009: Mini Bouquet Haute Couture

I was watching the Japanese TV channel at home on Monday afternoon playing with my son not knowing there was a new show starting.  It was called "Super Flower Lesson".  I could not believe what I was watching.  It's a show about flower arrangement taught by a famous French floral designer, Catherine Muller!!!  I kind of ignored my son and was staring at the TV for 25 minutes... This was exactly what I was looking for.  Anyhow, it showed who she was, her short bio, how she showcased her design in the grand lobby of The Paris Opera House for a charity event, etc.  It was so inspiring. Then, the program showed a lesson of how to create her signature piece "Bouquet Haute Couture".  It's a bouquet that she presented 10 years ago that made her famous.  It is a spherical bouquet of Calla Lilies, Christmas Roses and Anemone that keeps a long stem with some green Orchid cascading down even onto the bottom of the stem.  It was so nice to see an real floral designer showing how to do certain techniques, which I never knew.

So this week, I decided to make my own take of "Bouquet Haute Couture" with my $10 budget.  That was a real challenge.  I went to Fleur de Lis to see what they had this week.  They showed me hot pink Carnations first.  They were quite beautiful but I wanted to stick with materials that Catherine used in the show, so I asked how much the Callas were, which turned out to be a mistake...   They were $9 a stem!  I'm used to the grocery store price and didn't know how drastically the price can change.  So the whole Calla based bouquet idea was gone.  They showed me other interesting flowers that I was interested in but it was getting farther and farther away from what I was originally intending on doing.  So I started over again and decided to get the Carnations they recommended.  They were $1 a stem.  I got seven of those, a Tea Leaf and some Lily Grass.  I got a Tea Leaf so that I could wrap it on the stem to thicken it and Lily Leaves were the substitute of Ivy vines that Catherine used to tie the stems.

Luckily (;p) when I came back from the shop, my son was sleeping like a champ in the stroller, so I left him in it and started working on the bouquet.  I think with the small amount of flowers, I did pretty well on making them round and puffy.  The problems came after that.  Obviously, the Tea Leaf was way too big compared to the size of my bouquet, so I needed to split into two pieces to be able to wrap it around the stem.  Then I added the last flower at the bottom of the stem.  Then, the last thing was the Lily Grass...  I tried and tried to fasten the stem with them like the original one was with Ivy.  But I failed so badly.  Well, sometimes it just won't work.  I felt difficulties of working with live objects so much.  But I managed to put the grass in a glass vase and made them look like ballet shoes ribbons like she mentioned in the show.

It's probably better to have a bit higher budget to make a bouquet, but I really enjoyed it.  And most importantly, I learned a lot!!!