DIY Summer Flower Arrangement With Seashells

This is a fun method to create a flower arrangement for summer, adding a little 'coastal living' to your arrangement. You can use shells collected as a memento from a beach trip or some purchased at the craft store.

To create this flower arrangement, I used my favorite ‘vase within a vase’ method. Start with two vases, a smaller one, to nest inside a larger one. 

My vases came from Michaels several years ago. Download their mobile app to your smartphone so you have access to their 40% off weekly coupon when you shop. Hobby Lobby, Target, Walmart and Dollar Tree are also good places to find affordable glass vases.

I filled the walls between the vases with seashells, using a combination of some I purchased over the years and sand dollars found on a family beach trip.

Fill your inner vase with water for your flowers, no more than about 2/3 full, to prevent it from spilling over between the walls of your vase.

Add floral preservative to your vase water to prolong the life of your flowers. Floral preservative packets usually come with grocery store flowers and / or the floral department usually has some packets you can help yourself to when buying flowers. If you don’t have any floral preservative, you can make your own with this easy formula. 

To add some additional shells to the arrangement, bamboo skewers were tucked in among the hydrangeas. You can usually find bamboo skewers at the grocery store (sold for kabobs). They come in 10 - 12-inch lengths.

Shells were slipped over and placed on top of the skewers indicated by the arrows in the above photo. The starfish used in the arrangement is lightweight and easily rests on the hydrangea blooms, propped against the stems of the snapdragons.

For the flowers, I used a combination of limelight hydrangeas from the garden and white hydrangeas and snapdragons from the grocery store. Some flowers like hydrangeas are heavy drinkers, so check your water level, topping off as needed. More photos and details at the blog link below!