You can think this is easy until you try it yourself

Me with the finished product.

About a month ago, I saw a brief article in the L.A. Times that was telling of a florist in Venice that was offering periodic floral design classes.  Thinking that it'd be something fun to do, and thinking that it might be a nice thing to take my sister-in-law Carrie to as a thank you for helping me so much with my wedding, I signed us up.  Carrie selected the "Modern Masterpieces" course.

The class was last night and, upon entering the design studio and seeing our project, I felt like we were being ripped off.  It looked easy.  Too easy.  I mean, it was just a bunch of leaves in one of those thin, straight, rectangular vases.  How wrong I was.

You can sort of see the
layers of the arrangement
from this angle.

After the demo, Carrie and I set off to making essentially what the teacher did.  First by sticking in some tea leaves to create a backing.  Relatively easy.  Check.  Then we had to stick in these flax leaves to create the backdrop for the orchids (I guess those green things are orchids...I did not know that).  Sticking in those flax leaves, believe it or not, was a little more difficult because they kept squirming around.

But, finally, I got the flax to stop squirming and then tried inserting the orchids.  This is when it turned out to be incredibly hard.  First of all, you sort of have to squash the orchids so that they can fit in the thin space of the vase, but they can't look too squashed.  Furthermore, they're very delicate (and easy to poke holes in, which I tended to do.  Third, they totally misaligned the flax leaves that I had worked so hard to make perfect.  So there was a good portion of the night where I was just trying to move everything slightly to get it perfect again.  I never did achieve that.

Carrie's arrangement is on the left, mine on the right.

Neither did Carrie.  We started out with almost identical projects.  But she got so frustrated at one point that she totally scrapped that whole design and tried one of the other versions, where you take a palm frond and cut it so that it fit in the vase.  Then, she carefully floated orchids in the vase.  This type of arrangement seemed to be much easier and less complicated, but still had its problems.  However, I think we were both relatively surprised when we walked around at the end of class that our arrangements were average to above average compared to our classmates', which was most definitely not expected after all of the troubles we encountered.

When I registered Carrie and I for the class, they said that if I bought 3, the classes would be slightly cheaper.  I had interest in many of their other classes, but most particularly in their holiday wreaths workshop being offered in November.  So, stay tuned for more floral designs to come!