How To Make A Carnation Lei - DIY

Hi. I'm Julie Klingaman with Grohe Florist and it is graduation season, which also means lei season for florists and for all you graduates out there. Today, I'm going to demonstrate making a carnation lei. The reason I'm choosing carnations is because they're hardy, and hold up, and because they come in an array of colors. What you will need is ribbon, a long needle, and carnations. You need about 40 to 45 carnations. The bunches usually come up 25, so when you call your local florist to purchase the carnations, give them a couple days to get the colors that you're interested in, and they can get you bunches and you can just buy them by the bunch.

What you're going to do first is you're going to take all the carnations off of their stems. And you can use scissors or clippers if you happen to have them, and you just clip it right at the base and clip it right off. And then you're going to just take your carnation and string it through the base, and you can use a table to help you get it through and pull it right on. And you can decide if you want to do a pattern. You can do one solid color if you want to. When choosing your colors, you can choose colors that match your school colors, or you can choose a favorite color, or you can just do a mixture of colors like I am doing today. I picked three colors. It's what I had in my cooler, so that's what we're using. As you're pushing them down, you can see how the carnations will sit within each other. So, you don't want to leave a lot of space between them. You want to let them go. They open up in the center and you let them sit within each other. If you're going to have a party the next day or two days later, you can just put it in your fridge and it will hold up so that you can wear a carnation lei a couple days later. With orchid leis, you can do that as well. The problem with orchid leis is they break a little easier. So, with all the hugging that you're doing with people, sometimes the orchid leis begin to... The orchids begin to break off of the lei.

One other thing I forgot to mention was sometimes when you get your carnations, they may be a little bit tight. Some of these yellow ones are a little bit tighter and what you can do is you can just take the flower and with your fingers just push it open a little bit more just to open it up a little bit. This is going to be the 40th carnation I've put on here. So you can see when I put it together what length you would get with 40. Then, when I can cut this other end off of this, the ribbons, the spool, and tie them together, and it just slides right in. This is with 40 carnations. You can see this is a tight one. So, if it's for somebody smaller, 40's okay. If it's for somebody taller, bigger, I would go with at least 45, and if they're really tall, 50. You're going to get 50 if you buy two bunches anyway. You might as well use them. But that is how to make a carnation lei. So, have fun and happy graduation.