How to Press Flowers

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about how to press flowers. So flowers come in all types of shapes and sizes and it's really nice to try and save them for the future by pressing them and you don't have to have a fancy flower press to save them. There's a very easy way to press flowers. So this is a beautiful little impatiens and so it's got beautiful little flowers on it and by pressing them, I can save them for the future and use them with gift cards or make art out of them or just to save them to remember what they looked like. And so an easy rule of thumb is to just use two heavy books or one heavy book for the top and put it right on to a magazine or to a newspaper, pretty much anything that is paper or cardboard you can use and you just pinch the flowers off and the trick is to lay them flat. You want the flowers to be completely flat because however they are pressed is what they're going to look like. You don't have to use a lot of flowers, just taking a few out of your plants will work really well. And I love my impatiens because it keeps blooming and blooming and blooming. So once I've laid them down, I've just used a couple of old magazine and then I just put another magazine on top and then I take one of my heaviest books, I love my plant books, and I just set it on top. So that's all you have to do and I just wait usually two to three days, check on it about everyday and I will find that within a week, usually because the house is really warm, it's wintertime, that with even a few days it will be very dry and I can turn around and put them in plastic sleeves or in envelopes and use them for a variety of reason. If not just to keep track of my plants and make a journal of my plants or just to enjoy them or make cards out of them. There's so many different uses for pressed flowers and it's a really nice hobby to have.