Another very common and easy way to preserve flowers for future use as far as drying goes
is just simple pressing.
Pressing amounts to putting flowers or foliage between
sheets of some type of absorbent material, be it newspaper, some type of artboard
or, as many of us did in our gradeschool days, use a simple phone book
to press especially foliage.
The flowers and other material is, again, harvested at it's peak quality
and in the case of the phone book press, it's nothing
more simple than putting material between the pages of the phone book.
Here we have a fern and the pages are just folded over
you can keep on layering more foliage between the pages
and when you get all said and done
basically closing the book
and putting some type of the heavy weight right on top of it
and leaving it there for several weeks.
In the process, the moisture is absorbed by the pages of the phone book
and you can open it up and
pull out your dried leaves.
Flowers can also be dried by simple pressing
and it's just a matter of preparing the flower,
and, again, utilizing some type of material
that you place the flower on that's absorbent
and leaving it there for a length of time
to allow the plant material to dry.
In the case of pressing, especially when you're talking about flowers, you're going to end up with something that's
kind of one-dimensional or flat
and oftentimes these materials are used in picture collages, notecards, bookmarks, that kind of thing
so these are going to be very one-dimensional, flat,
but they will still retain their
overall shape and form and oftentimes the colors.
The colors in regards to pressing flowers,
the darker the colors usually end up with a darker
colored flower. They tend to get a little bit mauve colored or dark shades, that kind of thing.
Lighter colored flowers lik the whites and yellows and that kind of thing
will retain their colors. There's nothing
easier than putting this material on an absorbent piece of paper, this happens to be a
heavy piece of artboard,
and then folding a piece of, in this case, newspaper right over the top
and then putting something over the top of that
that's stiff and firm
such as this piece of cardboard and here again we're going to apply weights to this material
and leave it there for several weeks
at which time when you uncover this thing
the flowers will be dried, flat, pressed and ready for use in a picture or notecard or
bookmark, however you choose.
So this is a way in which you can do it at home.
The classic way of pressing flowers was always done with a plant press.
You see one right over here.
Basically several sheets of material are put between this plant press,
which then is equipped with these screws that apply pressure to this whole system.
That's left there for certain length of time to dry the material
and then you can just
pick out what you need out of this plant press
reclamp it down and you can store material here as well as use from it.
As you can see right here we've got some material that has been dried for quite awhile in this
case foliage off an astilbe
and this was using the classic plant press.
We can see how they turn out. Very flat, very smooth, very dry. These can then be
either used in their entirety or broken apart and used parts of to reconstruct
a flower, if you will,
if you're doing a picture or whatever might have you.
Pressing flowers: very simple, very easy to do
and you can do a wide variety of plant material