Christine de Beer - effortless floral craftsman
Stack miniature roses on to stacked grass snippets
- 28 January 2026
I am displaying my stacked flower frog in a shallow container...
Fold a long hollow grass so that it is high on one end and then tapers down to the other.
Fold a second grass and secure it with the smallest drop of floral glue.
Glue in a third leg to make sure the grass armature stands firmly on its own.
Cut grasses into shorter snippets and start to build up the armature.
The trick is to craft an armature with the least possible amount of grass snippets (so that it still looks stacked but not "solid") but at the same time be robust enough to carry the weight of your other plant material. Make sure to glue the grasses to connect each grass snippet at three places.
See the Tutorials below for more inspiration.
Build up the armature by placing the small snippets one by one.
Every Wednesday morning (Vancouver time), I send out a design note as an early glimpse at the newest Design and a few notes that I picked up creating the Tutorial that might be useful to you. This week, I show you how to (at least somewhat) speed up the process so that you can place a few snippets at a time without having to hold the snippet so that the glue sets.
If you’re new here, you can sign up below this post. And if you’ve been receiving these notes for some time, I hope they feel like a welcome break in your busy week.
Turn the armature so that you can view it from all sides to place the snippets and build up your design.
Book readers turn to page 348 for a Tutorial that builds up the grass snippets around a shape. For more information about my book: The Effortless Floral Craftsman
You can add water in the shallow container if you prefer to keep the few grass snippets that rest in the container hydrated for longer...
Finish the grass armature with a few decorative grasses that rest over the armature.
But for my design I am also adding tiny tubes as a water source for the roses and to give the stems the support they need to be placed at a similar angle into the grass snippet armature. See the Tutorial below for detailed instructions on how I make water tubes from drinking straws (and tubes).
Place the miniature roses into the tubes.
See how the tube looks almost exactly like the smaller hollow grasses where the rose stem is all angled?
I am also adding my rosary vine into the design with the stem in the water tube. The rosary vine is a succulent and can keep without the extra water but I add it in the tube because I want to root it and I want to lift the stem so that it is not distracting in the snippet armature but then flops over and drapes over the roses above.
The tube support gives the rosary vine just enough lift at the back so that it can drape over the roses down the front of the design.
And a few dew drop crystals add a bit of sparkle to the angled grass that stretches over the roses.
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