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How to Press Flowers

Drying Pressed Flowers

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Mary Beth Lopresti, Theresa Hambleton
All Seasons Floral Preservation
http://www.allseasonspressed.com  
703-283-9447

     Owned by the sister team of Theresa Hambleton and Mary Beth Lopresti, All Seasons Floral Preservation presses, preserves, and creates framed floral art with special occasion flowers.  By combining their years of experience in artistic design, customer service, and botanical preservation they have quickly earned a nationwide reputation as creators of exquisite floral art.

     All Seasons Floral Preservation has two Virginia locations.  Theresa presses flowers and creates floral art in her studio, just off the pedestrian mall, in Charlottesville.  Working out of her home in Sterling, Mary Beth is able to serve their clients in Northern Virginia, DC, and Maryland.  If delivering the flowers to either location is not convenient, they will guide clients through the process of shipping their fresh flowers to All Seasons Floral Preservation.  Mary Beth takes great pleasure in working with every client to select the layout, background mat, and frame style for each work of art.  Design meetings generally take place in Sterling, or over the phone with their out of town clients. 

     All Seasons Floral Preservation has received recognition as a 2009 Wedding Wire Bride's Choice Award Winner and Theresa's floral art interpretation of The Natural Bridge won The Viewer's Choice Award at the University of Virginia's 2007 Flowers Interpret Art Exhibition.  In addition, they were featured in a May, 2008 article in The Washington Post Sunday Magazine. 

     Creating All Seasons Floral Preservation has been an amazing experience for Theresa & Mary Beth, both professionally and personally. It has allowed them the opportunity to use their talents to help others enjoy, forever, the flowers from life's special celebrations. And, the way they see it, what could be better than doing what you love with your sister?

Drying Pressed Flowers

In this video series the owners of All Seasons Pressed, Mary Beth Lopresti and Theresa Hambleton demonstrate the process of preserving and storing flowers. They also show how to design a pressed flower bookmark and create a pressed flower frame.

This series: 19,155 views

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Flowers

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Petal

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Rose

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Leaf

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Stem

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Phone

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Book

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Press

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Microwave

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Color

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Preserve

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Art

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Craft

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Scrap

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Photo

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Keep

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Bookmark

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Card

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Frame

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Dry

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Store

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Transcripts

Mary Beth Lopresti: Hi! I am Mary Beth Lopresti with All Seasons Floral Preservation, and today I am showing you how to press flowers.

We've now put our flowers in the phonebook, and I am going to show you how to use a drawing box. This is just a regular airtight box, we place the flowers in the phonebook into the press, and we use -- we just put a board on top, and we use two bricks, and that will provide enough weight to have the flowers be pressed. If you don't have bricks and the board available, if you have the heavy hard bound book like a dictionary that can work out just fine.

After you've placed your flowers in the box, we recommend that you put silica gel on top. This can be purchased at any arts and crafts store or online, and we simply sprinkle the silica around, and what this will do is it will absorb the moisture in the flowers. So we just use it like this. You want to be sure to keep the lid tight when your silica canister, because any moisture in the air will be absorbed into silica and it won't be as effective. Once you have placed the silica and the flowers and the weights in the box, you simply put the lid on and you're good to go.

It generally takes about 10 days to two weeks for the flowers to thoroughly dry. One of the unique things about using silica is that you can see here that it is blue, and that means that it has the ability to absorb moisture.

Once it begins to absorb the moisture from the flowers, you'll notice that silica will turn either a white or a pink color, like this. The silica can be reactivated by putting in a baking pan like this, and putting in 250 degree oven for about 5 hours. When you take it out of the oven, it will be blue again, and so you can continue to reuse it over and over. So this is how we press flowers in a phonebook press. In our next segment, I'll taking the flowers out of the press and how to store them until you want to use them for crafts or just to save indefinitely.

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