Styling a Manly Flower Arrangement

Women are usually the only people who care about having flowers at a party.  I bet there are also a zillion men out there who can't understand the importance of having flowers, even at a wedding (um, hello. decor for the photos and a table arrangement will give your guests something to look at rather than awkwardly staring across the table at another guest they probably don't know).  When I threw Mr. 3 a bourbon party for his birthday back in January, he specifically requested no decorations...HOWEVER, I'm pretty sure that's because I hadn't thought up the idea of having a liquor bottle arrangement!  Now, I think we are all well aware of how nice flowers can look in wine bottles, but I don't think that I've seen much in the realm of liquor bottles.

Please excuse the banged up table...I had yet to finish ironing my tablecloth that day.

Let me tell you, this is probably the easiest and cheapest flower arrangement you will ever make (minus the cost of the liquor of course).  I waited until we three empty booze bottles, which mind you, I have been collecting for the past 6 months...NOT the past 6 days.



The openings for the bottles are quite narrow, so I knew I wouldn't need very many flowers and they had to have small stems and bigger blooms in order to work.

So, I picked up a bouquet of pom poms for $4.99 at Safeway.  I decided to stick with white so the flowers didn't clash with the labels aaaand because pink and purple didn't seem so mantastic to me. 

Because the bottle necks are so slim, it's best to cut your stems really short.  I cut the thick part of the stem off of all the pom poms to start out, but because pom poms grow as groups of blooms (meaning several buds connected to individual thin stems, but are bunched together and connected to one larger stem) you will need to further cut them down and separate them out for this arrangement.  After separating each bloom, I trimmed the stems down to about 3 inches and removed any leafy bits still hanging around (if you don't take care of them and they get into the water, things get murky fast!).

  

After thoroughly washing out the bottles for any lingering liquor, I filled my bottles with room temp water, leaving only the neck of the bottle free.  It's best to use room temp water for flowers because cold water can shock the blooms.  I grabbed a couple of big blooms and put them in the bottle first, then worked in some smaller blooms, and finally put the buds in last.  By working in this order, the bigger blooms supported the buds and kept them from falling into the bottle.  I kept working the blooms in until I couldn't get any more into the neck to make the arrangement super fluffy.

I repeated with the other two bottles until I had this fun, fluffy display!

The best part about this arrangement is that it was sooooo cheap.  I made three bottle arrangements using $4.99 bouquet and had enough left over to put in a vase with three sunflowers.  I think you could easily get 6-8 bottle arrangements out of a decent sized bouquet.  This arrangement was also super easy to make!  I think it took me about 30 mins and that included washing out the bottles and stopping to take pictures.

I don't think I would suggest this for a wedding centerpiece, but it would be a really cute way to display the types of liquor being served at your wedding or celebration wherever you have your bar station set up.  I could also see setting up a display for the ingredients in a signature cocktail.  For example, if you were serving a Jack Daniels Honey Lemonade (which is just Jack Daniels Tennessee Honey, lemonade, and a cherry garnish), you could create a flower arrangement in the bottle and display a bowl of lemons next to a sign for your cocktail.  This is definitely man friendly too and could easily be used at any man's birthday party or BBQ.  Mr. 3 came home after I had finished making the arrangements and he thought they were "pretty great" (love that man!).

Anyone else ever recycled their booze bottles into a vase?  If so, we'd love to see pictures!

***This is not a sponsored post.  We were not compensating in anyway, including free booze or flowers, to write this article.  We just like sharing easy and inexpensive ideas with our Posh Purpose Readers!***