Quick Spring Centerpiece Tutorial

So it's not technically tomorrow (Monday) yet, but I was excited to share, so here it is early.  I'll soak my coffee up a bit more not blogging tomorrow morning!

I promised a project soon, and A and I came up with an idea today.  I was running out of creative inspiration.  We wandered around the house, looking at all our art supplies and decor for ideas.  We decided that we should buy some birds to make a table centerpiece. Which unfortunately ruined my plans for a project using things we already had.  Oh well, like I really hate going craft supply shopping!

We grabbed some greenery, birds, lights, vase filler, and a vase, and headed home.  Said and done, it was maybe 20 minutes, start to finish, including photos and changing plans (and whining). Want to see?

Here's how we did it:

Gather your supplies:

• Vase 
• make sure it has a fairly wide mouth
• Vase filler - 
• rocks, petals, foam beads, mini Easter eggs - whatever you like
• we used rocks from A's burgeoning rock collection, along with scrapbook-style mini flowers that were on clearance.
• Flowers -
• I used three bunches with colored flowers - all with small blooms and lots of green, for the springy wildflower feel.  I got 3 different colors too, but I like variety.
• Straight stem fluffy flowers - I used 2 bunches, looks kind of like cattails but smaller and greener.
• Branch LED lights - 
• we found ours at the craft store...a little expensive, but makes them bright even on gloomy days
• Residents of your wildflower patch
• We used blue jay nests and large blue jays, but there are so many options of birds
• You can use butterflies or other animals to decorate.

First I laid it all out. I don't know why really...I just like to make sure I have everything where I plan to work.

Then I filled the vase (carefully!) with rocks.  It helps to tip it on it's side a bit to slide them in.  If you plink them in, I think a thin walled vase would break.

Then I realized the stems of all my flowers weren't going to fit through this narrow opening in the vase I had bought.  I pulled out one I keep here.  The flower stems take up a lot more space than you think they will, so use a wide mouth vase.  See the difference?

Then I added the flowers on top of the rocks.  You can barely see the rocks under there in this picture, but they're there.

At this point I started playing around with floral arranging.  I put in all my colored flowers first, since I knew they were the biggest ones, and that I definitely wanted them in there. I added the stem of lights to the middle of the 3 bunches, moving the wired branches around to be evenly distributed in the bunches.

Here's where it stood after that:

See how sparse it is?  Wispy and natural looking, sure, but not really fantastic and deserving of being the centerpiece.

So then I added the greenery cattail-like stems, spacing them out evenly too, moving branches around till I was happy.  Better, eh?  Filled in a bit more, it looks a little more cheerful.

Then A came over to decorate with eggs, birds, nests, and so forth.

After he finished and moved on to other projects, I may have rearranged some of them...just a little. :) What???  :)

Here's the finished product (don't worry, I hid the wire later - it's super easy to tuck it in the center of all the greenery where it's hidden):

 If you always planned on using the vase for artificial flowers, you could drill a hole to run the wire through...but I just really didn't want to spend the time, and winding the branch through would be a pain, I think.

Hope this brightens up your almost spring home - It makes mine look happier already!