Wednesday, December 19, 2012

How to make a carnation ball


 My beautiful friend Kellsie got married on December 9th to the love of her life and they are one amazing and talented couple! I pretty much begged Kellsie to let me do her flowers for free, she just needed to order the flowers. She used bloomsbythebox.com just like I did and yet again the flowers were amazing! Her vision was to have red carnation balls on top of milk glass goblets. When she showed me pictures of the dense flower arrangements I was super intimidated and worried that I couldn't pull it off. We practiced one time with store bought carnations and that made me feel confident enough to do it for her wedding. Yes, one practice round and I knew I could pull it off...that is how easy these awesome looking arrangements are!


Oasis Floral Foam Balls


We used 6 inch diameter oasis floral foam balls from a local craft store. We soaked them in warm water for about 30 minutes before we placed them on top of the milk glass goblets. You can find these balls in several sizes and you can also find floral foam in a lot of different shapes like cone, cube, or cylinder.


Prep your flowers!

Start an assembly line and have a few people prepping the flowers. Cut the stem at a sharp angle about an inch past the base of the flower. This will have the flower about two inches higher then the ball. 

Cutting at a sharp angle.
 Always be sure to use scissors that are made for cutting flowers or pruning. Regular scissors aren't sharp enough and crush the stem of the flower, preventing it from absorbing water properly.

Always start at the top in the center.

 The best way I can describe my technique without having a video is to say that I made one row all of the way around the ball, and then made the rest of the rows in a triangle or diamond pattern so that it was completely filled in with flowers.

Keep adding flowers row by row.
Add caption
Use your fingers to make sure when you push the next flower in it doesn't mess up the other flowers petals.
Every few minutes take a step back and make sure the entire arrangement looks even.

Finished product, working on the first row of my 2nd arrangement.


All six arrangements ready to go!
 Be warned that the arrangements will be very top heavy so be sure to travel with care!

One awesome thing about these arrangements is how affordable they are! I used around 50 flowers per arrangement and depending on the size of the ball you can use a lot less. You can also do this same technique with other flowers such as roses but, carnations are the least expensive. Anyone can make these and there are so many color choices with carnations the options are endless! 


Thank you for reading, more to come!!

Love, Anna


1 comment:

  1. These are really beautiful! I would like to make flower balls like this that will float in a pool. Do you think the balls alone with float ok? Or will they become too heavy to float since they are first soaked in water? Thanks!

    ReplyDelete