Pressing Flowers

I’ve recently picked up a very old hobby – flower pressing. It feels a little bit kismet that I have rekindled my love for this because I actually bought a friend a flower press earlier in the year and felt an urge to buy one myself. I didn’t, though, because as I said in a previous post; I don’t like buying things for myself!!

Flash back to a few weeks ago when Kaylah [The Dainty Squid] posted a plant pressing tip post and then my birthday at the start of June when I got a flower press as a gift!

I picked my first flower for my new project on the 1st of June, the day I turned 33, and have been on the look out for all kinds of flora and fauna ever since. So far I’ve collected a few types of flowers and flowering weeds [because, no matter what we call them, they’re still flowers], as well as some nice leaves and an attempt at pressing a rather chunky seed pod from a tree.

I don’t know if it’s something you think is cool but I really love the look of pressed flowers; as a kid I used to pick flowers and sneak them into books and then totally forget about them. I never once went back to find them and I’m sure some of the older books at my parents house will have very crumbled up flower-dust inside them! Oh well, never mind!

My plans are to pop the pressed flowers into thrifted frames so I can decorate my home and not send them to someone in the post every year and start a chain reaction of events that leads to a girl with a dragon tattoo and a case of a missing person, like my boyfriend thinks I’m going to do… That was a good film; please watch it but only the Swedish version and not the American, ok? [I believe the books are great but I can’t read crime books because my brain can’t dissect uncommon words well, making reading crime and thrillers a laborious task].

I plan on gathering as many flowers as I can during summer months and can’t deny my theft of flowers in people’s front gardens which are slightly spilling into the street; They surely can’t miss one? All in the name of fun and art!

What will I be doing with the abundance of flowers, you ask? Framing them and selling them on Etsy, hopefully! It’s all new to me and I haven’t decided how to present them yet; there are so many options – what kind of paper to back them with? How to fix them to the backing? What kind of frames and how big? All challenges I’m looking forward to facing!

What do you think of flower pressing? Do you like it or does it seem crazy? I find it really relaxing and it makes going out for walks a little more fun [even though I already love walking] because you get to have a little treasure hunt along the way!

Sam

Note: Whilst some people might not consider this, I am very careful to only take small flowers from plentiful plants to make sure I’m not stealing from bees. That might sound silly but it’s important I make that clear!!