Pressed Flowers

Pressed Flowers

“Flowers are the music of the ground from earth's lips spoken without sound.”

- Edwin Curran

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     I love getting flowers, but it's sad when they start wilting and dying. So I was happy to find this trick to save the flowers’ color and beauty. This way I was able to keep flowers from my niece, flowers from a first date, and flowers from my wedding forever.

     The flowers I will be using as an example are from a friend who came to visit my home for the first time. When they were starting to wilt I remembered that phone book I had laying around and decided to give it a purpose. (Who still uses phone books?)

     There are other ways to press flowers, but this is my favorite way of doing it. You can use any book, or paper, preferably something you don't use. The pages will be soaking up all the moisture from the flowers. So I usually use phone books or old magazines. Some people like to press flowers while they are still fresh and new. I like to enjoy them for a little while in my home, so I wait until I see the first sign that it may start wilting.

Let's get started! Once you have the flowers and a book/magazine/paper to use, you just need to decide what you want the flowers to look like. There are a few ways you can arrange the flowers.

You could press just the petals, in which case you would pluck the petals off and place them on the pages of the book. Like this:

   You could also press the whole flower by spreading the petals out like this:
Keep in mind this will take a bit longer to dry.

You could also fold the whole  flower over and press them like this:

This method takes the longest to dry.

       If you can't choose, like me, you can try all the methods.  It's important to try to spread them out a little, and make sure there is a big chunk of pages in between.  If the pages are too wet the flowers will not dry properly, and can actually get moldy. After putting all the flowers in the book, the next step is to carefully close the book and put something heavy over it.  you can put other books on top of it, I used to put textbooks from school on top of it.  Since I don't have textbooks anymore, I put boxes on top of mine. 

For all the flowers to dry completely it could take from 3 weeks to 2 months, depending on how much moisture was in the flowers. You should check every few weeks. Once the flowers are dry they are very thin and fragile, so it's necessary to be very careful when taking them out of the book. These flowers can then be used for other crafts. I used to put them in scrapbooks, frame them or just keep them in a keepsake box.