Carol Macht: Hello this is Carol Macht from Forever Yours in Glen Burnie, in Maryland. Today we are going to show you how to dry and preserve your flowers using a method you can do at home. You can see here is a bouquet that's been fully preserved and placed in a shadow box and this is all beautiful roses. The colors are gorgeous, it was done in silica gel and this is the kind of project that you can expect to have. We have here some silica gel. This is a product that is available from craft stores and you can purchase, you are going to need about ten pounds of it to sink a whole bouquet. Gently unwrap the stems first, taking each flower apart.

Now that we have the bouquet separated, we can start prepping the bouquet to actually put it in the silica gel. You are going to be cutting the flower about quarter to half an inch away from the top of the flower, keeping the stems because we are going to use the stems again later. Cut approximately three inches of wire and then you are going to take the wire and poke it in to the back of the flower until it's firmly in the hip of a rose and folded up. You will see why we need to fold it up a bit later. What she is doing first is pouring a little bit of silica gel inside of the flower, padding it in, so it goes nice and deep inside the petals, and she is standing it up inside the silica gel. Carefully from the outsides building upwards, pouring your silica gel so that they will support the petals. If she takes the silica gel at this stage and post it in the tub, then the rose might splay outwards. We are going to completely burry each flower inside the sand, then you are going to put a lid on the container and you are going to keep it in this container for about two weeks. After your two weeks are up, you are going to pour the flowers. This is what it looks like as a preserved flower. This is a tube that we purchased from the hardware store. It's a hard acrylic tube and this is going to be our stand that we can put a loamy into. What Carol is going to be doing is gluing a piece of rose stem approximately the length of the loamy. She doesn't have to worry about making exactly the length because she can cut it to be able to size later. But she is going to be gluing that on to that acrylic tube and this is for aesthetic reasons. You want to have something that looks attractive and natural. In the end you are going to have a stand that is completely surrounded by your stems and the ribbon is going to be wrapped around it. This is actual, real, preserved moss, and has been glued on to the loamy. It's going to be glued on to the base and it will be able to stand like that. And then she is going to take each of the flowers and straighten it, put the floral tape on and then she is going to be working, starting with the round bouquet from the top down. You press it straight in to the loamy and you are going to continue doing that all the way around. Assuming that she has now put in all of her flowers, she will be able to start putting in greens, allowing a small stem from each of the pieces of Baker's fern and she is going to put those in to the loamy at the positions where it looks attractive. And that's how to preserve and display your bouquet.

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