Designing a Pressed Flower Bookmark

Theresa Hambleton: Hi! I am Theresa Hambleton with All Seasons Floral Preservation. And we're showing you how to press flowers. Today, I'm going to show you how to create laminated bookmarks. I have some samples right here, some have text and some are plain. If you do want to put some text on your bookmark, you want to print it up before you set any flowers on it. And if you want to handwrite something on the back to make it more personal, you would want to put that on the back also before you start doing anything with your flowers. Okay. This one is, if teachers were flowers I would pick you. And the little boy wrote to his teacher on the back with his name. So you can make it very personal or something not so personal that just as simply a plain bookmark that could be for anybody. So we're going to make first this one here because it's very simple, it's a good one to get started on. So what you need is you need a white glue and you could use elmer's glue if need be. I use herbarium glue because it's safe for all flowers and we're in the preservation business. I have some sharp, small pointed scissors and some very pointed tweezers. So I select my card stock and I have printed on here, when I count my blessings, I count you twice and what I thought I would do is put two flowers on to represent counting twice. So I have here some Delphinium and I'm just going to very carefully select one, and pick it up with my tweezers and set it down.

Now, I notice when I put this down, that I can see the stem through the petal and when you laminate, a lot of times when it sucks the air out it presses the petal down to the point where you'll see the stem very well through the petal. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it over very carefully, snip the stem off back. Okay, and set it down there. And set it down, okay. And I'll select another flower, and I haven't glued it yet because I want to make sure I know where I want my flowers to be before I set the glue on. Put another flower here and see the same problem is happening. I have the stem showing through this very transparent petal, but I do like that flower. So I'm going to use it anyways. I'm going to gird it over and snip this off the back. Now I like how curve that is, I think that's really pretty so I'm going to still use that. But what I don't like, what I don't like is that this petal is so transparent but I have some other dark petals here that I can use to help with that problem. What I do is I take my glue and on this let's see if it fits first. I'm thinking it will. That's a little bit big, this one over here might be a little bit better. But I flip it over this way and match up the shape. Okay, that's much better.

So I'll take a little bit of glue, okay, it's just about -- that's a little dab of glue and a lot of people will think that that's not very much glue but for a flower petal it's too much. So what you want to do, is take it like that so it's just more like essence of glue on there. And then put that on and it makes it much thicker and then I did like that petal there. So with what's left on my finger, I like that. And that's a much fuller flower. Then I like that look of that stem, the way it's curved like that, okay. So now we're ready to glue these flowers down. I still have glue so I'm just going to put that much there because that's really all you need, it's that little bit right there. Set it down and it's time for more glue. And then take the stem. Now I could trim that little bit off right there on the stem, but since it's been covered I don't need to do that. If it wasn't going to be covered, I would definitely do that. And that it is the essence of glue. Slide it under there with this and there you have your bookmark ready to be laminated. Okay, now any office appliance store usually has a laminator and you can get them in sheets like this. This is a sheet that has three different bookmarks on it. That's the beauty of being able to take it to the office appliance stores that you can fill your sheet for just over a dollar and get several bookmarks done at one time. And all you need to do is separate your bookmark from the sheet and trim it out about three millimeters so they say, from the card stock. That way there's a seal around the card stock that you don't want to break, you can almost see it there that air seal right there around. You want to make sure you don't break that seal because it helps preserve your flowers and then when you're finished trimming it all, you'll have a complete bookmark like this.