How to Shape Floral Foam | Wedding Flowers

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Now that I've soaked my floral foam, I can take it out. And it's important to note that when you're working with floral foam it can be a really messy proposition, very wet. So have a lot of paper towels or towels on hand. I'm going to take it out of here and just set it down.

Once you've selected the container for your floral foam, some important qualities to note. This container is great because it has no seams, there's no place for the floral foam to leak. If you had a container that you wanted to use that maybe had seams and you were concerned about the water soaking through, you could always line this with plastic. Today we're going to use a container that's really, really easy.

Now, shaping the floral foam. This is actually a really fun part. So I like to take my container, especially if it's a really light vessel like this, and actually place it face down on the floral foam. The floral foam, even when it's wet, is really spongy, and so you can shape it however you'd like to shape it. So I'm going to take this brick and take my vase and just press down so that I can see this is the primary shape of the foam. And this is how, when we start cutting away at this brick, we're going to know that it fits here in this vessel.

So the next step is to take a knife. You can take a big knife, a little knife. I like to use a little knife because I like to carve it like a sculptor. And just start cutting away pieces of the brick using the shape that you've imprinted as a guideline. Cutting away. Starting to come together. You can see how drippy, it's really making a big mess. The good news is, as I'm cutting, I can see there are no dry spots in the floral foam, so I know that it's soaked well. And none of the flowers that we put in here are going to have any trouble. This process is long. You've got to make sure it fits squarely into your vessel. It has to be secure in there.

So I've pressed it down, and it looks like it's pretty good. You want to leave enough room on the top to be able to fill in the sides. So you could cut it down a little bit more than this, but I don't want it to be flush-flush, otherwise the flowers are going to lie really flat in this container. I like to leave myself a little bit of room on the sides. But if it's too much, you can still press it down a little bit. Here we go.