Bathroom flower arrangements

My bathroom has been about halfway decorated for three years. I decided maybe today was a good day to finish -or at least continue- decorating it. So I pulled out my baskets and some fake flowers and greenery that I bought when I was maybe 15 to decorate a shelf along the ceiling of my bedroom. I know that sounds crazy, but I swear it looked good. I can't find a picture, so I guess you'll just have to trust me.  Anyway, it took about 5 minutes to make these two baskets...

...which look great with the one other set of wall hangings we already had.  

I still want to hang a couple of pictures or something  on the other walls to finish off the look, but no ideas yet.

If you have never played around with flower arranging before, but would like to try your hand at it, I do have a few tips. If you are working with fake flowers, buy more than you will need and plan to take some back or keep the leftovers for a later project. Try to make sure that at least most of what you buy (especially the greenery) has wired stems so that you can bend them into just the right position. Try not to cut anything you don't have to. If a stem is too long, try folding it first. That way if you want it to be longer later, you can still adjust it. You will notice that I used a lot of greenery and very few flowers. Using too many flowers tends to make the arrangement look gaudy and unnatural. I could have used a few more flowers without making these arrangements look bad, but they would have needed to be small flowers placed in the background. You may have noticed that while I didn't use many flowers, I did use a lot of variegated greenery. Using greenery with different color patterns keeps the arrangement from looking boring which makes the flowers unnecessary. If you can make an arrangement with only greenery that looks good enough to display, then when you add a few flowers it will look amazing. When you add your flowers, please note that flowers should not always be placed in the front of an arrangement. Often people don't want to "hide" the flowers in the back, but placing bits of color toward the rear of an arrangement can help give it depth, and again, make it look more natural.

The hardest part is starting. I don't talk to people about flower arranging often, but when I do, they usually ask how to start. Which foam should they buy? How big should it be? Do you start in the center and work out, or start from the edges and work in? Answer: whatever you feel most comfortable with. Honestly, I don't like foam. So I don't use it. Sometimes, with certain arrangements in certain vases (usually fresh flowers in a shallow vase- think something you would see at a funeral) you do need to use foam. But I don't work for a florist anymore, so I can just avoid those particular arrangements.

When I did the basket that is hanging on the wall, I started from the outside and worked in. I knew I was going to want the big split leaves to be placed in a way that would give the arrangement character. They had wire running through the stems, so I just folded the stems so that they pinched the basket and held themselves in place. After that, I really had no idea, so I picked out a sprig of variegated leaves and put it in the basket. Too small. I needed something that would fill up all that empty space. So I grabbed a bouquet of fake pothos leaves and jammed that in there. After fluffing and repositioning most of the leaves, it looked pretty good, and there was an obvious spot for a flower. I tried putting two there, but it looked dumb. I think some wispy springs of tiny yellow or purple flowers on the left side of the arrangement would make it look a little better, but since I don't have any of that laying around, we may never know. I did this arrangement while it was hanging on the wall so that I could see how it looked with the other wall hangings, and so my three carefully placed leaves didn't get bumped or bent out of place.

When I did the small basket in the right picture, I didn't know what I wanted, so I figured I'd start with the base. I cut a loop of ivy big enough to fill the basket and jammed it in there. The leaves poking over the front of the basket just did that on their own. It looked good, but boring. So I decided to use some variegated leaves and since the speckly ones were just little sprigs, it seemed natural to have the leaves travel up the basket handle. Once that was twined into place, it looked kind of out of place, and I knew I would need to add a bit more of it on the other side of the basket. There wasn't much room left and I didn't figure I needed to add much of it anyway, so I stripped two leaves off of another sprig and pushed them into the ivy. That did the trick, but I wanted to add a splash of color, so I got two small bunches of flowers off of another vine and arranged them in the basket. And we're done! See, when you listen to my thought process it seems simple. And I don't sound like I know what I'm doing any more than you do. So stop planning (or staring at an empty basket and calling it planning) and just do the first step. The rest will fall into place before you know it.

I was going to do a step-by-step on how to arrange a vase of fresh flowers so it looks like it came from a florist, but I don't have any fresh flowers and I think that tutorial is going to need a lot of pictures... maybe some other day :-)

Update: My husband doesn't like the spotted foliage. He says it looks diseased. I don't have many other options lying around, so until I get around to buying something else, the baskets have been changed to crotons: