015: Flower Island

I was doing spring cleaning this past weekend and found a vase that I got from our friends' wedding that I totally forgot where I placed.  So I took the opportunity to used this vase as an inspiration of this week's WFT.  It's a shallow bowl that they used for center pieces.  We had the original plant (it was Japanese Peace Lily) for a while but it died when we went abroad.  We couldn't ask our cat sitter to sit plants as well... 

I went to Fleur de Lis this week for the first time in a while.  They had so many handsome flowers and I couldn't decide what to get again!  I got a stem of these pink flowers, which I forgot the name of, some purple Anemones and a stem of Dianthus.  My idea was to create an island with Dianthus in the center of the vase surrounded by water and the flowers were growing out of it.  Since we live in a condo and can't have a pond on our terrace, this is a quick alternative for a little urban oasis;)  I used a flower frog in the middle to make the island.  The vase was bigger than I thought compared to what I came back from the store, so I cheated a bit again and used my garden flowers.  I added Pansies and Phlox and made them floated on the water.  This is a trick I learned recently from a TV show to make an arrangement with a tight budget.  In the show, they used a mirror to reflect the floating petals.  I didn't have a large enough mirror to try it out but I thought it was quite brilliant and would like to try it sometime.

It was very quick from the start to finish but I am very satisfied with.  I think the key to make a quick good arrangement is not to have a very strong idea from the beginning.  If you do, then, you get stuck with what you want it to look like so much that you might kill the natural beauty of the flowers.  Now, the only concern that I have with this arrangement is my cats might try to drink water out of it!  Let's hope not.