Grocery Store Flowers

I love having fresh flowers in our house (it always feels so fancy!), but the habit can get expensive.

One of the tricks I've been doing lately is buying the (sometimes cheesy) assorted bunches that are usually $3-$5 and then breaking the flowers up into different vases.

It's so much more fun than having just a dozen stems of one kind of flower. I end up with four or five different arrangements that I can split up around the house or group together.

I pick up little vases and containers at thrift stores and flea markets all the time, so it's fun to have an excuse to pull them out and actually use them on a regular basis.

How often do you splurge on fresh flowers? I love to get tulips and daffodils in the spring because they seem to last forever, especially if I can remember to change the water every couple of days. And I still love doing my grocery store roses trick.

DIY Splatter Vase (and a Trick for Grocery Store Roses!)

When I was leaning over the paint counter, thinking about what colors I'd like to add to my bedroom, I thought an oxblood red would be the perfect balance to the new green lamps and the Knoxville Gray walls. I usually have something of every color in my extra tchotchkes/accessories closet (we all have one, right?), but this time I was coming up a little short in the oxblood red department.

So I swung by the craft store and picked up a plain, clear glass vase for about $3. They have these vases everywhere - even the grocery store. And they make the perfect base for customizing (hello! - great gift idea!). Here's the how-to:

I wanted a splatter pattern on my vase, so for the first layer, I grabbed a bottle of black nail polish and sort of carefully whacked the brush around the rim of the vase.

This enamel spray paint from Rustoleum is the perfect color of oxblood. It so glossy and deep - love it.

I wrapped the outside of the vase with a grocery bag and sealed it up with painters tape along the top edges of the rim

Then I sprayed the inside of the vase with the red color. Don't go too heavy with the paint here. You want to coat all the glass evenly, but it looks prettier if the light can still get through the layer of paint.

Just like Christmas morning!

The oxblood pairs so well with the pinks and purples in my favorite lady portrait and in the pink grocery store roses.

Also, here's a little trick for getting cheap $10/dozen bodega roses to look more like garden roses. 

To loosen the buds a little, put them in some warm water for an hour or two and then use your fingers to help them open a little more. If you put your fingers in a pinching position and sort of spread them from the center of the bud, they'll open up beautifully! And if you do it gently, there won't be any damage to the petals. Also I think they live just as long as before this way, especially if you're good about changing the water every other day or so. I can usually get my flowers to last about two weeks that way.

The roses are so much more pretty this way, don't you think? Hard to beat $10 for a pretty arrangement that last for weeks!

Oh, and some of you were asking about our flip clock. It was an Amazon purchase! Takes some work to get it going, but it's cute and fun!

Holiday Decorating with Lowe's

Happy Thanksgiving!! Tomorrow is Christmas decorating day for us. We're putting up our tree and hanging lights outside - the girls are unbelievably excited!

I got to practice my holiday decorating skills a couple weeks ago when Lowe's invited me to come to New York for an event with a few other bloggers. We had SO much fun using products from Lowe's and a few other stores to decorate spaces in a mock house built in a giant loft space in Chelsea.

Each of us was asked to decorate one of the "rooms" in the house (with less than a day to execute most of it!), and I got to decorate the foyer space. There were a few logistical hiccups and some pieces I had selected for the room didn't arrive in time for the event, so it was a little more sparse than I would have liked, but I still really like the way the room turned out. Lowe's has a ton of great pieces in their holiday section this year, as well as in their regular decor section, like these adorable suzani-style pillows:

and these cool vessel lamps that I filled with painted nutcrackers!

The Lowe's team helped me make frames out of gold ornaments for some oval shaped mirrors just by stringing the ornaments on a wire and gluing them down around the edges. Turned out cute, right?

And on the front door, which was painted the prettiest shade of mustard yellow, we made a simple garland out of assorted Lowe's holiday decor. Lowe's has really gorgeous sparkly decorations in gold and silver tones that were bendable and easy to twist around each other for a quick garland.

The silhouettes were paper cut-outs from textured paper I picked up at Paper Presentation (which is the best paper and party supply place in the city, btw). I thought the gold and silver foil Santa hats were fun. 

I think flowers are always a great way to decorate for an occasion or during the holiday season, and, really, I love any excuse to shop the flower district shops (Dutch Line and Jamali, both on 28th St, are my favorites). I went with flowers and leaves with sort of a wintery feel in color and texture. My favorites are the purple thistles.

I found the oil slick vases at Jamali and I love how they look on the lavender-gray mirrored console that the people at Lowe's made for me.

I found this trophy also at Jamali and used it for a flower arrangement that I put on the little Saarinen table we used in the center of the foyer. I used a little snowflake bowl from Lowe's and a stamped silver platter to hold holiday cards.

The artichokes in the arrangements are so pretty and unexpected. I love adding big and unique elements like that, especially in bigger arrangements, to help flowers look less stuffy and formal.

My lovely friend Gabrielle from Design Mom decorated the front yard area. She was waiting here for the Kitchen Cousins to be ready to film her interview segment and I made her strike a pose for me.

The painted floors were a little dirty by this point in the evening (lots and lots of dirty footsteps from the rain), but I love the colors.  (You can't really tell from these photos, but the lines are actually a series of concentric rectangles.)

These ombre Christmas trees were my favorite project from the day though. Lowe's has really great ornaments this year in all shades of white and silver that made for the perfect base for painting.

I picked out four or five paint colors in different shades of turquoise and teal, and had quarts made of each. Gloss stays on the best, but flat looks really pretty too.

My sweet sister- and brother-in-law let me crash their apartment to spread out a little and paint the ornaments. I separated the ornaments in equal size piles and made sure there were roughly the same number of each style of ornament in each pile.

I dipped the ornaments in the paint, but intentionally didn't dip the whole ornament on most of them. I stopped at varying levels so that they wouldn't look uniform.

I hung them up on those cheapie tension rods and let them drip dry for a few hours before the event.

Then I hung the ornaments from white to dark peacock blue on the two white trees I placed in front of the windows in the space. I LOVE how this turned out and it was so easy!

I wanted to have the trees in big planters here, but they didn't arrive in time for the event. No problem, though - the look is a bit more modern without the planters or a tree skirt. :)

Ooh - and I almost forgot to mention the seven Moravian hanging stars that we grouped over the Saarinen table. Aren't they gorgeous? They're made of thick white plastic instead of paper so should last for years and years of holiday decorating!

Anyway, it was a fun event! A big thanks to Lowe's for inviting me to participate! I think I'm now sufficiently warmed up to tackle decorating my own house tomorrow. Just as soon as I sleep off all of the Thanksgiving food I ate today... :)

DIY Autumnal Garland

The year after I moved away for college, my parents moved about 2.5 hours north of Phoenix. The small town that they moved to was the place we had visited every summer and Thanksgiving for most of my childhood. It was where my dad grew up and where my grandparents had always lived. It's a special little place in the high desert, and the drive up there from the Valley takes you through all sorts of beautiful Arizona scenery.

Michael had to work over Veteran's Day weekend (boo) so I decided to take the girls up to visit my parents. The weather was perfect and the sky was that perfect color of winter blue. I've always loved the desert, but I think I can appreciate its unique beauty even more after living on the east coast for a decade.

On the way back home, the girls and I decided to collect samples of some of the plants and foliage along the road back down to Phoenix. We found everything from sage to juniper (with pretty little blue berries!) to gorgeous maple leaves in every shade from red to yellow.

I was surprised that we were able to collect something from every color in the rainbow in less than two hours of driving. How could I resist making an ombre garland with all those pretty colors?

Here's the easy how-to:

I've made a few wreaths with evergreen boughs before and the concept is very similar for a garland. It couldn't be simpler or much less expensive (it was actually free for me since I had the floral supplies on hand already).

To make a similar garland, you'll need a good collection of leaves and plants. Try to find plants that are either already pretty dry or that will dry out well (flowers usually do not dry that well). It can get a little messy, so try organizing everything on a canvas drop cloth to make clean up easy.

Here are a few things I used:

You'll for sure want two thicknesses of floral wire, wire clippers and floral shears. The Dried Material Preservative (available at craft stores) is optional, but is actually pretty helpful for keeping the brittle, dry plants more soft and pliable. And actually I've been giving my garland a light misting with this stuff every few days, just to give it a little more life.

So, I would say the trickiest part here is figuring out the flow of the garland. I wanted mine to have a gradient or ombre look, so it took a little planning to get the right plants with the right color in the right area of the swag so there was a good balance to the thing. I knew I wanted the juniper berries in the middle though, and the red leaves in the corners and the white grass at the ends, so then it was just a matter of filling in the rest.

Once all your foliage is ready to go, and you have a good sense of how long your finished garland will be (mine is about 15 ft long), measure out three equal lengths of thick floral wire and then braid the wire. It doesn't have to be perfect at all - and don't stress if the wires get a little tangled. The idea is you want a thicker but still pliable surface to tie the flowers to.

I used two of those stick-on hooks (in black, to match my fireplace) in the corners of the mantle. I looped the braided wire around the hook and sort of pinched it to help the wire stay put. If you want the finished garland to swoop down a little in the center, let the wire sag just a bit here, but not too much. The weight of the foliage will pull it down several more inches.

Then it's time to start layering on the foliage. The most important part is to start at the bottom and layer on top of each little bundle and work your way to the center.

To make each bundle, you just layer the foliage in your hand in a pretty way so that there are no gaps or blunt lines. And then you hold the bundle up against the braided wire and wrap it three or four times with the smaller gauge floral wire, just around the base of the bundle, mostly. For the lighter foliage, I used gold wire and for the greenery I pulled out my dark green wire.

Once I finished layering on one half of the garland, I started at the bottom of the other side, trying to copy the layout exactly. When both halves are finished, you should be left with two mirror-image symmetrical swags. I think it would look a little funny if you don't have a center piece that is sort of bunched up and less layered looking. So I made a little end cap for the very center out of more juniper bush. I used floral tape to sort of bunch and fan out some shorter pieces, and then attached it with wire just like with the other bundles.

Also, and I didn't end up needing to do so here, but if you've lost a lot of leaves in the process, you can strategically hot glue a few leaves back on to help fill things out a bit.

Finally, you can sort of bend and tug at the wire to get it to look right and you're done! It's easy and fun and only takes an hour or two. My garland has been up for about a week and a half and I think it'll still look great for Thanksgiving next week! The only plant that's shed at all is the soft gray sagebrush in the middle, and it's not been bad at all.

I'm already dreaming of ideas for a winter palette of all blues and greens and grays for my next garland. Maybe a double swag!