Easy pressed flower method!
Two sheets of kitchen paper
Potentially, also some additional heavy objects (could be anything: tins of beans, water bottles… get creative!)
Choose your flowers! Ideally you want thin and vibrantly coloured flowers. Avoid juicy things like bluebells because they tend to go mouldy before they dry out, and you don’t want that! Make sure that you have permission to pick the flowers, and don’t take too many from one plant/area - be considerate to the environment!
Don’t wash your plants, but make sure they’re clean and free of bugs and dirt etc. If they were damp or dewy when you picked them, just dab some kitchen paper over them to make sure you’re not putting them into the book wet.
Open your chosen pressing book somewhere in the middle, and on the bottom page, place a piece of kitchen paper. This is just to make sure that the pages of the book are protected in case any of the moisture from the flowers seeps that far through the newspaper. It didn’t for me, but protec those books!
Open out the newspaper and place the sheets on top of the kitchen roll. It helps to close the book once at this point so that you have a nice crisp seam in the newspaper before you put the flowers on, so that they don’t jump out when you close the book.
Lay your flowers onto the sheet. It helps to place them with the flowers facing towards the spine and the stems towards the edge so that when you close it, they stay flat-ish. Some might get squished, but that’s just part of pressing flowers.
Once all your flowers are safely on the newspaper, gently close the top sheet of newspaper over the top of the flowers, and place another piece of kitchen paper on top of the newspaper, before closing the book completely. Make sure nothing gets too squished or dog-eared in a way you don’t want. It’s tricky, so don’t be too fussy about it.
Place the book somewhere out of the way, and either put a load of other books on top of it, or stack (carefully!) your other heavy objects on top of it to create the pressure needed.
Leave the book without opening it for about a week.
Check to make sure nothing’s gone mouldy or whatever after one week. If all is fine, close it up again and leave for another 7 days or so to make sure everything is completely dry.
After 2 weeks in total, you should have dried, pressed flowers. You can attach them to journals with a liquid PVA glue or use them in resin or whatever you want to do with them now! Have fun!
Stack up the books to add weight
Here’s some I did earlier…
Feel free to add any tips or tricks if you have more experience with pressing flowers than I do! I used to do it a lot as a child, and recently had a go at doing it as an adult, but without the little flowerpress I built back then (they’re super cheap and easy to make, if you want to get into pressing flowers in a bigger way than just the odd occasion!).
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