s Day is a week away and if you think ahead, you can make it a special day and save a few bucks while you’re at it. (After all, the economy kicked us all in the tokus last year.)

If you order a bouquet of flowers from a professional, you know they won’t sag and you’ll have the right mix of size and color.

But maybe you can spice things up a bit by presenting your special someone with a homemade bouquet.

Carrie Blaschke, a designer with Philpott Florist & Greenhouses, shared her tips for making the perfect arrangement of flowers. Here’s what she had to say:

Step 1

Pick out a design from a magazine, online or from a florist’s shop, or sketch out one of your own.

Step 2

Gather your supplies. You’ll need a vase that fits with your design, special tape (find it at a florist’s shop), quality flowers, foliage to fill out the bouquet and a sharp knife.

Step 3

Use the tape to make a tic-tac-toe design on top of the vase that will act as a grid to hold your flowers in place.

About.com suggests crisscrossing the stems of the foliage under water to form a grid for your bouquet instead of using tape.

Step 4

Choose three to five varieties of foliage as a base for your bouquet. Examples include lemon leaf, eucalyptus, myrtle or tree fern. Arrange the greenery in the shape you want your bouquet to be: round or tall.

The Web site flowersmadesimple.net suggests placing in the center of the vase a spiky green that’s about one-and-a-half times the height of the vase. The other foliage stems should be shorter and placed around the outside of the vase.

The site also suggests cutting off all of the leaves that will sit below the surface of the water.

Step 5

Cut the stems using a sharp knife instead of scissors, which may pinch the stem and keep the flower from drinking water like it should. Clippers can be used to cut woody stems. Cut all stems at an angle.

Step 6

Start adding flowers. Blaschke suggests using flowers of differing shapes and lengths.

Start with flowers that are tall and spiky like snapdragons, bells of Ireland or stock flowers.

Next move to round flowers, such as roses, carnations or gerbera daisies.

Finish it off with fillers like goldenrod, monte casino asters or baby’s breath.

The flowers should be inserted into the bouquet at different angles. Give the bouquet depth by putting some of the shorter flowers down inside the bouquet — but don’t hide them.

“You should be able to notice every flower in your arrangement,” Blaschke said.

Posted by Kirace