today fun with flowers and J's brought to you by Garcia group glass and Esprit Miami their flowers mean business welcome to the world of flowers I'm Jay schwanke I've spent my entire life surrounded by flowers as a fourth generation florist flowers have been a part of my daily life for as long as I can remember now I'm on a mission to share my knowledge and love of flowers with everyone I meet growing picking arranging designing and sharing it's all fascinating to me because I love flowers anything flowers and everything flowers welcome to fun with flowers and Jay today on fun with flowers and Jay we're using mini calla lilies and weaving them inside a bubble bowl I've got a special secret to share calla lilies are so popular because of their unique shape no other flower is shaped like a calla lily and we're usually most familiar with seeing a big white trumpet like this but calla lilies also come in miniature varieties and the miniature varieties are laden with all sorts of colors there's black ones like this it's also pinks and yellows little ones that look just like the white ones were familiar with and for today's project we're going to use these beautiful blush pink ones along with a variegated one that has a purple throat now we'll be placing those inside this bubble bowl and rather than using the bubble bowl as a traditional vase we're going to curve those calla lilies around the inside of our bubble bowl to do that we'll use a secret trick now calla lilies are usually bundled together that corrugated paper around the outside to help them all remain straight and they're packaged in 10 stem bunches now I could place this calla lily in a vase like that but that's not nearly as exciting as having it inside now here's a problem the stems are straight and the stems are stiff a callow lead grows in a straight stem but it can be curved and manipulated now some people talk about heating it up with your hands and slowly and gently trying to change the direction of the flower itself but because it's so rigid and there's so much water inside you could break them so what we'll do is we'll use a special trick we use our Swiss Army knife and catch the edge of the skin of the stem of the calla lily and we're going to pull it all the way from the bottom to the top of the flower it comes off in a neat little strip then suddenly our calla lilies completely flexible we'll cut it to the appropriate length and we can twist it around the inside of our bubble bowl this works exceptionally well with miniature calla lilies the stems have a great skin on the outside and it's just catching it with your knife and pulling it all the way down now this does shorten the vase life of the calla lilies but again the calla lily stem is made up of so much moisture that it's going to have plenty and when we're putting it inside a vase like this and adding water it's gonna make them last longer if we have them out in open air all along where we remove the skin can dry out but for this it's perfect so what I'm going to go ahead and do is remove the skin on all the Cowley's and weave them inside them all it's interesting because you can actually see the tension release on the stem of the Cowley's once that skins removed it's a really impressive technique because it looks so intricate but you can see how easy it was because you know the secret now this is calla lily foliage so I'm actually going to use one leaf on the interior I'm just gonna cut it short I'm gonna pull the skin off the back of that length too so I can get it to curve around a little bit as well we're gonna put that in the interior behind some of the callous and then you'll also see the veining on the inside of that leaf now just add water it's ideal if all of the stems go into the water but in some cases we're gonna have stems that aren't gonna be under that water level but the humidity level inside here much like a terrarium is going to be beneficial I let a couple of those calla lily blossoms peak up towards the top so that they start to go inside the lid and that'll make it even more interactive towards the top the best part about this is we'll use an LED illumination underneath the bubble bowl itself so that we light up the entire arrangement look at how great that leaf looks the backside lit up and also with the great reflection that we get on the other side of them all of those stems look so great inside our contained arrangement so until next time keep having fun with flowers