I love flowers! I wish I could have freshly cut stems in my house every day. I was introduced to the world of flowers when I was a senior in college when I persuaded my painting professors to let me do an internship in a local flower shop. It was an invaluable experience, where I was submersed in an environment filled with colors, textures, and problem solving.

Although I can not claim to have the skills of a florist, flowers have become a part of my home and certainly my entertaining.

So remember that Winter Chocolate Gingerbread Cake I made for a baby shower? Well these are the flowers for that shower, which I soon will share all the little details!

I usually get my flowers from Trader Joes, and occasionally my local Hy-vee. The flowers I chose for this project were a white carnation, hypernicum berries, blue thistle, and seeded eucalyptus.

I never liked carnations, because they would make me think of my elementary school, where we would buy them for our moms for valentines day. But I realized if you pair carnations with varying textures and colors, they can look quite nice and soft.

I started out by putting water in all of my vases. I love these simple glass vases that my husband gave me. He actually used them in his proposal to me. I’ve used them so many times and every time I use them, I thank him and tell him how much I love them.

See that lovely chandelier of candles 😉 Those are the vases I used!

The next step is to make a sample arrangement so I can know what I’m going for. They don’t all have to look exactly the same, but here you can see I want my finished arrangement to have eucalyptus, some berries, one carnation, and one thistle.

I started with my greens (eucalyptus) and I put one little clump of them in each vase.

I added a thistle.

I then add some berries.

Lastly, I add the carnation.

After all of the flowers were distributed among the vases, I went back in and trimed them if I needed to, to get the right shape, and heights of the stems.

I can’t wait to show you how pretty these looked at the baby shower! The best part was that the Mama got to take all of the flowers home with her when the party was over!