Pressed flowers, how do I get started and do a nice job ?

Question

I am known as the Flower Lady for the past 12 years in the SE area of our town, I sell flowers for .10 each on a card table, self pay in a jar :) Now I would like to learn how to press them and make keepsakes for my family members, but I'd like to hear from those who learned the hard way, not from sites you have cut and pasted please. Experience usually speaks loudest

Answer 1

Have you seen the book:

Pressed Flowers
by Pamela Le Bailly

Amazon.com has it for about $11. Might be a good starting point to learn how and then what you can do with the flowers.

I'm assuming you have a ready source for flowers, can make multiple presses (cheap and easy to make, it's the blotter paper that adds up). When I was mounting it was on herbarium quality paper and with special herbarium glues, I'd be interesting to see what this author uses.

I've always liked the pressed flowers in stain glass, but the flowers fade in sunlight, so self defeating.

Answer 2

So I had a friend make this really cool thing for me. It was two layers of wood, with 4 screws (one on each corner) that you could tighten and loosen. (It's really hard to explain, but there are many ways you can do it.) Then I put a whole lot of newspaper in between the two wood layers. Then you just put the flowers in the layers of paper, with 10 or 20 layers of paper in between them. I usually would let them press for about a week.

Make sure not to use too big of flowers that are too wet. They soak through a lot of paper and it gets a little messy.

Hopefully that helps some :)

Answer 3

old phone books work well since you don't care if the flower bleeds onto the page-don't put between plastic-newspaper is ok
weight it down