I love decorating with fake flowers. Trust me, fresh cut flowers are gorgeous and I’m always happy to grab a bouquet from my flower garden or the supermarket, but fake flowers last forever and are an easy way to swap out for the seasons (especially when the season you’re currently in doesn’t have all that many fresh flowers available). You can also make big, fat beautiful arrangements for less than the cost of a real one, and not have to worry about tossing it in the garbage or the compost in a week.
But even fake flowers can be expensive! Especially when you’re picking them up from the craft store where one stem of something realistic looking can run you $10-15! I don’t know about you, but that’s a bit out of the budget these days, considering I still have to, you know, eat. If you’re not catching the craft store on one of those ultra-low sales days, you may turn to the Dollar Tree (or a similar dollar store). Lured by the wall of $1.25 bunches, you may even pick a few up, feeling very virtuous. She’s a thrifty diva, you may whisper to yourself as you head home, smugly thinking about how many compliments you’ll get when friends and family see your proudly displayed bouquet. “It cost less than $5,” you’ll say, sipping from an iced latte with an extra pump (you earned a little treat for saving some money!). But then you arrive home, grab a vase, plop your DT flowers inside and are met with this:
So why do they look so bad? Well, the first problem is that the flowers are all clumped together. Real flowers are placed in an arrangement one at a time, and if you are putting multiple types together, they won’t all be hanging out in a bunch like middle school boys at a dance. So, we need to spread them out and give them some breathing room!
Take a look at the bunch of flowers and spread the individual stems apart so you can see how many you’re working with. This bunch had five different stems with some pretty big dahlias on the end.
Bend one of those stems back and give it a snip. Wire cutters are the best tool for this, but you can also use craft scissors: you may just have to bend the wire back and forth a few times to get it to snap. Now, this will make your stems shorter than what you may find for a higher price at a craft store. But this is the trade-off for using DT flowers. Plus, if you put a piece of floral foam toward the top inside of an opaque container (like a galvanized bucket) and push your stems in there, you can still give the illusion that you have long beautiful stems without having to break the bank on the flowers!
You can also just grab a stem and start peeling it down until it pull right off the bunch, if you don’t have wire cutters or your scissors aren’t working. Use caution with this technique, though! The wire will be exposed because you’re actually just tearing the plastic coating off of the bunch.
I also like to slide a lot of the leaves off of the stems. Listen, DT flowers are cheaper for several reasons, one of them being that the flowers don’t look quite so realistic. I think the lack of realism comes through most in the leaves though. They tend to not look appropriate for the style of flower (they’re probably just reusing a lot of leaf shapes), and you wouldn’t want every single stem in a real flower arrangement to have leaves on it anyway. You can just grab hold of the leaf and slide it on down and off the flower stem.
At this point, you should have a whole host of stems. For $3.75, I bought three bunches of flowers and, after cutting everything apart, I ended up with 15 individual stems. Not bad! All that’s left is to start arranging them. You can place them inside a vase, push them into some floral foam and turn them into a centerpiece, or use them on a wreath.
A useful tip for any type of flake flowers is to play around with the shape of the stems. The stems are always made with wire, which means they can be bent and manipulated. Real flowers don’t tend to stand tall and straight, but gently slope down. Think about how heavy the head of the flower is and how it would look in real life. A rose bud would stand up taller than a giant sunflower, for example. And all flowers droop a bit as the days go on. So play around with the stems and shape them. Have them spill over the sides of the vase, or curl inwards on your wreath. Be creative!
This entire arrangement cost me $3.75 and took about ten minutes to do. For the equivalent amount of flowers from Michael’s, I couldn’t find anything cheaper than $18 total full price. Another great idea is to buy a couple of the big showpiece stems from the craft store – ones that really speak to you and will stand out in an arrangement – and then use this technique to manipulate a bunch of Dollar Tree flowers so that you can make that arrangement look full and lush.
That Jane Crafts 
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