Flower-Arranging with HomeSense

I’ve seen quite a few blogs lately raving about the new incarnation of fake or faux flowers and how much they now resemble the real things. I love flowers but have stuck steadfastly to fresh ones in our home because as good as the alternatives are, they just never fully appealed to me.

When HomeSense got in touch asking if I’d like to pop along to their celebration of Spring evening at Somerset House to learn some floristry styling tips and enjoy a botanical-themed cocktail or two, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to open my mind to the possibilities of faux flowers.

Somerset House is such an iconic London landmark and the event took place in the beautiful Salon, a garden dining room of Spring restaurant in an enclosed interior atrium. The venue looked amazing as we arrived, full of huge vases of flowers and ready for an evening of floristry styling tips.

Showing us the ropes was Helen Edwards from The Velvet Daisy, who started off with a large faux hydrangea head and demonstrated how to add stem after stem, turning the bouquet ever so slightly as you go when adding each flower to create a spiral effect. The idea is that you hold the flowers just beneath the head as you add more, but if the bouquet increases in size hold it further down the stems to fan out the layer of the flowers.

Of course there is an art form to creating beautiful bouquets otherwise we’d all be in the business and I must confess that to the eyes of a trained florist I’m no doubt a horrible flower arranger. I think I definitely miss the point of creating balance and synergy in my arrangements, but the spiralling did get easier the more we practised.

As you can see, my attempt wasn’t very wow but I was working with quite a narrow-necked vase and I did find that the faux flowers really were incredible and totally changed my opinion on them.

I’m also planning to pop back for dinner at some point, the restaurant menu looked so enticing and this eye-catching lighting arrangement on the ceiling in the restaurant reception is so unique.

HomeSense very kindly let us take our flower arrangements home and after struggling on to the bus with the tallest vase ever, I separated out the real flowers into one vase and the faux arrangement now sits on the windowsill in our dining room, and you know what? I really love them. Do pop to your nearest HomeSense when you can to check out their range of faux flowers, I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

Thank you so much to HomeSense for inviting me along to this event. They haven’t asked me to write a post but I wanted to share the beauty! All images, words and opinions are my own.

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