Easy Flower Arranging for Outdoor Entertaining

Jayme Jenkins — Thu, 27 May 2010 12:00:19 +0000

When you’re throwing an outdoor garden party, create informal flower arrangements that compliment, rather than distract, from the surroundings. If you’re having a seated dinner, or small cocktail tables for guests to sit around, you also want to steer clear of towering (potentially unstable) arrangements. Bud vases provide easy floral design tools, and it’s quick and easy to create a pretty centerpiece.

We have a variety of bud vases in the aHa! Modern Living catalog, including our Glass Bird Vases, Cube Tube Vases, Jacks Vase, and the Windowsill Herb Holder. Here are a few ideas for each vase, and ideas for mixing these vases with other household containers.

Glass Bird Vases: These vases look best with delicate flowers and greens. Thin ornamental grass leaves, flax flowers, and other long-stemmed, delicate blooms look good in these birds.

Cube Tube Vases: You can display larger flowers in these sturdy vases. Their hard-edged lines are calling out for either 1) specimen flowers like a small sunflower on a short stem, a hydrangea, hybrid tea rose, or a large tuberous begonia or 2) wispy, floating ornamental grass stems, sprouting from the tubes in a cascading waterfall of greenery.

Windowsill Herb Holder: Use this vase to hold your edible centerpiece of garnishes. In each glass cup, place herbs that compliment the taste of your appetizers. Dill, basil and thyme are all different enough, and will highlight most savory dishes. Alternatively, you could place cut stems of mint, lavender, and pineapple sage as garnishes for sweet items and drinks. (See “Grow your own Garnishes,” below, for more garnish ideas.)

Mix and Match

The fun of flower arranging with bud vases is that you really can’t make a mistake. Go out to your garden and snip cuttings of anything that catches your eye. You could stick with a color theme (cool colors: blues, purples, greens or warm colors: reds, pinks, oranges, yellows), or a shape (spiky, round, daisy-shaped), or just cut a riot of colors and shapes.

Cut the flower stems at different lengths (though, none more than three times as tall as the container itself), and start putting them in vases and containers. Bud vases look best when mixed and matched together, along with other glasses, jars, and tumblers from around the house. Part of the fun is the mixing and matching. The space around the vases, once they are arranged in their final place before the party, is also part of the design. Draw attention to the group of vases by placing a large hosta leaf under several of the containers.

Most importantly, have fun with your arrangements. A grouping of bud vases is a chic and simple table arrangement, fitting for most garden parties.

Cultivate Your Style

So what’s your outdoor entertaining style? Not sure? For inspiration, check out these images of some of the best outdoor spaces. Notice the placement of flower arrangements and potted plants, and how different arrangements can create or add to the style and atmosphere of an outdoor patio. We love the way simple additions of clipped or potted flowers, herbs, and succulents on or around outdoor tables can help to create a balanced, complete outdoor space fit for both entertaining and personal enjoyment.

How to Make a Modern Winter Centerpiece

Susan — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 17:21:48 +0000

Image source: weddingbee.com

When you hear the word “centerpiece” the first thing you probably think of is a floral arrangement, right? An elegant flower arrangement has the power to transform a simple white tablecloth into a lush and beautiful setting. However, floral arrangements are not particularly practical in the winter. Unless you’re fortunate enough to be living in a tropical climate, it’s not an option to snip an arrangement of buds from your backyard. While your garden hibernates, here are a few ideas for modern winter centerpieces, sans flowers.

1. Centerpiece Using Candles

If you’re going to use candles as a centerpiece, make sure to use soy candles. Why? Well, first and foremost, paraffin candles are made of oil. We all know that oil is not a renewable resource. The United States is the number one producer of soy in the world, so when you purchase soy candles, you are purchasing a renewable resource and you are supporting American farmers. Another factor to consider is that soy is clean burning. If you are going to be eating with lit candles, you definitely do not want the fumes from burning paraffin to interfere with your taste buds.

Parker Collection Soy Candle in Lime Blossom

Have you seen the soy candles that we have here at aHa! Modern Living? The Parker Collection Soy Candles produce hardly any smoke or soot, so there will be nothing offensive combating your meal. They are available in three delicious, delicate scents, too. For an easy centerpiece, try placing a candle in the middle of a bowl or platter, then scattering fresh cranberries and limes or lemons around it. Or, for a cool effect, place a few candles on top of a mirror. Try grouping the candles in an odd number, such as 3 or 5, since this adds visual interest.

2. Centerpiece Using Greenery

Pine branches are a classic and treasured symbol of Christmas and wintertime. But depending on which region you live in, you can add some other gorgeous sprigs of green to your centerpiece as well. If you live in Northern California, you may be lucky enough to find some European mistletoe, or Viscum alba.It crept into this region by way of an apple stock from Europe. If you live in North or South Carolina, you may have already noticed people on the street corner selling large bunches of North American mistletoe, or Phoradendron. Mistletoe is the floral emblem of the state of Oklahoma, too.

For a pretty green centerpiece, try placing some little sprigs of mistletoe in the fun and modern Cube Tube Vases. So simple, so chic. Just make sure to keep the vases out of reach of pets and small children. The waxy white berries on mistletoe are delicious to birds, but poisonous to humans and other animals.

Mistletoe + Cube Tube Vase

3. Centerpiece Using Branches

For a really cool modern look, you don’t need any greenery at all. Just borrow this great idea from the photo below and snip some branches off of a tree. If you want to, you can lay the branches out on some newspaper and give them a quick coat of metallic spray paint. We think they look just as pretty left au naturel, because it’s really about the shape here and not the color. A bunch of thin, twisting branches grouped together in a vase makes a big impact. The higher your celing is, the taller you can go with the branches. Try placing them in the Ivy Pitcher and Vase. Stunning.

Twigs + Ivy Pitcher Vase