How To Press Flowers

Pressing flowers - traditionally, people use flower presses to press their flowers but I found that there's a much quicker and easy way and it costs a lot less money. I use a telephone directory because the paper is absorbent, takes out the moisture form the flowers and leaves you after few weeks, if you put a heavy weight on it, with perfectly pressed flowers which are ideal for making cards. So, what do you need? What sort of flowers? Well, the spring is the ideal time to press flowers because they lend themselves very well because they are not multi-petalled.

A multi-petalled flower such as a rose is very very difficult to press and they do suggest that you actually take off the petals and then reassemble the flower. That can be quite tricky. So, I'm going to say that this for example, the florists obviously are not going to try and press that whole hydrangea head.

I mean, I'm going to take off little florets from the main stem, just like this, 1, 2, 3, 4, so you can see, I'm going to get a lot out of just one stem f hydrangea. I then work from the back of the book and open it up, press it down and then I place the flowers over the page with a nice space in between each one, so you can see, like that, and I probably need a bit more few ones. Here, I just use these post-its, I put it in there and just place it there and write on and I know it's this particular point.

I would then go a few more pages in which is here and this time, I'm going to use some of these lovely cinarea leaves – and why is it good – because it's indented and when pressed and while it loses its three-dimensional quality, it's still interesting. I find it far more valuable perhaps to press something like this and one like that. So, I place the three just like that and actually put those upside down, so you feel that's placed nicely.

And then because it's leaves, I might use a little bit of another sticker and place it down like that and turn again. Another flower that I'm going to try and use is the delphinium. Delphinium is such a glorious blue and it keeps its colour extremely well.

The intensity is gorgeous. I just clip off a few of those. Although it is spear-like, it's actually got a little spear, it's not totally flat.

It will still press extremely well, so I press 1, 2, 3, get them nicely positioned and you can help the start by just pressing down a little bit like so. But before I nearly forget, we stick on yellow this time, put it in and again, clearly mark what you have. When you're finished and I'm going to perhaps add one more, I've got little star flowers here.

You could take these off, remove the leaves and then place them. But I like to have a separate sheet for each type of flower. So, we just put one more and over there, gently down, and pres downwards, and then a few of these.

We could even go on the side. So, down there and – what colour have I not used – pink and then I'm going to close it. Press down on it and if you've got any weights, you could just put them down there.

But it's as easy as anything to actually just get some heavy books, place them on top, forget it and it's only a matter of weeks, a couple of weeks, and you can open your pages and you'll find that your flowers are pressed and ready to go. So, that is how you press flowers. Flower presses also work well but for me, it's the yellow pages any time. .