Holiday Centerpieces-Silver & White Centerpiece

Suzanne Taylor: My name is Suzanne Taylor of Artistic Gardens, Flower Shop and Greenhouse, St. Johnsbury, Vermont. I am a professional florist and I am going to show you how to make a formal arrangement all in white and silver with candles, very stunning, very formal, and striking for Christmas.

You will need some green sticks, corsage tape, oasis tape, glass millimeter balls, some silver ribbon, either white or silver candles. We have an assortment of greens here, incense cedar, white pine, seeded eucalyptus, balsam, and variegated holly. Our container is just a utility container, very shallow, nothing fancy.

So we first cut our oasis to fit the container after its been soaked. We now have one piece and the other piece has to be a little bit shorter to fit in this one. It goes right in there and I dont want them to topple out, especially with candles. So I am going to tape it in two places because I have used two blocks, two pieces. That way I dont have so much waste.

Great way to do the candles, if you dont have a holder for them. Its just another added expense but if you want to keep the cost down, pare a point into the candle and then you can stick it directly into the foam. Be sure to get it nice and straight. So I will pare the other one down. I will take the wrappers off later because my hands are full of pitch and I dont want to get it on the candles. It will show up rather dirty.

Now the flowers that we are going to use in this one have a little bit weaker stem. We are going to be using snapdragons, roses, and Bells of Ireland. Now before I go any further, I want to get these Bells of Ireland in here. So you just cut it off at the length you want. This is going to be quite long so I am going to put two on this end to give it the length that I want and one on this because we dont want to have it to be just symmetrical. Keep going till you get it fairly full.

We can start putting some of those incense cedar in and it takes up a lot of space. Take off all the excess greens, put that in. Well go with a little bit of white pine. This adds some fabulous texture to it. Just insert them here and there; there is no set way thats right or wrong. We are going to put a few roses in it. These are nice long stem of white roses. They dont have the lasting power of carnations but they are very rich and they certainly do add a lot to an arrangement at Christmas time.

We are going to put a little bit of ribbon in this; we are going to make a bow. We just pinch it together, and we kind of weave it back and forth like this, and I am going to make two long tails to make the center part, and then the last loop, like so. This is wired ribbon too so it will hold its shape and its forgiving, if you need a little help making a bow.

This is where you use your sharp scissors. Cut of the excess, take a piece of wire, wire it around, put it on one of your sticks, wrap it around, and then we will make some dove tails here. You take it, fold it in half this way, fold it in half that way, and then just make a diagonal cut, and then when you get done, you have what we call dove tails. This would go in here, slightly to one side. We will fluff it up, like so, and then we are going to take some of these millimeter balls. Put them on sticks, just twist it around, stick them. This is also good for New Years. So you get double beauty out of it. Yeah, I just wrap those around, and then you have your glittering corner.

The next arrangement we are going to make will be an all greenery arrangement in a rustic basket with cones, and millimeter balls, and ribbons; no flowers. So this is something anybody can do. You can go out and gather your greenery. It saves you a lot of money; its a fun one to do.