A project for saving all those gorgeous summer plants and flowers.
Material Requirements: 4/10
Time: 30 - 45 minutes over two days
Age: 7+ (or younger if adult helping)
Sensory friendly: 10/10
A Feast for the Senses
This is the ultimate whimsical garden walk dream. Basket in hand, floating from flower to flower plucking beautiful, freshly opened buds and adding them to a colorful pile of blooms- this is the stuff gardens were made for. Whether you're in a beautiful meadow, a flower patch at home, or you've found a few plants around town you'd love to savor all year long, this project is truly meant for you.
Flower Pressing through History
The practice of saving flowers in this method dates all the way back to Egyptian culture, but it was more recently made popular as an art form called Oshibana in Japan in the 16th century. Artists would create large, elaborate, layered designs with blooms that often held personal significance. As trade increased with Europe, western cultures became fascinated by the artwork and began adopting the practice as a favorite pastime. Whether someone was keeping a flower between the pages of a book as a special keepsake or they were adding dried flowers to a scientific field journal, this practice has been valuable throughout human history and the tradition continues today.
Collecting and Saving Flowers
This process is very simple, and it's fun for kids and adults alike. Make sure you bring a basket, or a plate, anything that will allow you to place the blooms in gently and won't allow them to fall through. You don't need much of the actual plant, simply clip off the length or the bloom you'd like to save. If you only take a few from each plant, your plants won't even notice that you've harvested some blooms.
Flowers that have flatter bloom shapes are the easiest to start with. Things like violas, daisies, calendula, and chrysanthemums are perfect for pressing since they are already a flat shape. But you can also collect leaves, grasses, small cuttings of herbs, and more. For more complex shapes, you can also pluck apart the petals for drying and then assemble them again once they've dried. You want things that are at their peak bloom, looking their best at the moment you clip them off. Once you have everything you'd like to save, make time to press them right away as they will begin to wilt and become harder to work with if they sit for too long.
How to Press the Flowers
It's pretty simple to press flowers with or without a press, the overall goal is to pull the moisture out of the plant while keeping it under pressure so it doesn't shrivel in the drying process.
Option 1: Press Flowers in a Book
Lay your flowers face down onto a piece of tissue paper, then place another piece of tissue paper on top so that the flower is sandwiched in between, place the whole thing onto a paper towel or tea towel and then place it under something flat and heavy like a large book. Leave it for about a week or two and then lift it carefully to reveal your flowers.
Option 2: Press Flowers in a Flower Press
If you want to press A LOT of flowers in a small amount of space, you can make life easier by picking up your own flower press. It's fairly simple, just some boards, a couple of straps, and some layers of paper and absorbing material, but it really speeds up the process and improves the results considerably. We have this one and it works amazingly well.
Go a layer at a time, trimming off stems, and laying your flowers face down onto the tissue paper. Take time to make sure your flowers aren't overlapping, the petals are nice and flat, and that everything is laying exactly how you would like. If it's been a few hours since you've picked the flowers, they may have started to wilt, so just be patient and experiment with placing the flowers in different ways.
Then place another layer of tissue paper on top and a thick soft board like on top of it. Sandwiching layers on top of one another. Once you have completed all the layers, you'll wrap the whole thing together using a couple of velcro straps. Pull these tight so that it really presses your flowers. Put the whole thing into a big plastic bag and give it just two days to be fully dry. All the extra absorbent layers really speeds up the process.
How to turn those beautiful flowers into cards
Now that you have lots of blooms and grasses pressed and ready, why not use them to create cards for people in your life. We did this project to create mother's day cards with first graders (we called it "adults who love you day" to make sure everyone was included) and the children took to it very well with some supervision.
Materials Needed
- Pressed flowers
- Watercolor paper cut to size
- Paintbrushes
- Sharpies or markers
- Tweezers (optional)
- Photo mats (optional)
Set up each person doing the cards with markers, a piece of water color paper, a dish of mod podge, some brushes, tweezers (optional to pick up and arrange the flowers) and about 10-15 dried flowers each.
Using decoupage to attach your flowers
Before anyone starts gluing, try arranging the flowers how you'd like them first. Think about patterns, or designing a scene, or even whimsical ideas like using the blooms as balloons or fancy hats. This is the creative fun of this project-- you can try all sorts of designs. Once you have it how you like it dip your paintbrush in the mod podge and paint your whole water color page with a nice even coating. Then transfer your blooms one at a time onto the card and press them gently into the paper so that the bloom sticks. Now that your blooms are on the paper, dip your brush in the mod podge again and gently paint over top of the blooms again. The mod podge will dry clear, so don't worry if it looks milky at first. This second layer of mod podge secures the blooms to the paper. The more layers you add, the thicker this coating will become. You can even layer up flowers this way if you want to experiment by adding mod podge and then blooms and letting each layer dry in between.
Once you've finished adding flowers, let the papers dry, sometimes this means waiting a few hours, but just like glue you can test it with your finger to see if the surface still feels tacky. Once it's dry you can embellish your design with markers, ribbons, or other things you'd like to add. In this case, children added their own messages to the adults in their lives. We added a frame the kids could decorate too but that step isn't necessary.
If you'd like to buy materials for this project:
Flower Press https://amzn.to/3AjM6RQ
Mod Podge https://amzn.to/3dvcmQi
Watercolor papers https://amzn.to/3SSgsCc
Tweezers (optional) https://amzn.to/3zPgmlS
Photo Mats (optional) https://amzn.to/3bW6VcG
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