When we were preparing for our flower arrangement workshop a couple of months ago, I went to Amazon and found “The Flower Workshop” book by Ariella Chezar, and I went nuts. It looked divine. (I know divine is a cheesy word, but there is only so many times you can you use words like amazing, awesome, great, and wonderful in a blog before you start to sound brainless).

I pressed the BUY IMMEDIATELY button, and then proceeded to wait next to my door for the flower bible to arrive… but days went by and nothing happened. I started to freak out and signed in to Amazon again only to find that the book was available for PRE ORDERS ONLY!! Can you believe it? Has this ever happened to you???? I felt deceived and angry, so I closed the computer, ate some candy and went on with my life.

The flower arrangement workshop we did for our friends came and went, and days later, without trumpets nor drums, a box from Amazon arrived. I opened it (…be still my heart… ) and found the best book about flower arrangements that I have ever seen in my whole entire existence. Here are a couple of pictures because this is so cute!

Every page of this book is amazing, awesome, great, wonderful and divine!!! The only problem is that now I HAVE to replicate every single one of these arrangements, and talent is not on my side.

With this in mind, and a lot of wishful thinking, I went to the flower market in DTLA last Saturday. I took Víctor with me. Big mistake. Children and flower shopping don’t go together without a high dose of stress, so I had to hurry and buy whatever flowers looked good with the hope that I could make them work later.

Once at my place, I got some vases, a pair of clippers, and sat in our outdoor room to do arrangements all afternoon while listening to music. Dream. (This also happens to be my father’s favorite activity, so I thought a lot about him while doing this.)

The results looked nothing like what Ariella did in her book. I did not try to replicate any of her arrangements, but went with the flow and did what looked good to me. Also, I wasn’t thinking about doing a post about this, so I didn’t take photos of the whole process. If you are a blogger, you know it is nice not have to capture photos of everything you do sometimes.

At the end of the day I had three flower arrangements. The first arrangement was the one that took me the longest. Here it is:

It turned out kind of cute. Organic, with flow, and nice colors.

Flower ingredients:

• 4 yellow and pink dahlias.
• 5 white and pink alstroemeria
• 8 short yellow acacia tree
• 1 pink snapdragon flower
• 30 purple Astrantia flower
• 2 White wax flower branches

Here is the second arrangement:

Kind of unusual, but I really liked it.

For this arrangement I used:

• 10 Cherry blossoms branches
• 40 pink carnations

And here is the third arrangement, or, what I like to call the “leftover” arrangement, where you use any flowers you have left, and don’t worry about the consequences:

For this arrangement I used:

• 7 pink Snapdragons
• 4 white wax flowers branches

Lessons learned:

-To do a full arrangement you need a LOT of flowers. Don’t underestimate the number of flowers you will need if you want to go big.

-It is very important to look at the shape of the flowers when you are buying them. Make sure you don’t only get flowers that go straight up. You need flowers or branches that fall too.

– Start with the bigger flowers that are the center of your piece.

I can’t recommend this book enough. It gives great tips, it has beautiful pictures and it is a pleasure to look at. Also, it inspired me to do all these arrangements. In little words, it made me very, very happy. The only thing I wish it had is more step by step instructions for the arrangements.

(This post is not sponsored, though I wish it were. :))