Storing Pressed Flowers

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

Right now I am going to show you how to take the flowers that you've pressed and store them properly so that you can use them for future use. This phonebook contains flowers that were pressed from my anniversary, and that was on May 2nd. So at this time they are ready to come out. We recommend using acid free cardstock and on each sheet, we label what event the flowers are from, and the date.

And you'll just open up the phonebook and take the flowers and you can just dump them onto the page. We've reused the tissue paper, that's absolutely fine, for other pressing projects. You want to just have the flowers kind of spread out, in this case these are rose leaves.

We store our flowers in acid-free sleeves that are also photo safe, and this way we are able to see the flowers. So we can see the event, and we can see the flowers. So if you are doing a craft project, you have an easy reference. If you begin to build a lot of press flowers in your collection, you can even file them with pink flowers or red flowers or certain type of flower. Here is some ivy that we pressed, and you can see that it just comes off of the page, like so, and again each one is marked. You have to try do not have it overlap too much, because the flowers are very brittle and they can snap and break. So we simply put it into sleeves.

Next, we have our hydrangea and our Baby's-breath. Dark yellow roses around the edge, and you can see the variation with the flowers, even though it's all from the same yellow rose, some petals press much darker than others. But that's just the way they are, and it makes each piece unique, and that the flowers -- each petal is just as unique as each flower.

Another option if you don't have these types of sleeves, is that you can store your flowers in an envelope. We recommend again putting the occasion, and also the name of the flower, because you don't have the advantage of being able to see right through the date as we did on ours, and also to take a piece of tape and just tape one of the petals to the front so that with a quick glance you are able to go through your flowers and know exactly the shade of roses, if you just put roses or red roses some maybe darker or lighter than others so that you have a good sense of the flowers that are in the envelope, because you don't want to handle the flowers a lot, unless you are going to be working with them, because they are so delicate.

Once you have put them into the sleeves or the envelope, you want to be sure to keep your flowers in a dry location that's away from direct light and heat. If you would like, you can store your flowers in storage box, like we did the phonebook press, and put some silica in the bottom. You could put a rack that way the flowers aren't actually in the silica, but you are able to take advantage of the drawing qualities of the silica, and that will keep your flowers fresh for a very long time.

In our next segment we are going to show you how to make a floral art bookmark using some of the flowers that we've pressed today.