Easy Floral Arrangement Trick

My great-grandparents grew roses and used to make tons and tons of arrangements to take to people in the hospital, hospice, shut-ins, etc.  (If you want to read more about them, go here and here for more neat tricks or here to read about how great-grandma taught us about sportsmanship.)  To stretch their flowers a little more and help keep flowers in position in the containers that might have wider mouths, they used this little trick.

Just take tape and make a grid across your container.  You can use floral tape but if you don't have any on hand or your flowers have thin stems where floral tape would be more visible, you can just use a good Scotch tape.  Masking tape also works just fine.  The tape will help flowers with wimpy stems stand up straighter and will allow you to use far less flowers and fillers to achieve a "full" look. 

The first photo is a close-up shot of the arrangement on my button photo and the only thing in the whole arrangement is Queen Anne's Lace.  Queen Anne's Lace has a very thin and bendy stem with not a lot of foliage so to fill a container this size and have the ones in the middle stand up, I would have had to cram a ton of them in here without the help of the tape.  You can use this trick on any size container and then remove the tape when you are done.  This eliminates the need for floral block, although you can use the two methods together.