Mary Beth Lopresti: Hi! I'm Mary Beth Lopresti with All Seasons Floral Preservation and we are showing you how to press flowers. Right now I'm going to show you how to use some of the flowers we have pressed in creating beautiful scrapbook pages. We begin with a prepared scrapbook page. We are going to be using a 4x6 photo and we have just attached a little saying that, a family blossoms with a mother's love. So what we'll do is create a frame template out of card stock, and it's to this template that we'll attach the flowers. You always want to keep your photos protected when you are working with the flowers and the glue. So I generally have the photo with a piece of plastic on the top of it, but for right now I'll set that aside and work just on the frame. I cut out one piece of card stock, that's an eighth of an inch larger than the photo. Because I don't have much room here, I can't make my frame very wide, but depending upon the size of scrapbooking page you are using, if you are doing a much larger page, you have a lot more leeway and that's the beauty of working with pressed flowers. You can do smaller things with smaller flowers, with large petals you can create much bigger designs. I've cut the card stock one eighth of an inch wider than the photo, and I just want to make a quarter inch template. Lining this up on my paper cutter; it goes right there. So I just put this in at about one quarter of an inch, and go down. I am creating this template because it's not going to show; it needs to be accurate, but it doesn't have to be perfect. So there we take this out and we have our template on which we'll put our hydrangea petals. What we'll first do is run a very thin line of glue, and we'll use some of the petals from the larger florets to line the template. This will give a second layer of petals, so that you are not able to see the template through the hydrangea. So what I'm doing is just taking the larger hydrangea, and breaking apart the petals very carefully, and just lining them up along the edge.

So now we have created our template and lined it with hydrangea petals. And what we are going to do is place a clear sheet over the photo, you always want to keep your photos protected when you are working with the glue and flowers. So in this way, we'll be able to see the frame and how it's going to look on the photo when it's finished, but be able to work it without running the risk of doing some damage to the scrapbooking page.

When you pick up your florets of hydrangea, you always want to look to see the green part is the center and the darker spot is where you cut the stem off. So in order for this to look its best, we want to be sure that green part is showing on top. Just a smallest amount of glue on the back, it doesn't take much to have the flower stick, and then you just put it on top. You'll see that the hydrangea frame is covered with the petals and that really helps to make it, so that you don't see the template underneath. It gives just enough so that you don't see that.

We'll move along like this, along the entire edge of the template, just putting a little bit of glue and then dab it down. When you are putting the glue on your hydrangea petals, you want to look to see that in some cases the petals overlap one another. If it's possible to put your little dab of glue on that spot, that's ideal, because that way you are certain that none of the glue will ever show through the flowers.

So now that we have created our hydrangea frame, we want to take this off, and our picture has been protected the entire time from the glue. And just put a little bit of tape on the edge of the picture and you just want to straddle between the picture and the background there, because the border is going to come up onto the photo. It will cover that throughly, then we just frame the picture and put that down. And now in order to secure, we don't want to touch that flowers because they are fragile, so we want take just a piece of card stock, lay it on top and then put pressure on it that way. And that will be sure that's it's secure to the page but we are not going to damage the flowers.

Now that our scrapbooking page is complete, we are going to be able to enjoy these flowers indefinitely. The flowers are still very fragile, so most scrapbookers use page protectors and it's especially important to do so in this case. One of the tricks is safely getting your scrapbook page into the page protector without damaging the floral art that you have just made is to cover the scrapbook page with a piece of card stock of the same size. Then you just simply put your page into the protector, slide the page in, and then pull the piece of card stock out, and you have a beautiful scrapbook page with your pressed hydrangea, and it will stay safe for good.

Keeping pressed flowers in a scrapbook is actually a very good place to keep them, because they are dry and away from direct light. And for long-term results with your pressed floral art, that's the best place to keep.