Jean Shea: Hi, I am Jean Shea with Shea Studio Interiors and we are showing you how to create a beautiful holiday home. The next thing on our agenda is to create a center piece. You are going to start out with a very shallow dish, a sticky floral clay, scissors, snips, wire cutters, some wire, floral picks that are wired, various and assorted picks, red-berries, we have some greens, floral foam which is called oasis and water and we also have some fresh flowers. These are Gerbera Daisies are they are very, very pretty and they are very, very red.

So, that is what we are going to start with and the first thing I am going to do, is take my floral foam which is called oasis, put it in the water and just let it, just let the water soak up into the foam. You will see that in the oasis, there are holes on the bottom, you put the holes down. I am going to take some of the sticky clay, put it at the bottom of my dish and just peel my tape up, it s very sticky. When all the water soaks up through the foam, then we are going to stick it on that sticky and then we will start placing items. What we want to do is, we want to have the center piece go horizontal, so it does not block people s view. So, generally I like to try to determine how big I want that spread, so maybe we want to get it about two feet. So, we know that none of the flowers are going to be longer than two feet, so let s just go ahead and cut this one. So let s pick our greens, you want to clip, you want to clip a lot of this, a lot of this junk off the bottom. So, you have not, you do not get a whole lot of bulk and you have something that will go into the oasis.

I am going to take my foam which is pretty well saturated now and I am just going to stick it right here on my clay. So, I am going to put this in, want to go a little bit more horizontal. I like to put things in one side then the next side, so I can constantly be making adjustments for to keep it even. We are going to start out with some really heavy links and then we are going to make them smaller. Like some of these little pieces are great fillers, so do not get rid of them. Okay, so I have a pretty much the kind of the shape that I want which is long and spread-out, I am going to grab some of the berries and fine one that has sort of a natural curve to it. Stick that in and it does not have to be symmetrically there, it can be very asymmetrical, we do not like matchy-matchy. I am tucking some gold in there, just to reinforce the theme and they do not have to be matchy-matchy, but I am kind of going left-right, left-right, so that, I can keep it balanced. Now, these Gerbera Daisies, they are very fragile at the neck, so generally when you see them, you will see that they have a neck protector. Sometimes, I leave it on because I want them to not flop over. You do not have to use a whole lot to get a big impact, so, I am just going to use a couple and then I will fill in with more greens, this is going to flow over that way. You just intersperse those with the big red ones and you just sort of work in your way to the middle, more red flowers. Now, with this one, I am actually going to add a pick because at this point, I am running out of floral foam and these stems are really too thick. So, you just wrap this around your flower and just place it in there and then it stays put. This is how you create your center piece. Next, we are going to decorate a fire place mantle.