- Hey you're watching Preppy Kitchen where I, John Kanell,
teach you how to make delicious home cooked dishes
to share with your family and friends.
Today we're stepping out of the kitchen
which is totally not done,
and visiting one of my new friends, Amy Beth,
where she'll be showing us how to make the perfect,
but still really easy, Thanksgiving center piece.
Let's go.
(upbeat music)
(knocking)
- Hello!
- Hi!
I'm so happy you could come. - Thank you so much.
Oh my gosh, this is my,
sorry, I had to stop myself.
I was gonna say good friend,
but I was like I don't want to get ahead of myself.
(laughing)
This is my friend Amy. - You can call me that.
(laughing)
We actually met through Instagram,
and she has the most amazing account
filled with beautiful things.
There's a link in the bio so you can check it out.
Amybethcupp with two p's.
Let's get started.
- Yeah, come on in.
- Okay.
Thank you so much for having me over.
By the by, a beautiful flower,
a beautiful pumpkin, everything.
- Well I'll give you
some of the best tips that I know
to make a beautifully balanced arrangement
that has a focal point,
that, when you're sitting at the dining table,
you can see over it to the people across
the table, - That's important.
- That's really important especially at Thanksgiving.
One of the first things that you have to think about is
we're gonna use this
as our vessel. - Mm-hmm.
- And I like to think about the fact
that you don't want it to be more than one and a half times
the height of the vessel.
- Right because,
I'm trying to see here.
You've got to make some eye contact across the table.
- Exactly.
And even in this case, I know I said one and a half times,
but because the pumpkin is a little but tall,
I don't think we want to go much higher than this.
- Right.
- With the flowers at all. - Mm-hmm.
- This is gonna go inside eventually, so put this on top,
and draw a line all the way around.
Do you wanna do that?
- I'll do the honors.
- Okay.
(laughing)
- So we're basically making
a beautiful, floral jack-o-lantern.
- Yes we are.
That's gonna give us the guideline
of where we start carving,
and then we'll take all the guts
out of the inside of the pumpkin.
- So fun fact, I'm deathly afraid of cutting pumpkins.
(laughing)
My parents always told me to be like super careful.
I had this little child,
the little child pumpkin cutters.
- Yeah - They're, like,
they couldn't cut butter
but somehow you can like force them into a pumpkin.
So this is--
- I actually have on in the other room,
should I go get it?
(laughing)
- I'm an adult now.
- Okay.
- So I'm just gonna like cut this,
it doesn't have to be perfect.
- [Amy] No, not at all.
- [John] Yeah.
- [Amy] And it can even be slightly bigger than this,
it'll make it easier for us
- [John] You might want to stand back
- Yeah.
- Okay I'll make it
a little bit larger-- - Okay
- So you can pop it in. - Yeah it's all good.
- And we'll cut
(laughing)
Brian is like, I don't know.
Fast forward through this part.
Think we made it all the way through?
- I don't know, we'll see.
We'll go back maybe. - We'll be back right after.
(laughing) - Yeah.
(violin plucks)
- I feel like I got it.
- There we go, all right. - I got it, I did it.
- And now we're going to just scoop out the stuff.
(chuckles)
Want to use that?
- Yeah thank you - All right
so I selected a Cinderella pumpkin cause they are kind of
short and squat, but you can--
- I love Cinderella pumpkins.
- Do the exact same thing with mini pumpkins
- Mm-hmm. - Which is totally adorable.
So if you do them with the little ones
just scale your flowers
to be the same size, right? - That's smart.
- So you use smaller ones rather than larger flowers.
That looks good. - I mean, one more.
- Well, maybe one more scoop.
(laughs)
So let's put some water,
I just left a little bit of the top for overflow.
Another thing is, it's not totally
a hundred percent necessary when your doing
a flower arrangement.
- Yeah, that's a floral spike?
- Is that what it's called? - Yeah, or a Flower frog.
- Oh it's actually called a flower frog,
she was just saying--
- You can call it whatever you want.
You can get these on Amazon or whatever,
but basically it'll just help keep some of the stems,
- Right. - More sturdy in place.
So that when you go to transfer it to the
dining table,
- Mm-hmm. - All of your flowers
don't shift around or. - Right
- If you need to take it to grandma's house or something,
you could put it in a box - Mm-hmm.
- Put it in the car and the flowers will stay still.
- If you don't have one of those--
- Totally not necessary.
- What you could do, because like the florist
never wants to give you one of these because they're
really heavy.
- And they're expensive.
- And they're expensive. - Yeah.
- So they'll just make a grid of scotch tape on top.
- It's true. - And that helps a little bit.
- Yeah.
So I'm just going to stick it in there,
and then take the vase.
- And your like, and you fail,
you told me it was cut open - It's a little small.
(laughing)
(violin plucking)
- Perfect. - There we go, okay.
- See there it is.
All right so the trick here. - Mm-hmm.
- When you're first starting a flower arrangement
is to use your woodiest stems first.
This is called ninebark,
and you'll see it's very like tough,
and it will basically give you a structure
from what to put the more delicate flowers in.
- Mm-hmm. - Right?
- I almost went into the fields and cut some flowers
because there's really pretty like yellow flowers
all over the place, a little autumnal,
however I was like,
maybe they're full of ticks.
(laughs)
- Oh yeah, well these are definitely, these are
from Anderson Acre's Farm
- Uh huh - And they're like, you know,
out in the middle of the woods
just about three miles from here.
So every once in a while you do find a little guy
but hopefully not this time.
- Oh, nature. - So what I'm
doing right now, is because these are so tall,
I'm just making them more usable for this size arrangement.
- Right 'cause we're following our like one--
- Yeah. - Our one rule.
- So, let's see, just do this. - I can help.
- Yeah you want to do a couple?
- I was watching.
(laughing)
- All right, so that's probably good.
- That looks so nice already.
- That does look nice but I'm just
gonna to take a little bit more off.
- Mm-hmm.
- So that really the last leaf is right at the lip
of where the pumpkin starts.
- And we're going to make like a little...
- A little nest, and we'll just go through
and you basically put them,
that one is going to be a little shorter,
at varying heights.
- So some are shorter than others.
- Create some visual interest. - So it looks natural, yeah.
We're just gonna kind of place these
in a circle all the way around,
till we get to the other side.
- I think the key is that you
chose such a nice variety of flowers.
Because when I go to the flower market,
I would always choose like beautiful like
peonies and roses and, it makes a nice arrangement.
- Yeah.
- But it doesn't have that variety, that you get
with the greens and like this.
- I can definitely appreciate a flower arrangement
that's made of all the same flowers.
- Right.
- [Amy] But at Thanksgiving time,
you know, it's all about the bounties.
- [John] Right.
- [Amy] You want some variation I think.
So this one is kinda nice,
you see how it's a little bit more
mature than the rest of these. - Mm-hmm, yeah.
- It might make for a nice piece that's gonna
stand up in the arrangement.
So this will be the, probably the last
I use of this material.
And the trick is to get it the right height.
- Mm-hmm.
- If you go along the side of the table that your working on
and kind of decide. - Right.
- How high you want it to be, and then I'm thinking
I'm going to cut it right there.
So that it's the right size
once I get it into the arrangement.
There we go, okay so now we've got this really nice,
full, beautiful, it's up high, it's down low.
- You have a structure.
- A structure, exactly that is the word I'm looking for.
Since this is going to be viewed, in the round.
I want to do two different focal points.
- Okay.
- And I'm going to pick them opposite one another.
So we'll put one low, over here, and one low, over here,
and the perfect
- Look at these dahlias.
Oh my gosh. - Thing to do that with.
Isn't that delicious?
I'm going to just cut up the stem on an angle
so it can continue to drink water.
- Oh those colors are very seductive.
- Mm-hmm, it's going to be beautiful.
And then we'll do one more, and then my third dahlia
that's the same color,
we're going to try and get it to land right about there.
- Okay.
- So that it will go this way across the arrangement.
- [John] And odd numbers, I think always--
- Always are better than even.
This is when it comes handy to
have this flower frog down there because--
- Mm-hmm.
It just stands up. - It holds the flower up
even though I don't have stems holding it currently.
So I'm going to pull the leaves off of this guy.
- What is that? - This is amaranth,
it's called.
- Wow.
- So I'm going to do the same kind of idea
where I've got these guys going this way across
and I'm going to put. - It's so fall.
- Then I'm going to make this guy be kind of tall
right here. - Is that amaranth too?
- This is also the amaranth.
I have it in burgundy and
I have it in this gold color today.
And then I'm going to do a third one
over on this side.
Hopefully I'll get one that's kind of that shape.
- Your going to be rich in flowers.
- I'll tell you what, there's nothing
better than working with flowers,
and they're such a nice gift.
People like them when they're happy,
they like them when they're sad.
- It's also like working with food where it's very tactile
and it's all the senses working together.
- For sure. - And it also kind of
focuses you on something.
- Let's get some of these guy's in here now.
These are also dahlia.
One over here.
Kind of get this orange color, and we'll do
a kind of a low one also on this side.
- So your fourth golden dahlia going in here.
- Yeah and you see there's like a nice little
empty spot right in here. - Right.
- That we wanna fill.
This one's kind of neat because it has this other baby one.
- I love those little buds.
- Yeah, so I'm going to use that, maybe next to it
and make it look like it's still connected.
- So Amy has amazing taste and we have been
leaning heavily on her since our move
peppering many questions into conversations about
handles, kitchen layouts, stoves, everything.
I mean if you see our kitchen you might see a few
things that are going to be familiar.
(laughing)
- Let's see here, we have one more and I think
I'd like to get it right in here.
- Okay.
- And you want to everything
to kind of have it's own breathing room, right?
I've even noticed that this dahlia's
bumping into
the leaf
and basically I'm just gonna go in here
and give it a little haircut.
I think next, I'd like to put some,
just a little bit of these phlox.
I'm gonna remove some of the leaves on here and
just you can do that too. - Yeah.
- But I just want them to be a little less.
And then just go with the shape of the stem.
You see how that's working?
- Oh so they can just hang on out.
- Yeah but he's going to go out that way
and then we'll do another one over
(laughing) on this side.
- Is it going to go in the right,
I wanna trim this down.
- Right here is a good spot.
- This one seems a little.
- You see right there, well.
- No. - Almost got it.
(violin plucking)
Yay!
- Is that right?
- Yeah, let's just turn it a little bit
so that it's got. - No.
- It's good it's perfect.
Okay, and then I'm going to do.
- I need to just shoosh.
- What you do,
down low, you do up high.
So we'll stick this guy right in there.
- So you have moments that are being echoed
at various points.
- Exactly, we're getting close.
- [John] Yeah, yeah I'm seeing like some,
there's composition, there's color theory.
- [Amy] Totally. Focal point.
- [John] So, you're choosing-- - [Amy] Texture.
- [John] You're choosing like a color story to tell.
- Exactly, exactly. - [John] With the arrangement.
And you have moments that are different
like these little flowers here are paler but,
they still have those rich like burgundy colors
that are brought in.
- Exactly, and that one right in there.
- Oh that's so pretty.
- Yeah, so this is going across this way you see?
And I need one more that comes out down low on this side.
And then I think we need to get a couple of
pops of white in here,
cosmos. - Yeah.
- So these guys are super delicate, this is why
you save them for last, right? - Oh yeah.
- And I even, I like to do what I can to make them
slightly less weedy. - Right.
- Because once they're in the arrangement,
what you're really focused on
are on these white pretty flowers.
- How long will the cosmos last in an arrangement?
- Well in water, a week,
I would say, yeah. - Oh really, okay.
- [Amy] Don't let any of the leaves hit the water.
- [John] 'Cause they get all moldy?
- Yeah, it forms like a bacteria,
it starts to smell, and then all the flowers go like this.
So you really don't want any leaves inside the water.
We're getting so close here I can taste it.
- Yeah, I am like mesmerized.
I'm sure there's like flower arranging channels
'cause it's so relaxing to watch.
(laughing)
- Do you think we're missing anything?
Tell me where?
One last one
and then we're done. - [John] Okay.
- [Amy] I would like to see a little more of this peach
right in there.
And then we're ready to go fry the turkey.
That's it, I mean what do you think?
- I think you're very talented and I'm so appreciative
that you let us come here and film this.
- I'm so glad that you came, yeah.
- [John] Oh my gosh, I'm going to be practicing at home now
and let things breathe, choose a palette.
- [Amy] Yep.
- [John] And, I guess, just have fun with it.
- [Amy] Have fun and...
- Even if the flowers weren't this good,
it would still be like a nice thing to do
and, you know, practice makes perfect.
- [Amy] Exactly. - [John] I'm trying to set
you up for coming over to dinner and seeing a really
janky flower arrangement.
(laughs)
- [Amy] It'll be perfect.
- Thanks, that's the spirit.
If you missed my "We Moved" video,
click up over here
and see what happened in my life
that I am now in the country,
in beautiful places like this. (Amy laughs)
Thanks so much for watching
and I'll see you in the next video.