How to make a perfect centerpiece using floral tape

Step 1. Begin by putting some water in the bowl.

Step 2. Stretch a piece of tape across the bowl or container.

Step 3. Repeat the strips until one direction is completed, and then criss-cross the tape until you have a grid system. Make whatever size you like, from small grid squares to very large, depending on the size of the flower heads. Rebecca is using asparagus fern for greens, also roses and sunflowers. The flowers all lay flat and nice and just the way she wants them to.

Step 4. Last step, check the bowl to make sure no tape is showing, and if it is, add some greens to hide it.

Floral tape

A low, wide bowl

Flowers and greens

Shallow bowl

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Floral tape

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Hi I'm Rebecca Cole from howdini.com, and I'm going to show you how to make a fantastic flower arrangement in a nice big bowl. The trick is a grid system. We're going to use tape, and a big bowl.

First, pour a little bit of water in it. Try not to get water along the edges, because we want that to stay nice and dry, because we're actually going to tape the edges. We do this with a floral tape. It's kind of like a gaffer's tape or electrical tape, but it's thinner. You go from edge to edge, about a half an inch from the side, cut it off and turn it over, push it down nicely, and I'm going to repeat that several times and make a nice grid.

You can do this with a silver bowl or any little low thing, but you don't want to have to use a whole bunch of flowers to keep the other flowers up. You can make this grid as small or as big as you need it. It sort of depends on how many flowers, how much you want to keep it standing up.

All right, now we are ready to build our arrangement! So I like to start with leaves, because it sort of helps me hide the grid right way. This is a little asparagus fern. You can imagine how much we would've needed had we not had this grid.

And now I can take my roses and put them in a few random spots, and that looks pretty nice. So if you wanted to do something really wacky, use a big-headed flower that usually you see really tall with the stem showing. Sunflowers — see how much huge room it takes up, too? The grid really holds them in place. So you want to make sure on all of your sunflowers you take all of the leaves off. This is such a large-headed flower, they really flop over the leaves.

Now, let's say you decided, “Okay, I kind of like it, but it's too much yellow. I love the brown though... what do I do?” A radical, crazy idea would be to just pull the yellow off, and then you have a lot more brown...look how cute that looks! Then the last little touch is to just put all of your little extra greens around the edge to make sure we don't see any of the tape, and there is your little bowl of beauty!