Flipping through
fancy-schmancy magazines showing high end homes you would be surprised to know how many of those jaw dropping flower arrangements you see in the back ground are made from artificial flowers.Only the extremely wealthy can afford huge fresh flower arrangements every week so for the rest of the well to-do set, fakes rule the day.
No one will argue that fresh flowers are wonderful but if you have severe allergies, you are just too busy to enjoy them, they are out of season and terribly expensive or you want flowers in the house for a special occasion but you won't have time the day before to pick them up then go fake!
In an effort to make them sound better the term faux flowers and permanent flowers are often thrown about but a silk flower is a silk flower (actually most of the good ones are synthetic). So how come the fake flower arrangements you tend to see just look, well, fake? How can you have the same gorgeous fauxs you see in the magazines?
Here are seven secrets in how you can get those same arrangements at a fraction of the cost and have guest not knowing if they are from your garden or not.
1.Probably the most important aspect of having a faux flower arrangement is that the flowers that you use need to mimic there real counterparts as closely as possible. If you don't have a lot of experience with real flowers then you should spend some time looking around a flower shop to see what they are like.
While there are some flowers out there that come in bright colors generally if the color looks fake then so does the flower. Forget about using flowers that are black or hot pink.
You don't want to stem to be an un-natural green or to have the inside of the flower finished with a cheap piece of yellow plastic. Hold up the stem and really judge if this could pass for the real thing.
So which is the real and which is the faux flower above? The red one is the real one.
2. All good flower arrangements have some greenery in them.( The exception to this would be if it is only a single type of flower being used, like a dozen tulips or a dozen roses, in the arrangement). You have to be just as careful with the greenery that you use as the flowers. Once again you should study what is real in the flower shops.
The best real flower arrangements actually use more than one type of greenery in them. They would use 3 so there are different textures. If you do this with your faux flowers it will also insure that you will not see the Sahara base that you will use to arrange the flowers.
3. You need to use colors and types of faux flowers carefully. There is a trend to make arrangements with many different colors of the same color pallet so you would use different shades of pink or white. This can be a very sophisticated look. If you want a more colorful arrangement make sure that you are not mixing hot pinks with rusts or any other un natural combinations.
You also should think about the flowers themselves. Mixing daffodils, tulips and iris in an arrangement would make perfect sense as they are all spring flowers and would be growing at the same time of year. Mixing sunflowers with dainty roses just would not work as they are too different.
4. If your home is more country or casual style then use the flowers that fit the room. If you have a very traditional arrangement in a informal setting it just won't look real.
You need to follow how florist make real flower arrangements. It does not matter if the style is informal, modern, or traditional.
5. Use flowers that people can recognize, such as carnations, lilies, tulips, irises, delphiniums and peonies. If it looks too weird and exotic then it will also look fake. Let the flowers bend in the arrangement. Nothing in nature is absolutely straight.
6. If you are placing stems into a glass or crystal vase then make sure that you cut them to fit and don't bend or kink the stems. Have you ever seen a real flowers whose stem is bent over double at the bottom so it will fit into a vase?
Stems tend to look better in a crystal vase so you cannot tell that there isn't any water in it. With clear glass vases if you pull the outer most foliage and flowers over the rim of the vase it will look more realistic and you will not be able to tell that there isn't any water in the vase.
7. Never have a faux arrangement out for more than 2 weeks at a time. This would be about the time most fresh flower arrangement would last. It is when flower arrangements hang around so long that they get dusty that people really turn up their noses at them.
If you make several different flower arrangements that you use through out the year you will enjoy them more. Store your faux flower arrangements with plastic over them so they will not get dusty.
You can buy faux flowers in so many different places, from dollar stores to expensive craft stores. The price does not matter, it is the quality and you can find quality faux flowers at the dollar stores, liquidation stores, grocery stores and discount stores if you follow the rules above and really study the flowers that you are going to buy.
Follow these simple rules and you can have a parade of faux flowers in your home through out the year that will always look great and fool the most expert flower lover.
Blue Cricket Designs Lilluna
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Photography and Content
Copyright Ingrid Talpak 2012
Morestylethancash
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Blue Cricket Designs Lilluna
Photography and ContentCopyright Ingrid Talpak 2012
Morestylethancash
Thanks for sharing all those great tips! I think it is harder to find real looking greenery than real looking flowers. A trick I use for arrangements that might not be viewed up close (like a large arrangement at church or wedding) is to use fake flowers with real greenery in oasis. I saw your post over at "Rock N Share" blog party.
These are great hints. I truly hate the look of all my fake flowers right now, but this might help me to give them new life, or at least replace them with better versions :) Thanks!
Thanks for those floral tips.
Great tips -- thanks for sharing!
Great tips, I'm not very good at flower arrangements so this should help me. These are really great tips. Thanks for sharing all your creative inspiration at Sunday's Best Par.tay!
These are some great tips!! The last one is the one that resonates the most with me. I think I leave arrangements out too long and they do get dusty and look fake because of it.
Thanks for this challenge and inspiration. Thanks for linking up to the Take it on Tuesday blog hop!
I got great tips from your article.Thanks for sharing such a wonderful post.