Pottery Barn Floral Arranging Class

This Sunday I attended the Pottery Barn decorating class on the Art of Botanical Arranging. Pottery Barn is one of my all time favorite stores for great home decor accessories and beautiful very real looking faux flowers. They also have great decorating classes every month. Some of my favorites are when they have classes on setting tablescapes for all the holidays. Here I learned some great ideas for real or faux flower arranging and using items from Pottery Barn or perhaps things you have in your own home or backyard.


The first idea was on arranging large stems or branches in a large vase. They recommended using an odd number of branches because it ends up looking better visually. You can criss-cross the branches into the vase and keep adding until it looks full enough. Also with the faux flowers you can bend and move the branches to help them to have more depth.
Here is a mid-sized vase and flowers. This arrangement works best in a cylindrical vase rather than square. With square vases you always need a larger grouping of flowers to fill in the vase.

You may not be able to see what this is clearly but they gave the suggestion of using a pop bottle with the top cut off and placing it inside the square vase in order to hold the flowers together better. I love this idea! It is inexpensive and easy.

They also suggested taking floral tape or even scotch tape if that's all you have at home and making a grid with the tape at the top of the vase to hold each flower in place. This is such a great idea if you get home with a bunch of flowers but they just don't fill out the vase well.


These hydrangeas are one of my favorites. They fit really well into square vases since they're such a full flower. The faux flower stems needed to be bent in these vases, which doesn't look very good, so you can add a fun vase filler. Here, on the left, they used faux limes and moss and it looked beautiful.

Other vase fillers suggestions were to find something at a local market to fill in the bottom of the vase.
Here they used a large leaf to wrap around the stems of these flowers in the bottom of the vase.


This is one of Pottery Barn's new lanterns with large branches. You could use real branches here again by using a large soda bottle with the top cut off and filled with water placed inside the lantern.



This arrangement has some larger flowers in the center and the tallest part of the arrangement, then going down and out from there are the smaller purple flowers. You start with the tallest in the middle and work down from there.

They also recommended finding different things around your home to use as vases like pitchers, creamers, shot glasses, etc. You could use shot glasses, creamers, tiny bud vases for place cards at a table.

Here they have even used a coffee cup with some faux and some real flowers. You can use just greenery which is really pretty on it's own as well.

If you ever get a chance to check out a Pottery Barn decorating class I would recommend it! You get a 10% discount on anything you buy that day as well. You can find the next class in your area by checking out www.potterybarn.com.