Suzanne Taylor: My name is Suzanne Taylor of Artistic Gardens, Flower Shop and
Greenhouse of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I am a professional florist and I
am going to show you how to make a centerpiece with basket and candy
cans. It’s a whimsical one, a nice country style, and I think you will like it.
So the tools that you are going to need are green sticks, corsage tape, oasis
tape, a red ribbon, glass balls, candy cans. You get these in the regular
store; they are the kinds you eat, and some white tipped pine cones, some
balsam, white pines, variegated holly, red miniature carnations, large red
carnations, and white fuji poms, and a block of oasis.
We soak this, Ill drop it in the water. It goes whole side down. You just
drop it in and it soaks, and then it comes up. After it's soaked, you take it
out, place it in a container, use your floral tape to tape it down, you use a
sharp knife to cut off the excess tape, then you start with your evergreens.
Strip the stems of the excess needles, places them in there. This one is
going to be fairly tall. It’s great to have on a coffee table or a side table. It
also does well on the kitchen table; except when you are eating, its a little
bit tall for that but centerpieces have lots of different places.
So you just strip it and insert. We start with the balsam once again because
it’s a fairly inexpensive green and it goes along ways. Once you have the
oasis covered with the evergreens, well go on to another green such as the
white pine. You want to make sure you cover all the mechanics not just
the foam. We are using tips and all these little pieces can be used and
inserted.
It’s good to turn it around also so you can see what’s on the backside if
you’ve missed a spot. Variegated holly put a couple of pieces of that in
there. Now we are going to take our ribbon. I am going turn this back
around this way and we insert it here. The candy cans, you want to take
with a stick and your corsage tape, and you are going to just like -- when
you wrap anything with it, you just go right around it, like that to get a
nice firm wrap. That will give it the extra length it needs and also keep it
out of the water. That way these are still addable.
You put some in, in various places. I have some nice white cones, they can
go in, like so; and some red balls, these can go -- you can put them on a
stick, if they are not going to be long enough. On another stick -- you just
wrap this wire right around the stick and insert them here and there
throughout the arrangement.
Then well take our main flower which is going to be the large red
carnations. We are going to put three of them in this one, one on the side,
one to the center, and the other one slightly to the back so it’s not
uniformed. Then well take the miniature carnations and stick those in. Just
find your oasis as you are going, not that hard, and to make it a little bit
more festive we are going to use white fuji poms.
One stand probably will be sufficient. You don’t want to over stuff; you
want to be able to see the greenery in these. It’s quite striking. These are
very long lasting arrangements for the holidays, carnations would go a
good week or more, same thing with the pomes. There you have a nice
festive candy can basket, and the next arrangement we are going to do is
going to be an all white and silver arrangement, a very formal with two
candles.
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