home decorating ideas pottery barn
pottery barn easy updates with nico de swert hello, i'm nico de swert, i am a floral designer and an interior stylist, one of the biggest trends right now in interior design is bringing some organic materials into your home such as these beautiful heavy woven baskets from pottery barn. to protect your basket we're going to line it with plastic liner, in this case i've used a heavy garbage bag that i've just cut down to the height of my basket, and to secure it to the basket, we're using a piece of
paper covered floral wire from your florist or your garden center. um, you just cut off a piece, it's about four or five inches long, uh, depending on the thickness of the rim of your basket. so the next step is to find a container in your home that will be suitable as a vessel for your flower arrangements. in this case i found two champagne buckets, and they are perfect for this basket, just fill them up with water, put some flower food in there, and you're ready to go to make the arrangement. i'm gonna show you an arrangement for this basket, so i'm gonna put this away quickly,
over there. the liner that i'm going to use for this basket is just a simple galvanized bucket, that i have laying around, i've filled it up with water all the way to an inch from the rim, and i also added some cut flower food to get the most out of your flowers. um, so the flowers that we're going to use are the most inexpensive flower variety that you can buy which are these beautiful yellow chrysanthemums, um, height of the summer, inexpensive,and you're gonna see what an impact, what a statement they're going to make when we're finished in this basket. and i'm gonna start showing you the european handheld technique
to make this bouquet. when you go to paris and all the florists that you see there all know this technique very well. so how to do it os basically take a few stems laying in front of you on the table surface, and what we're gonna do is place the next flower on top of the other ones, but we're always gonna use the same angle to lay the flower down. so we're gonna do it like that, and hen we're gonna twist it around do it again here, another one next to it, and another one next to it, an once you master this you can create the most beautiful bouquets, just right in your home. just like that, and it's always good to, when you make bouquets like this,
to add some cut flower food to your water, um it's going to keep your water clean, because bacteria, doesn't just kill people, but also my beautiful flowers, so we're adding one last flower to this side, just like that, and what you have now is, voila, a european style flowerbouquet, where all the stems are going to the same direction, just neatly like that, and to finish it off, we're gonna use some simple twine to bind the flowers together, just hold it on your finger, and then we're going to just bind it at the binding point, which is the point where your hand is holding the bouquet, we're just gonna wrap it around a few times,
and you can just lay it on the table like that, it's not gonna fall apart when you do it with thiseuropean technique. so we have finished our bouquet, now we have to decide how, where we're going to cut the stems, and that we're going to do by taking the basket, we're going to put these aside, just one moment, we're going to take the basket, and just basically measure the height so we're gonna have a flower mound right here, so i would say we need to chop off almost that much of the stems, and we're fine. so we've cut them to the right length and now we're just gonna put them in the basket, just like that, opening them up a little bit,
but there you go, a beautiful inexpensive, late summer arrangement for your home. please visit www.potterybarn.com for more ideas and inspiration.