PROJECT 5: Botanical Pressing

I have to say the delicacy and beauty of pressing flowers is really quite enchanting. I felt like I was capturing the flowers at its most colorful moment and in essence, keeping it alive forever. I remember as a child my mother loved to press flowers and while I thought it was nice I never really quite appreciated it. Now I can see why she loved to do it. Making art out of these pressed flowers is absolutely lovely.

To press the flowers I put them between pages of a telephone book and piled more books on top of the phone book. This worked fabulously. I only pressed the flowers for three or four days, shorter than is usually recommended but my mother told me that this would be all right and that if you want the flowers to have a lot of color you should press them for a shorter period of time.

The flowers I made the cards out of are cosmos from my neighbor's yard. My four year old niece was visiting and my neighbor's daughter handed her a bouquet of cosmos over the fence. It was really quite sweet. We enjoyed them in a vase for awhile and when I saw they were starting to wilt I pressed them.

Unfortunately Ms. Stewart does not tell readers that spray adhesive can be tricky and can leave visible stains. I opted for the spray adhesive for the cards thinking since the flowers were delicate it would be a good way to adhere them to the paper without having to over handle them. I followed the spray's instructions, spraying outside and keeping about 8 to ten inches away from the paper. Even with that the spray adhesive left small dots all over the card stock. I foolishly kept using it on the other cards because I thought it would go away. It hasn't and so while the flowers are beautiful the cards are basically unusable. The spray adhesive also left a tacky feeling all over the card stock. After taking the pictures below I snipped off the ends of the stems so they were even with the ends of the card stock. I would warn everyone against using spray adhesive for this project.

I also decided to make coasters out of some other flowers I gathered from my flower garden. In the book Ms. Stewart uses glass coasters but since I had some old tile in my shed I decided to be resourceful and just use those. I spoke with my mother and she told me just to mix some Elmer's glue with water and paint it over the flowers and coasters with a paint brush. This worked great.

So for this particular project I think I just should have asked my mother for help instead of relying on the instructions of Ms. Stewart. I learned that lesson the hard way with the spray adhesive.