Creating a bouquet or centerpiece made purely with flowers can be quite expensive. That’s why professional florists have to use fillers and greenery effectively to keep the cost of a flower arrangement down.

From table centerpieces to wreaths, to bridal bouquets, greenery and fillers play a huge role in making sure your designs look beautiful and professionally made.

Here are a few tips to make sure your fillers work perfectly for your projects.

Prepare your flowers and fillers

One of the most important steps in flower arrangement is preparation. Aside from stemming your sola wood flowers, make sure you have all your tools ready on the worktable. If you have fillers all bunched up, separate them beforehand so you can just grab them as you build your arrangement.

This is especially important for hand-tied bouquets where you’re holding the entire bouquet in one hand and you only have one free hand to pick up flowers and fillers to add to the arrangement.

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Fill as you go

Check on your arrangement from time to time. Check for holes or empty spots and fill them in as you go. Biedermeier bouquets are great for practicing your filler and greenery skills. Start with a few pieces of your sola flowers to create the base of the bouquet. Then line it with aster blooms or baby’s breath. Do an alternating sequence of your main flowers and fillers to create concentric circles. 

A posy is also a nice bouquet to practice your filler use. Add a collar of leatherleaf fern to emphasize the colorful flowers of your bouquet.

A little goes a long way

Those sprigs and florets are not just there for show. They’re carefully selected to complement the flowers and enhance their beauty. And it's best to have just one or two kinds of fillers per project. You don't want to overwhelm your bigger flowers by putting too many in between each of them.

If you're going for the round bouquet shape, put smaller flowers around the perimeter to add fullness to your bouquet. Presentation and hand-tied bouquets could use some height from pampas grass and bunny tails. These fillers work amazingly well to lend texture, height, and dimension to your creations. They give your floral arrangements personality without breaking the bank.

Know your greens

Greens are the silent heroes of a beautiful arrangement as they add texture, shape, and even hide a not-so-good-looking pot to keep the attention on the flowers. Large greens like leather fern add shape and body. Table centerpieces look best with glossy leaves like lemon leaf and myrtle while bouquets and smaller arrangements are perfect with smaller or thinner leaves. These are just general guidelines to give you an idea, but you can experiment with different leaves to see what works for your design.

Choose colors and flower sizes wisely

White filler flowers are a safe choice as they can work with a whole range of flower colors, but you can also explore light-colored hues. 

Also, make sure that your filler size is appropriate for the size of your bouquet’s flowers. The bigger your flowers are, the bigger your fillers can get. Small bunches of fillers (think baby’s breath) add softness and volume, while long and big ones add boldness and height. 

Experiment with other materials

Leaves and flowers are not the only things you can use as fillers. You can experiment using other materials like twigs, pearls, beads, a cotton bush, or feathers and combine them with your flowers to make a more personalized arrangement. 

Fillers add a lot of character to your flower arrangement. For budding enthusiasts, it can be overwhelming if you don’t know what will work best for your project. Thankfully, we have other tutorials that you can use to replicate or just to take some inspiration from. 

Pressed for time? You can also purchase any of our craft kits from our shop. Each kit has the flowers, colors, and fillers preselected for you so you can start crafting as soon as it arrives. If you want more tips, tutorials, and handcrafted ideas for your sola wood flowers, you can join our Facebook Page. We have a community of crafters and enthusiasts where you can share your work and ask questions if you need help.

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