Upscale Supermarket Floral Arrangements

The first thing my guests will see when they walk through the door is my favorite of many scales all dressed for the party. Phew! Thank goodness for 24 hour shopping.

Another look. Noticed I have also gone to the pots and clipped the sweet potato vine. As we all know, if you plant this in the spring there will be plenty to go around when you are in a pinch.

Side view. I'll fill you in on a little secret. In order to conserve time, money, and flowers, I only arranged the fronts and sides of the dishes. Go for it! No one will be the wiser.

Here is the original piece before being adorned. It's beautiful all by itself, but everyone wants something new for a party!

Here they are, my grocery store picks. Most likely you won't have exotic choices so go for the color story. For early fall I choose reds, oranges, soft whites, yellow, and green. Thank goodness for my large wash tub sink!

Here's a tip: keep plenty of floral foam on hand just for moments like these. Soak as much as you need in water before arranging the flowers.

You may want to line your scale dish with a plastic dish. I had no need as mine is water tight. I was also not worried about water marks left behind. It's only junk afterall!

Here I am only dressing only 3/4 of the available space. My bad! Another thing to keep in the cupboard is plenty of moss. It's a great filler.

My thrifty use of flowers and an abundance of scales allows me to do a centerpiece for the dinner table.

Here they are folks, the most common of all grocery store flowers: alstromeria. Not my first pick for sure, but the selection available forced me to buy them. Throw them together with some golden weeds and poof! Dinner's on.

Could I possibly fill on more scale with less than $35 worth of flowers? Yeppers. This little cutie usually holds soap in the kitchen, but was reassigned to the powder room for this ocassion. This will leave your guests thinking "she's always so prepared, she even thought of the powder room!"

Ha! Your secret's safe with me.

And here she is. The left over dahlias and berries from the main arrangement make an adorable tussy mussy.