Easter Floral Arrangements

In preparation for Easter, several congregations from our church performed selections from Handel's Messiah last Sunday evening.  I was asked to make floral arrangements with an Easter flavor for the event, so I ordered bulk Asiatic lilies from Costco.com and mixed them with Queen Anne's lace and various foliage.  Above is one of the arrangements for the foyer tables.  It's not very noticeable, but I bent Arctic willow branches around the inside of the fishbowl vase and included a few branches from my contorted filbert to add a little more interest.

 

 

Here is the arrangement in place at the church with another tall vase of lilies.  The flowers set a nice tone for the event, which was beautifully performed by many singers and musicians.  Unlike Oriental lilies, which pack a pungent fragrance, Asiatic lilies have no scent.  That makes them a better choice for indoor settings where a strong scent might bother people.

 

For the inside of the chapel, I created two of these large pots with some of my houseplants draping across the front, a foam block with lilies set in the center, and a plastic container holding curly willow tucked into the back.  Curly willow is fabulous but has a mind of its own, so I convinced it to stay in the proper place by wiring the stem bases together and holding them upright with scotch tape across the top of their container.  Some of the stems are sending out roots into the water, so I'm planning to pot them up into large urns and cut them back to the base each spring to keep them from growing into trees.  Then I can have a ready supply of these interesting twigs.

 

I also put together these flowers in foam for the pulpit.  I'm not completely pleased with how they look - it seems that the shapes should connect together better somehow.  I bought a plastic foam cage from a florist shop that they often use for funeral sprays and used ribbon to hook it around the wood piece that juts out the front of the pulpit.  The next spray I make for this position will be bigger, and maybe the side arrangements should be set down a step? 

The lilies from Costco were a great deal - seventy stems of lilies with three to four blooms on each stem arrived at my doorstep on Tuesday.  They needed several days to sit in buckets while the buds opened before being displayed on Sunday.  I have decided that lilies are not my favorite flower, though, as it's difficult to avoid creasing the delicate petals when working with them.  This tall arrangement was for the food table, where it made a large impact without taking up much space.  I made a grid of scotch tape across the top of the vase, which made it a cinch to keep the lilies standing up in place.  I learned this trick from The Flower Recipe Book, by Alethea Harampolis and Jill Rizzo, and it's going to make arranging roses and many other flowers much easier.  If you're tired of stiff, static vases then this book is a great resource to learn how to use asymmetry and interesting materials to create flowing arrangements.