How to: Pressing & Drying Flowers

Gather supplies: For pressing, you'll need a thick book and flowers. For drying, you'll need cotton twine and flowers.

Pressing: Place flowers in book so they're not touching one another.

Pressing: Optionally, use wax paper to protect the book.

Pressing: Close book and allow to sit for two to four weeks.

Pressing: And you'll have beautiful dried flowers.

Pressing: With or without the wax paper.

Pressing: Handle gently once dry!

Drying: Tie bundle of blooms together near the end of their stems and hang upside down for two-ish weeks.

Drying: And you'll have a bundle of colorful dried blooms ready to go!

Pressed flowers make wonderful decorations and look gorgeous in a hand-made grimoire. Dried flowers are great assets for spellwork and they look charming in bottles around your altar. Both are easy to accomplish.

Our property is absolutely bathed in violets for two or three weeks every spring, so I’m using them in these examples.

Pressing:

1. Find a heavy book you don’t care much about or a flower press.

2. Cut flowers with a little more stem than what you want for the final product (that way if they break, you still have something to work with). In this example, I’m using an old, heavy book.

3. Optional: Cut a piece of wax paper to fit inside the book, fold it and slide into place. You can lay the flowers directly on the book’s pages, but they may stain or stick. Wax paper protects the book, but if the flowers are too moist, it can cause them to mildew. Try both ways to see which you prefer.

4. Allow to dry for two to four weeks, depending on the flower and relative humidity.

5. Gently remove from the book and use. If mounting in your own grimoire, velum pages and rubber glue will get you some great results.

Drying:

1. Cut flowers with at least three inches of stem still attached.

2. Using cotton twine, tie together in small bundles near the bottom of the stem. Or, if dealing with larger blooms, tie solo near bottom of stem.

3. Hang upside down from your drying rack. I have a few drying racks around the house. One is a piece of twine tied from hinge to handle on our kitchen window, another is a sock drying rack, while still others just get hung from the exposed plumbing in the basement. Be creative—they just need to hang upside-down somewhere they won’t be bumped or crunched for a couple weeks.

4. Dry for about two weeks or until there’s no moisture remaining in the plant.

5. For most, I break off the stem and store in a glass vial with a cork lid, but you can do pretty much whatever you want with them—make potpourri, crush and store, sprinkle in a bath, or just store and enjoy like I do.