A Guide to Pressing Flowers

My husband knows that he should never buy me flowers, and if he does they should be potted.
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Flowers are pretty and can brighten up a whole room, but they just don’t last long. Pressing flowers can be a good way to keep their beauty living on.

This is coming from my experience of working with a rosebush, but it could work with any type of flowers, as long as they’re not too thick! Somehow, even with the heat we’ve been having, my rosebush survived and still has flowers even though it has been a bit neglected lately.

When choosing the flowers to cut, you can use almost-dead flowers. Shake them; if the petals don’t fall off and they still look pretty, they’re good!

Always cut the flowers at an angle.

If there are spider webs you can wipe them off, or rinse them, but be sure to let them dry some before trying to press them.

I use phone books to press my flowers. They soak up the moisture, and I don’t care if they get ruined. If you have already thrown away your phone books, you can use any big book and line the pages you use with paper towels.

Start from the back of the book.

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Some flowers you can hold how you want them to lay while turning a chunk of pages, so that they will lay perfectly for you. Some it doesn’t matter and they lay pretty already or they will look good however they dry. It depends on the flower.

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Once you have your flowers lying in the book like you want them, it’s time to stack on some weight. I take a bunch of our heavy books and set them on top of the phone books.

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It takes about a week for the flowers to completely dry. I found these ones still in the phone book.

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You can do a bunch of different things with pressed flowers. They can be framed, used on cards or as scrapbook embellishments. What else have you used pressed flowers as?

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