Suzanne Taylor: My name is Suzanne Taylor of Artistic Gardens, Flower Shop and Greenhouse of St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I am a professional florist and I am going to show you how to make a centerpiece with basket and candy cans. Its a whimsical one, a nice country style, and I think you will like it.

So the tools that you are going to need are green sticks, corsage tape, oasis tape, a red ribbon, glass balls, candy cans. You get these in the regular store; they are the kinds you eat, and some white tipped pine cones, some balsam, white pines, variegated holly, red miniature carnations, large red carnations, and white fuji poms, and a block of oasis.

We soak this, Ill drop it in the water. It goes whole side down. You just drop it in and it soaks, and then it comes up. After it's soaked, you take it out, place it in a container, use your floral tape to tape it down, you use a sharp knife to cut off the excess tape, then you start with your evergreens. Strip the stems of the excess needles, places them in there. This one is going to be fairly tall. Its great to have on a coffee table or a side table. It also does well on the kitchen table; except when you are eating, its a little bit tall for that but centerpieces have lots of different places.

So you just strip it and insert. We start with the balsam once again because its a fairly inexpensive green and it goes along ways. Once you have the oasis covered with the evergreens, well go on to another green such as the white pine. You want to make sure you cover all the mechanics not just the foam. We are using tips and all these little pieces can be used and inserted.

Its good to turn it around also so you can see whats on the backside if youve missed a spot. Variegated holly, put a couple of pieces of that in there. Now we are going to take our ribbon. I am going turn this back around this way and we insert it here. The candy cans, you want to take with a stick and your corsage tape, and you are going to just like -- when you wrap anything with it, you just go right around it, like that to get a nice firm wrap. That will give it the extra length it needs and also keep it out of the water. That way these are still addable.

You put some in, in various places. I have some nice white cones, they can go in, like so; and some red balls, these can go -- you can put them on a stick, if they are not going to be long enough. On another stick -- you just wrap this wire right around the stick and insert them here and there throughout the arrangement.

Then well take our main flower which is going to be the large red carnations. We are going to put three of them in this one, one on the side, one to the center, and the other one slightly to the back so its not uniformed. Then well take the miniature carnations and stick those in. Just find your oasis as you are going, not that hard, and to make it a little bit more festive we are going to use white fuji poms.

One stand probably will be sufficient. You dont want to over stuff; you want to be able to see the greenery in these. Its quite striking. These are very long lasting arrangements for the holidays, carnations would go a good week or more, same thing with the poms. There you have a nice festive candy can basket, and the next arrangement we are going to do is going to be an all white and silver arrangement, a very formal with two candles.