Rebecca Henry: Hi, I am Rebecca and today we are learning how to make a wedding centerpiece. In this clip, we will be doing a really simple arrangement using glass arranging beads to hold your flowers in place. First, we want to take the glass arranging beads. You can buy these at a craft store, they come in a lot of different colors, so that might be something you want to incorporate into your arrangement and your vase. I have chosen a square glass vase here, but even a cylinder would be fine. Glass is a good choice when you are using arranging beads so you can see them in your vase.

You want to put them in here and you want them to fill about half way up the vase, then add water and then we could start arranging our flowers. The flowers I have selected here today are in shades of pink and white and we have got roses, ivory French tulips, hot pink Ranunculus, a spring flower, we didn't talk about earlier, Dutch tulips and stock. So you want to start by taking any of the flowers, but I usually like to start with some of the bigger flowers like stock or roses. You want to make sure you take off the greenery from the flowers. You don't want to leave any greenery on your flowers in your arrangement because the greenery in the water will start to get mucky and add bacteria to the water and then your flowers will eventually die because the bacteria will clog up the ends of your stems.

You want to start by cutting the flowers to a certain length and you will have to sort of play with the length. What's the right length? This is going to take some practice and you want to drive the stem or the flower down into the vase. Now I am looking at this and I am thinking that's going to be too long because it have got a lot of empty stem here. So I am going to cut a little bit more off and you will use the arranging bead to hold this flower in place. See it will stand up pretty well. So in putting together your arrangement one of the first things you want to think about is balance. You want to think about where the flowers are in the arrangement and well, as we see as different flowers get into the arrangement we will start to see that come together, but we want to make sure that you don't have too many flowers of one kind clustered in one spot. You want to spread them out in the arrangement so that they are balanced throughout the arrangement.

The other thing to think about is the shape of the arrangement. You don't want too much stuff sticking out this way and it all tucked in down here. You want to think about it being a nice, round dome. Even if things stick out a little bit, you still want to think about it to forming a dome. The way I like to think about it is taking like a glass bowl and inverting it over the top, an imaginary glass bowl of course and inverting it over the top of the arrangement and then filling that space in there with your flowers. If you can visualize it that way, that's the best way to get that nicely shaped arrangement that's not going to have an imbalance of like something sticking out this way and something sticking out down there and all squished down on in one corner. That will avoid that.

So let me put in one more piece of stock, take off the greenery and these are holding up really nicely there. We will start putting in some roses. As far as how many flowers to plan for, for your arrangements. An arrangement like this if you aren't using any greenery in it and just flowers alone, you will need to plan for at least 20-30 different flowers depending on the size of the flowers. I know that sounds like a lot and it is, but unfortunately, that's how much it takes. You really need -- the more flowers you have, the better you are going to fill the vase and the better things are going to come together.

Let's put in some of this hot pink Ranunculus and you will see how the color really looks great against these other colors. Oh, that's nice. It is a nice pink, this bright pink and now we just want to fill in the holes and that's it and we have a beautiful centerpiece of just flowers. It only took a few minutes to make.

Next, I will be showing you a technique of how to make an arrangement completely in your hand. We can make the wedding centerpiece in your hand and then put it right into the vase.