Spring flowers...

As you know, I have 2 cats.  One of them thinks it's her job to take any real flower arrangement I bring into the house apart.  She stays up all night ripping the petals out and pulling leaves off the stems until she finally knocks the whole thing over and leaves me to clean up the mess at 4am.

 But I don't let that stop me from enjoying beautiful flower arrangements, and this is why I have only silk/fake flowers and plants in my house. I've collected fabulous fakes for quite a while and can put together dozens of different seasonal arrangements.

I've created some easy rules for making your fakes look interesting and fairly real:

1.  Treat fakes like real flowers.  They have to be animated to look interesting, so bend the stems and the leaves, crush the perfect looking flower heads and pull out a petal or two.  Do what real flowers and branches do.

2.  Build your arrangement the same way you would real flowers.  Use the rule of 3/5/7 to mix different kinds of flowers together.

3.  Use the same seasonal flowers you would if you were buying flowers.  Lilacs are usually only available in April, so I wouldn't put them in a December arrangement.

4.  If your vase is clear, use glass pebbles or real stones to cover the plastic stems in the bottom of the vase.

5.  Keep your flowers fresh by storing them in plastic containers large enough to keep from crushing them too much.

Most of my flower/plant collection come from Pottery Barn.  I usually wait until they go on sale seasonally.