June Flowers for Your Home

This past week before my parent's arrived for their visit in Michigan, I grabbed some peonies for our home. It IS June, which is prime peony season over here! These particular ones I found were huge and all different, soft shades of pink. I loved them so much, I just had to make them my Flowers For Your Home series this month :) 

When in doubt, just get one variety of flowers and stick them all in a vase. It's a fail-proof way to arrange flowers! That's just what I did here. I had a bunch of stems, so I split them up into a few different vases, this one being the largest, then spread the others into little budvases throughout the house. The burst of pink was such a fun pop throughout the house and my mom loves peonies just as much as me, so she was loving them.

It's been such a busy week with my mom and dad visiting that I haven't had time to share some of the exciting things around our new house with you. I'm excited to show you soon! But first, I'll be recapping our Traverse City trip for you this week with all of our favorite wineries and pictures of each in case you're planning a trip!
Happy Tuesday! xoxo


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April Flowers For Your Home

I know, I know, it's MAY! But I picked up these flowers on Monday and realized I didn't do an April edition of Flowers for Your home. When I saw these open up, I was in shock. They are SO beautiful, I couldn't help but share!

These are a different variety of tulips and I'm sorry, but I don't know the name! They're not parrot tulips, I don't think. I got them at Trader Joe's for $7.99 and almost every single stem had MULTIPLE tulips on it! I've never seen tulips do this before. The first couple shots are from the first day I got them and the last picture is from yesterday, when they'd already opened a lot.

When you're a beginner at arranging flowers, it's always best to start by arranging ONE type of bloom per vase. A big bunch of tulips is the perfect place to start. A grouping of hydrangea is also a favorite of mine!

Look how opened up they are now! Did you know if your tulips start wilting you can throw a couple pennies in the vase and since they love the copper, they'll probably start standing up a little straighter. Though I do love the slight lean tulips do.

Have you bought any fresh flowers for your home lately? Or even better, have any flowers starting blooming in your yard or garden?!
xoxo

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March Flowers for Your Home

This month I found one of my favorite flowers to use in an arrangement from Trader Joe's! Ranunculus! And only for $5.99 for 10 stems. That's an amazing deal! I grabbed one bunch of those + one smaller "farmers bunch" with 1 stem of spray roses, 3 pieces of lavender stock and 2 white mums (not my favorite, but I liked the other things so I went with it). This small bundle was only $3.99.
I actually made this arrangement for my friend who's birthday it was last weekend! I picked up a really pretty vase I'd been eyeing at Target recently and I knew she'd love it. You can find it here. 

 Since I'm making these grocery store flower arranging posts a monthly series, I had my friend Alex from Prairie Letter Shop do some calligraphy with the series name so I could put them on the pictures! She's so talented :)

 There was this one peach ranunculus in the bunch and it was SO beautiful!!

I show this every time, but I never want someone to miss it because it really helps! Since this was a smaller mouth vase, I cut the strips of tape in half so they wouldn't take up too much space. This just provides support to the flowers so they can stand up easier on their own.

I started with the bulkier blooms which were the Stock pieces. Then I placed the spray roses, but as you'll see, I ended up moving them towards the end ;)

I started filling in with more flowers and this arrangement was tough, I'll be honest, because all of the blooms are on the small size. Usually you have some that are larger and others that are small, but all being the same size, I had to play around with it for a while. I started by putting a mum in the front, but I didn't like it. As seen below, it looks out of place.

I took it out and made the tallest ranunculus shorter so that the two tall ones on the side would balance each other out instead of having 3 tall points. I think it looks much better!

Lincoln went and laid down under the buffet while I was taking pictures. He always has to be right next to me ;)

This little guy is amazing with its green center. I can't wait to see how it opens up.

This is from the side with the spray roses...

I think ranunculus are just so pretty, I wish they were in season all the time! I'm so glad they had them for my friend's birthday :) I left this tip on my instagram, but I also wanted to leave it here: when you know certain flowers are in season, be sure to ask your local Trader Joe's if they're getting any shipments in. Then ask them to take down your number and have them call you when they arrive. My store even lets me reserve a bunch! So they put these flowers in the back for me to pick up when I came in, so that they wouldn't be gone by the time I arrived. I'm always so impressed by them!
xoxo
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February Flowers for Your Home

Happy Monday! Hopefully this post will actually bring you some happiness from all the pretty flowers (it's kind of a photo overload, fair warning!) If you missed my first post in the Flowers for Your Home series, you can find it here. Once a month I'll be showing you an arrangement I make for my house. The flowers will always be from local grocery stores and typically they're going to be inexpensive, but today's bunch was a little more because we splurged for Valentine's Day ;)
If you're local to West Michigan, I grabbed most of these flowers from Horrock's and got the white roses and wax flower from Trader Joe's (was hoping to find greenery at TJ's but got there too late and it was gone). I spend $70 on the flowers total, but my friend and I split them up, so $35 for a full flower arrangement with specialty flowers like ranunculus still isn't THAT bad. However, last month's flowers cost $9...so January definitely won ha! For comparison, a dozen roses at another local grocery store called Meijer is $16.99 usually. That to me is VERY expensive for 12 roses that I can get for $8 at TJ's. 
Anyways, on to the pretty flowers. My friend Chelsea and her husband recently bought a fixer upper and completely redid their kitchen. I thought it'd be fun to photograph our flowers in her new kitchen for you to see little peeks.

We decided to use the exact same flowers for each of our arrangements and see how different they came out.

Flowers:

+ Roses (some standard, a couple more "garden rose" like, but didn't get their exact names)

+ Spray Roses

+ Stock

+ Lisanthus

+ Greenery (sadly, I didn't get the name of this :( I'm sorry!)

+ Ranunculus

+ Wax Flower

Isn't her kitchen lovely?

I used the mercury glass vessel, which were the vases used on the reception table at our wedding and used floral tape across the top in a grid to anchor my flowers, and Chelsea used a white compote with a floral frog to secure her flowers.

Always check the roses for a higher petal count in the center...the higher the petal count, the more they look like a garden rose variety-- like these:

We start with the base of greenery. I put some on either side of my arrangement at different heights.

Chelsea spread hers more evenly:

I started with more two favorite roses as my main flowers and put one front and center, while the other sat up and to the right a little. I also tucked my Stock flower in the back left.

 Next I filled in with some spray roses and a couple lisianthus:

I was trying to be conscious of cutting my flowers at different heights so it didn't seem to flat. I could have done this even more, so I'll work on that next time ;)

Lastly, I added my pops of color with the ranunculus and made sure they were the tallest blooms in the arrangement.  

Here's Chelseas-- I think it turned out gorgeous! She has such a knack for arranging flowers and even grows a cut flower garden in her yard in the summer and fall. Hopefully we'll do some arrangements from her garden this year for the blog.

Here's my arrangement at home on the buffet:

Oh, and I had to show you this little succulent I got for free when I purchased a fiddle leaf for a client last week! It's so cute and fits perfectly in my little tea cup, which was my great-grandmothers.

Even though I've only done two posts in this series so far, I think it's my favorite series I do! And this month's arrangement will be hard to beat. Now onto brainstorming for March's bouquet.... ;)

Hope you have a wonderful day! xoxo interior design website / services / portfolio

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January Flowers For Your Home

I'm SO excited about this post, not because it's anything overly amazing, but because I LOVE flowers and I'm excited to share a new series with you. Once a month in 2019 I'm going to share a flower arrangement with you. Sometimes it'll have tips, step-by-step directions, and sometimes it'll be more simple, like it is today. But they'll always have pretty pictures of flowers, they'll always be bought from a local grocery store and they'll always be arranged by me-- not a florist, but a flower-enthusiast ;) Hopefully it's inspiring and will spark you to pick up some blooms for your home! I usually pick up flowers for our little abode when I'm at the store (almost always at Trader Joe's)...guilty. They just make me so happy, especially in the winter. I work from home, so need some LIFE in here! (Okay, husband?!) When I got a bunch of requests from my sweet readers about wanting to see some more flowers / flower recipe posts / how-to's with flowers, I was so excited. I already buy flowers for our home, so why not share what I'm doing with them with you?! For January, I wanted something colorful yet warm. It's so dead outside, friends. Although it's been the mildest winter since I've lived here since 2014, it's still cold and everything is brown. This week when I went to Trader Joe's I was instantly drawn to this pink/purple color! I grabbed two varieties: Spray Roses $4.99 Alstroemeria $3.99

For this arrangement I chose a pretty, warm copper vase to compliment the magenta flowers. Since these flowers have a lot of width to them in that they take up a bit more area space and can spread out, I thought this size round vase would be great.

I always tape off my vase first so that it provides a structure and support for the stems!

Make sure to discard any leaves that will sit under the water on your blooms. If there are leaves under water, it'll create bacteria and make your flowers wilt quicker. This is also why changing the water is important!

I wasn't able to take step-by-step pictures, but what I did was put 1 stem of alstroemeria in each of the 4 tape quadrants. Then, to cover the tape lines better, I added 2 more stems in there. Then I placed the spray roses and tried to group them together. I don't like when the different flowers are so spread out it looks like polka dots, so I tried to incorporate them a little more than that. I also wanted the flowers to spread wider than the width of the vase, so they took up more area space. The last thing I'm conscious of is covering the tape lines on the side and giving it some height. You don't want to cut your flowers so short or all the same height, because then the arrangement falls flat and lifeless.

I braved the 20 degree weather to sneak a couple pictures outside for you ;) You can see here that I tried to pull some stems out a little more than others to offer different heights and textures.

The pink is just so lovely!! And the beauty of this is that usually I have enough flowers to do one larger arrangement and one smaller + even a budvase or two for my bathroom and nightstand. By choosing flower varieties that have a lot of "breaks" like the spray roses, and a lot of area space, like the alstroemeria, you get a big bang for your buck! And alstroemeria lasts forever!

My husband got me this little vase in my stocking, so I was very excited to put it to use :)

I snapped these a couple days after the really opened up!

I hope this inspires you to go pick up some flowers (these were under $10 total!) to bring some color and life into your home this week! Next month, I'm going to be showing you a couple Valentine's Day inspired flower arrangements with my friend Chelsea, who's also a flower enthusiast :) We're going to shoot it in her lovely new kitchen. You won't want to miss it! xoxo interior design website / services / portfolio

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