00:00Want your mantelpiece to look like it's straight out of a magazine?
00:03Here's how. Now this is a mantelpiece that I salvaged when we were doing our renovation and
00:09I simply couldn't get rid of it so it now has a home in my studio. The first thing you
00:14want to do
00:15is arrange your vessels on the mantelpiece. I am obsessed with these vintage inkwells so I really
00:22like to use these and the first step is to place these onto the mantelpiece. The next step is to
00:28add your tall elements which are usually going to be your branches so your taller more structural
00:33elements which will create a framework on your design. So for this I've got some catkins that I
00:39cut from the garden and I've also got some pussy willow branches. We'll give each stem a fresh cut
00:46before we place it in and obviously make sure that all your vessels have fresh water in them before
00:51you start arranging. When I place these in I always like to look and see which ones are the curviest
00:56and which ones are going in which direction and that will help me to determine which ones go in.
01:01Okay so now we're ready to add in our beautiful spring flowers. So the first thing I'm going to add
01:07are these beautiful pastel hyacinths. We can cut off this really thick bit here at the bottom it'll be
01:14a bit easier then to arrange with and just leaves us with a really nice clean stem. When I'm working
01:19like
01:19this I'm always thinking in odd numbers always trying to design in threes or fives or sevens because
01:28things just look a lot more balanced that way. A spring display would not be complete without tulips
01:33and I've got two useful colours. We'll cut the stem every single time always cut the stem end but I
01:39actually want to leave these quite tall just giving every element its own space and its room. You're
01:48kind of creating layers with all the different elements that you're adding. The last gorgeous spring
01:53element that we have to add in are these narcissi. Let's have a look where we have some natural gaps.
02:05What's interesting with this design is that you don't have to fill all the space you can actually
02:10leave negative space which just allows the eye to travel through it and it allows it to breathe a
02:15little bit. I'm really happy with this design now you could keep adding if you wanted to make it a
02:25lot
02:25more abundant you could add a lot more flowers even more vessels but I think what it does is
02:31inspire you to bring a little bit of spring into your home in a really natural and gentle way.
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