How To Make Your Own Beautiful Bouquet (Fresh Or Dried) For Any Occasion

Nothing screams joy like a bouquet of fresh or dried flowers. While buying a premade assortment is always a fail-safe option, arranging your own flower bouquet—be it for a wedding, a gift, or just a kitchen table—tends to be less expensive and loads more fun.

Not sure where to start? We called up Emily Thomason, a florist at Devynn's Garden in California, to put together this guide to the basics of bouquet making.

First, you'll need to pick your flowers. Go to the shop with a vase or vessel in mind, so you'll know around how much you'll need to get to fill it.

Buying from florists tends to be a better bet than from a grocery store, as their flowers are usually fresher and will last longer.

Once you get home, separate your flowers into individual stems you can place in your vase one by one.

Clear off any leaves that will be sitting in water, and give all your stems a quick snip at an angle before laying them on a clean arranging surface. This will free up some surface area for them to drink from and help them last longer.

Those who are working with shallow, wide-mouthed vases can use floral foam or bowl tape to help keep stems secured in place. Both tools can be found in most flower shops and are easy to work with.

If you're using the waterproof bowl tape, make a grid pattern on the mouth of your vase. This will create a little pattern for your flowers to lean on and make arranging much easier and less frustrating. By the time the arrangement is complete, it should be full enough to hide the tape underneath.

Now for the fun part. Once you have all your snipped flowers laid out and your foam or tape at the ready if you're using it, you can start putting in your flowers.

Thomason recommends always starting by placing your greens: "That's going to give you a base and help it all stay together and stay up," she says.

With that foundation in place, you can add your line flowers and filler flowers, then your statement blooms. Bouquet arranging is more of an art than a science, so Thomason's advice here is just to learn as you go and get to know your arrangement.

Eyeball what colors and textures you think look nice together, and cut some stems shorter and keep others long for a more layered look. Remember: You really can't go wrong with such stunning materials, so just have fun with it.

If you have an idea where your finished bouquet will go, that can help shape your arrangement too.

If you think it will be placed against a wall, for example, you can get away with only arranging half of the bouquet. "In that case, you'd want to put greens standing up on one side and acting as an anchor for the back," Thomason says. "You can make the front really shine because that's the moment you really need to focus on."

Again, the same general rules apply for dried bouquets: Place those pampas grasses or greens first before adding your statement pieces. Pampas grasses tend to come in large stems, but Thomason adds that you can cut the stem where it forms a cluster to eke a few smaller pieces out of your bundle.