DIY: Ombre Mini Carnation Arrangements

I’m so excited to introduce my first blog ‘series’ of sorts. When I was printing up my calendars for the year, I looked up all the holidays to fill in. The site I was looking at also had the monthly flowers… oh, yeah! I’ve expressed my LOVE for flowers before, so when I saw this I thought… what a great excuse to buy flowers!

Every month I’m going to put together an easy arrangement with the ‘flowers of the month’! There’s gorgeous arrangements out there and you could drop a pretty penny to get them, but it’s easy to make grocery store flowers beautiful too… it just takes a little time! No matter the budget, every house should be brightened by some fresh blooms. First up… carnations!

When I saw January was carnations, I had two thoughts: 1. That’s affordable! 2. So many childhood flashbacks. I’m not sure about you, but carnations were the staple grocery store bouquet that graced every family gathering, birthday, and mothers day growing up. My beautiful sister knows what I’m talking about!

Anyways… these ain’t your granny’s carnations. I love the bold look of solid colour arrangements and since carnations are so affordable… I could get more than one bunch! I chose three shades of pink mini-carnations for this (pink played well to my valentine making party!). And to hold them I got these gorgeous tealight holders on clearance at Target for $1.50 each! I couldn’t find the perfect vase… and fell in love with these. I love non-traditional containers for flowers… and chances are you have some tealight holders in your house to use!

So here’s what you’ll need to put together your own arrangement:
* Mini carnations in three coordinating colours
* Tealight holders or small vases (I used three)
* Floral foam
* Scissors
* Knife to cut floral foam
* Newspaper to make clean-up a breeze

Let’s get started! Set up your workspace by laying out newspaper and soaking floral foam. Once the foam is saturated, go ahead and cut it to fit your vessels. Make sure you have some height out of the top of the vessel. This will help you get the round, pouf look to your arrangement.

Clean up those flowers! Take all the leaves you can off the stems and cut each flower to a shorter length. Don’t worry if you think you’ve cut some a bit short… you’ll need them quite short to work with such small ‘vases’.

Get started placing your blooms in the floral foam. Cutting the stems on an angle will help them stick into the foam easily. I like to start with the larger blooms and space them around to get the shape I like, then fill in the spaces with smaller blooms.

It’s seriously that easy. And one solid colour mini-arrangement would be super-cute all on it’s own too! Even better? This whole endeavor rang in under twenty-bucks- including my ‘vases’! (Nothing’s that cheap in Canada y’all!) And PS- if you have a little helper, it makes the process so much more enjoyable.

I’d love to see your carnation creations!

XO -C