How to wire a flower

1. To make a straight, long-stemmed rose curve, cut a piece of wire about a foot long.
2. Push it through the stem just under the head of the flower, leaving one third of the wire on one side and two thirds on the other.
3. Take the short side and wrap it around the stem.
4. Then take the long end of the wire and wrap it in the opposite direction very tightly. When it’s wired, you can gently press down on the wire so that it bends and the wire holds the new shape.
5. Take the newly curved flower and place it in your arrangement, wherever you need a flower that gracefully curves down.

• Sturdy gauge wire

• Wire cutters

• Straight-stemmed flowers, like peonies, roses or dahlias

So I'm Rebecca Cole for howdini.com and I'm going to teach you a little trick of the trade. Sometimes, when we get our flowers there perfectly straight, they looked really beautiful, but I might want them to curve a little. Why do they do this? Because we've now hybrided some of these roses and the flowers that we use all the time, to such a degree that they'll last really long, but they don't have all those gentle curves that we we're used to in the old fashioned flowers.

So let's say I have this beautiful arrangement, here, and I'd like this flower to stick out like this. So how do you get that really straight flower to do that really nice curve? With wire. You want a pretty sturdy gauge because you need to be able to really bend the stem. I'm going to cut about a foot of wire and then I'm going to take the rose, and just as the head meets the stem, we're going to take the wire and stick it in. Just push it all the way through. It won't hurt the rose.

And I'm going to take about 1/3 of it out this side and leave 2/3 this way. And now start wrapping the 1/3 around the stem. Wrap. Wrap. Wrap. All in one direction. Until you're out of that wire. And now I'm going to take the other 2/3 part and wrap it in the opposite direction. Nice tight wrap. You see that it's going to make a little bit of a crisscross grid, as you wrap it.

I like holding my fingers tight against the wire, against the stem, and turn the stem of the rose. And you'll wrap that all the way down so that's now going to go a little bit longer than your other part. I'm going to take my straight stem and gently start bending it, using, basically the force of the wire to both hold it, so it won't break, and to keep it in place once you make the bend. And now we have a lovely curved stem. So you take that little nice curve and you stick it right on the side of the vase and no one would know that it didn't grow that way. And that's going to work with any of your stiff stemmed flowers, like a Dahlia or a Peony or a beautiful rose.