Ok, I know that flowers are not food, usually, but this is related. An important part of serving food is decorating your table, and cut flowers are an easy and beautiful way to get the decor going. So, it made sense for us to include an entry on decorating.

I was at Michael's on Passover with Jessica and Mom and found some great craft supplies for decorating cut flowers. I got a little carried away... buying a glass vase, river rocks, oasis, and moss.

I set some soaked oasis in the center of my vase. It would have been much better to use cylindrically-shaped foam, but they only had bricks, so I had to shave it down. The foam was then surrounded it by the "moss river rocks", which are just greenish-hued, polished rocks. Then I cut and set in the bright yellow, gerbera daisies. My goal was to get the tops to complete fill the exact top of the vase and be perfectly level. That turned out to be much harder than I thought. As I put in each one, the next got harder and hard to place without crushing the prior. The result is semi-decent, but certainly not perfectly level.

After setting the gerbera, I used chopsticks to place the reindeer moss below it. That added a lovely foresty scent and hide the oasis. My goal was to have tiers of experience. The bottom being focused on the ground with perfumed moss and rocks. Then nothing but thick stems flowing up to the daisies. Finally, the dainty rose stems flowing all the way up to the mini-roses. I really like the way the stems look from the side (see the pic to the right).

The roses are the small size (about 1" blooms) with very firm stems, to hold them in place. They are variegated peach and yellow color. The overall effect of the roses and daisies come out in a mango-colored theme.

This looks great on any counter or table setting.

For more pictures of this decoration, check out the Flickr set.