Posh Purpose: Styling a Baby Bouquet

My friend Tara delivered the sweetest little baby boy a few weeks ago.  Mr. 3 is craaaazy for babies and we immediately went over to visit the newborn at only three days old.  I wanted to bring my good friend a flower arrangement and I decided to try my hand at styling a bouquet for a baby.

I bought all of my flowers from Safeway and used a clear vase I already owned. 

Supplies

Bouquet vase

4 types of flowers - one large fluffy bloom, a medium fluffy bloom, and two smaller blooms

1 small baby balloon from the floral department

Ribbon

I picked up a pack of large hydrangeas with three stems, medium sized green hydrangeas with 5 stems, and two packs of mini carnations. I decided to do the main blooms in more "boy" colors with green and blue, but since I was sending these to a new mama, I added in some pink accents.  I put my arrangement together on Friday when I heard that the baby had been born in order to give the flowers time to open up before we visited on Sunday.

I started by trimming all the stems at an angle and prepping the vase with room temp water and plant food.  I put the largest blooms and the medium blooms with all of the leaves that were above the water line still intact (leaves below the water line = yucky, murky water).  

I moved the blooms around until they were evenly spaced and then began filling in with clusters of mini-carnations.

Once I had everything packed in, I added in my baby balloon.  I also eyeballed the arrangement and removed the hydrangea leaves that I thought looked a little wonky.  I liked the color and extra fullness that they added to the arrangement, but I didn't want my arrangement to look like a crazy overgrown wildabeast, so I removed the ones that looked "off."

Finally, I found some scrap white ribbon and tied a bow around the neck of the vase for a bit of extra festive fun (also, it's a gift...don't all gifts need bows?).

 Because I had the scrap ribbon and vase, this flower arrangement only cost about $23 (I had an e-coupon through Safeway for the carnations!).  If you had to add those costs in, you would probably be looking at about $35 if you had to buy the vase at the grocery store (but check Dollar Tree and the thrift stores...you can always find cheap vases!).  I also had enough leftover carnations to make two small arrangements for myself!  I tend to spend more money on flowers that take up a lot of room, but may only come with a few stems (like hydrangeas, lilies, peonies) and then using cheaper blooms that usually come in large quantities for fill in (like carnations and mums).

This is a great project to try your first attempt at flower arranging because you can make it really low cost and you don't need anything special like floral foam.  If you live close enough to take visit your friend or family member, making your own bouquet is also waaaaaaay cheaper and more personal than ordering flowers online.  You could easily use these same Posh Purpose styling tips to make bouquets for birthdays and other celebrations, or to cheer someone up as a get well present  (Safeway had several choices for balloons for every occasion).  Anyone else made any pretty bouquets lately?  We would love to see them, so feel free to email them to us at poshpurpose@gmail.com!