Growing a lot of flowers like I do in both the cutting garden, mini gardens and vegetable gardens I have a lot of flowers that may not be perfect: but I don’t want to
discard them. So I come up with other uses for these flowers.
One of the uses is to dry the flowers and make pressed pictures or gift cards.
Below are instructions where you will dry the flowers flat so that they can be used in
floral paper arrangements, collages or on hand decorated note cards.
Supplies you will need
Blotting Notebook Papers
Eyebrow Tweezers
Fresh Flowers
Fresh Plant Materials
Flower Presses
Old Newspapers
Paper Glue
Phone Books (or other older books)
Select flowers, grass, moss and a background material such as construction paper, card
stock or tracing paper.
You will want to gently squeeze the center of the flowers with your index finger and thumb to flatten them. Also thin out mosses and grasses. If they are too bulky they will not dry properly.
The flowers in particular will be very delicate so use tweezers to arrange the plant materials into the design you have chosen. Try to use plant material of the same
thickness to avoid uneven pressure.
Carefully glue the plants to the background material. Next place the arrangement between blotting papers. The blotting papers help to remove the moisture from the plants as they dry.
Place newspaper underneath and on top of blotting paper to help capture any extra
moisture. I use two pieces of paper on both sides.
To hold the papers in place and press the plants and flowers as flat as possible use
heavy objects such as phone books or older books on top of the newspaper. I actually
used bricks and cement blocks one time when I was pressing thicker herb plants.
Let the plants you are pressing set for two weeks. After two weeks they should be dry and glued securely in place. After I remove the plant and flower picture form the books and
newspaper I let air for a day them spray with a clear finish. This protects to colors from
fading. If you are making cards many people apply clear contact paper or a transparent
paper over the top to protect the pressed image.
You can also dry the flowers to make dried arrangements with. This will take you to an
article about drying flowers, http://thegardenersrake.com/how-to-dry-your-cut-flowers
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