Creating a Laminated Pressed Flower Bookmark

Theresa Hambleton: Hi! I am Theresa Hambleton with All Seasons Floral Preservation, and we are showing you how to press flowers.

Okay, for the second bookmark, we are going to make one that's a little bit more complicated because there is some cutting involved with the flower. But it's not too complicated because my seven-year-old son created the design. So with that in mind, we are going to make a butterfly going towards the flower. Okay and for the flower, we are going to use a floret from hydrangea and for the antennae, we are going to use a little bit of babies breath, and then for the butterfly, we'll use some pansy pieces, okay. So let's get started.

We have our paper, and I am going to keep it simple, I am not going to put any text on it. Get our tweezers and first we are going to make the butterfly. So we select pansy that we think will be pretty. And what I'll like to do, the pansy has three petals, right here, that kind of makeup the face of the pansy. My mom always thought that this was two eyes and a mouth. So we'll take an eye, and the mouth, and we'll just cut that out. Okay, and that could be for the body of the butterfly. So we'll look for a large petal, a large back petal, from the pansy. It's okay to cut through the front petal because it's the back petal that we are looking for. I am just going to round it off so it looks little more natural, and slide under here. Then we'll take another one, and then for the body we are going to look for a sepal from the back, and a hydrangea floret for the flower, and we'll put the antennae on last after we glue this down. So you just see a very small amount of glue, I am holding the other petals in place, put an essence of glue on the back, it doesn't take much. The problem with too much glue is that sometimes and in the darker flowers is, isn't a problem but a lot of times, if you put too much glue on, you put it on too thick, then it turns the petals brown and with lighter colors, lighter flower colors, it really does not give you the effect that you want.

So you just need a tiny bit, and I will choose -- now the antennae are small, so we don't need big flowers for that. So I will just take this one here. Now I have my laminator warming up. I know not everyone has a home laminator but they are handy. What I am going to do next is I am going to put this bookmark that we have made into this clear sleeve, and if I push it up to the edge and that's on two-sides, and that's two-sides that do not need to be trimmed, if I put them in the right distance from the edge. Okay, if I make it straight, and I put the clear sleeve into the protective sleeve, and the laminator is ready, just set it in, and wait for it to come out of the other side.

Okay, so now the bookmark is ready to be opened, and these laminator machines are not very expensive, and they could be a lot of fun if you decide that you like to make bookmarks, tags for your luggage, etcetera. Here is the finished butterfly going towards the flower, that was easy to make, or just going to trim that off. Actually three sides are already ready to go and we are just going to trim off this last side, and there you have it. So now, I have shown you how to make laminated bookmarks, and next, we are going to show you how to make rose petal frames for scrapbooking.