Do you have a bounty of flowers in your garden? Have you ever wanted to press a flower, but weren’t sure where to start?
Pressing flowers just requires a little bit of patience for the flowers to actually dry, but the process is quite simple and doesn’t require a lot of fancy equipment.
Start by collecting some flowers. Big thick flowers like roses are hard to press, but delicate flowers like pansies are the perfect candidates for this project. My suggestion: Make an experiment out of the process and try a bunch of different flowers to discover what works best.
We thought that daffodils would work out great, but they stuck to the press and lost a lot of color. So experiment, make guesses, document your ideas, and make some discoveries.
If you’re not pressing right away, store your flowers in the fridge to keep them fresh.
Flower Press
I used a very inexpensive product, the 4M Flower Press Kit. It’s currently out of stock, and this 4M Flower Press looks equally wonderful (Amazon). The press comes with nifty straps that you can tighten and hold the whole thing together, and I didn’t have to spend a lot of time cutting cardboard. However, you could easily make your own press with the following materials: a stack of cardboard, photocopy paper, and a heavy book.
Place one piece of cardboard down on your table. Cover it with a piece of photocopy paper. Place flowers on the paper in the way that you want them to dry. Add another sheet of paper on top of this, and then another piece of cardboard.
Keep stacking: Cardboard, paper, flowers, paper. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Until you’re done. Place one last piece of cardboard on top. Cover the whole thing with one or more heavy bricks to smoosh it down flat.
This is where you have to be patient: come back and check the flowers in two weeks. We pressed these two weeks before the grandparents came for a visit, which created a natural moment in our lives for uncovering our dried treasures.
If you’d like to glue these to a card, pour some white glue, Mod Podge (Amazon), or Glazing Medium (Amazon)
into a small bowl. Paint the glue to the card (not too much if you care about the glue showing) and adhere the flowers to your paper.
You can use your pressed flowers to make collaged cards, framable art, or add a bowl of them to a table and see what the kids come up with.
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Which reminds me that our next Creative Challenge for kids is coming up on June 4, and the material is: Flowers! I hope you’ll join me. Start collecting those flowers and have fun with this one.
And if you’re looking for a reason to make your own art and would love the company of others to motivate you, I hope you’ll consider joining the fun Double Page Spread Challenge. We just started last week and there’s already a ton of inspiration on Instagram (type in #tinkersketch to follow) and on Facebook.
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beauty-full tutorial!:-)
what a joy to see you pressing with the young ones:-)…they will have memories forever:-)
thanks for letting us see:-)
rebekah:-)
I love the idea of pressed flowers and I do that occasionally with my boys, but they are boys and prefer something a bit more physical. So I saw something last year that we tried out with fresh flowers. Put them between 2 pieces of watercolor paper, or other thicker absorbent paper and smash with a hammer. This also yields some interesting results where the colors transfer to the paper. You don’t have to smash too hard, but of course this was tons of fun for them. and I guess you could call them pressed flowers 🙂
I still have the flower press my horticulturist dad gave to me when I was a little girl… and now I use it with my boys- we love pressing flowers and leaves 🙂
We always used old phonebooks with something heavy on top; it works great.
We should press a few things for JDaniel’s nature table. Thank you for showing me how.
What a beautiful tutorial! Thanks for the detailed instructions. Mine pressed flowers have never turned out right lol
my mom and grandma did this for many years and they used old paperbacks. we made pictures and book marks. I bought a wonderful pressed flower Christmas card the tree was a fern and the decorations petels.