How to keep flowers forever

When you receive a beautiful bouquet or arrangement of flowers, it’s natural to want to keep them forever. Unfortunately, even the most gorgeous blooms start to droop over time. Fortunately if you press or dry your flowers, you can make them last a lifetime.

Pressing

To press your flowers, first be sure to trim off as much of the stem as you can. Get a piece of waxed paper and fold it in half. Sandwich the bloom in the waxed paper and put the whole thing between the page of a heavy book (you can place more than one bloom in between the waxed paper halves, just be sure the blooms don’t overlap). Place a couple of other heavy books on top and then…wait. It takes several weeks for a flower to become fully pressed and dried out, but when the process is finished, you’ll have a flower that will never fade!

Drying

If you’d like to preserve the stem along with the bloom, drying is the method for you! You’ll want to make sure your flowers are partially open for this method to work best. You’ll need to gather a coat hanger, some string or elastic bands, and some scissors. First, trim off the ends of your stems and remove all leaves. Gather several stems into a small bouquet and use string or a rubber band to fasten them together. Attach the other end of the string or rubber band to the coat hanger. Hang the bouquet up somewhere out of direct sunlight (to prevent fading) and wait for a few weeks. When your bouquet is totally dry, you can spray it with hairspray to further preserve it.

There’s nothing quite like a bouquet to celebrate a special occasion, and when you preserve your flowers, you’ll have a beautiful memory to last a lifetime!