A New Way to Extend the Life of Cut Flower Arrangements

Since we’ve been working with Flower Muse on all of these pretty floral projects, I’ve been getting better and better at making my cut flowers last! Yes, there’s definitely a shelf life but there are also lots of little tricks you can use to extend the life of cut flowers. It just kills me after making a project like this one to toss the flowers when it’s done. I can’t bear it! So we came up with a little inspiration and created this unexpected floral arrangement using only flowers that had already been used in other projects — beautiful flowers that lots of people would just throw away. Here we go!

Materials

• florals (fresh or a little used, it’s okay either way!)
• a low dish
• scissors
• fresh water

Make Time: 10 Minutes

There really aren’t any right or wrong steps here so I’ll just describe what we did! We had lots of flowers left over from other projects where we had cut the stems short (these, these, and these are perfect examples). All of the flowers had been out of water for a few hours, cut up, wired, taped, and more. But the blooms themselves were still beautiful!

So. We trimmed the stems down to about 1 inch each, getting rid of any broken or soggy greenery. (When you trim, be sure to cut the stem on an angle to allow the flower to soak up maximum water.) Next, we filled a low dish (it’s actually a serving platter) with about a half-inch of water. Finally, we just started filling the dish with the florals until it was chock full of blooms!

This arrangement lasted for another 5 or 6 days, and I was so glad we decided to start salvaging these blooms! To really make them last, change the water daily with fresh, cold water and remove any flowers that start to go bad.

I kind of love this new take on a floral arrangement anyway — it’s so unexpected in a dish, and it wasn’t annoying me by getting in the way of the person sitting across the table while we were trying to talk. Hooray all around! xoxo

Flowers for this post graciously provided by Flower Muse.