Petal pressing – a practise

I was lucky enough to get some pretty red roses for Valentine’s Day (after some shameless hint dropping) and once they’d started to look past their best I thought I’d try to press some of the petals to use in a future DIY. I’ve titled this a ‘practise’ because supposedly you have to wait over a month to see if pressing has worked and for the flowers to dry, I’m no good at waiting so pressed some for a week then had a look to see what had happened! It looks like everything is as it should be the petals now just need to dry out more, so today I’ll bring you step one of petal pressing.

You will need
Flowers/Petals
Tissues
Paper
Heavy books

There is such a thing as a flower press but I’ve always thought that a heavy book should do the same job and is something we all have on the shelves. So, firstly use a book as a base (this way if you need to move the press at any point you can) then place a sheet of paper to protect the book, and a tissue to soak up any colour from the petals on top. Place your petals on this making sure they aren’t touching each other and then place tissue and paper on top, then the heaviest book you can find!

Leave for as long as you possibly can so the petals can dry out – this is the most difficult bit.
Step two will be checking they have worked and turning them into a DIY...