With Thanksgiving and holiday decorating right around the corner we thought it would be fun to create a centerpiece made entirely from easy to find items from your local supermarket. A clustered arrangement like this can be just a few components, made in minutes, and is festive without being too fussy- and you could also class it up with one of your nicer vases. We celebrated this fine fall day with pre-Thanksgiving bites and brown ale!
Our local chain supermarket was our starting point where we spotted a pretty oatmeal can on a holiday endcap. We decided to carry the can’s neutral palette into our flowers as well. We wandered the produce and flower section choosing a variety of items in brown, green, white, and a touch of rusty red. After tossing around ideas using wheat, radishes, kalanchoes, and chestnuts we narrowed our final selection to mushrooms and seckel pears, eucalyptus, fall leaves, cream mini-carnations, white alstroemeria, and paperwhites.
CLICK HERE for the full arrangement how-to after the jump!
We started the arrangement by creating a base with the leaves, loosely leaning them against the sides of the can. Next we removed the leaves from the seeded eucalyptus to give it a more pod-like texture. We made two small rubber-banded bundles and added them in so the lowest seeds started just below the top of the can. At this point the can should be full enough with foliage and seeds that things are not moving around too much (to make placement even easier you could use a flower frog or oasis in the bottom).
Next we inserted some wooden skewers into the mushrooms and pears at different angles to make their “stems”. We added them in through the seeds to look like they were growing out of the can in bountiful little groups.
We wanted to continue using low clustered elements rather than long spray stems so we needed to do a little alteration on our flowers. The mini carnations had long stems with buds, leaves, and flowers, so we just snipped off the open blossoms with stems at least three inches long. We removed all the leaves from the alstroemeria and separated the four small flowers. The paperwhites were good to go! Finally, we just added the blooms amongst the foliage and produce in little groupings. We cut the stems short and pressed in so the blossoms were resting on top of the foliage (with no stem exposed). Easy as pie. Mmmm pumpkin.
