Immortalise your favourite flowers as a piece of romantic art! Floral artist Georgie Malyon shows us how with this easy step-by-step.
Plant lovers have been pressing flowers for centuries. In 16th-century Japan, samurai pressed flowers to develop patience, harmony with nature and their powers of concentration.
All you need are flowers (I used pansies, limonium, hydrangeas and delphiniums), heavy books or a flower press, tissue paper (or any kind of absorbent paper without an imprint), two matching box-style picture frames without metal fasteners, and a glue gun.
1. Make sure your flowers are fresh and free from moisture – if you’re picking them from the garden, wait until any dew has evaporated.
2. Cut your flowers and lie them flat between several layers of tissue paper within the pages of a heavy book. (Alternatively, you can place them between the layers of a flower press.)
3. Be sure to space out your flowers so the moisture from one flower doesn’t transfer to another. Once you’ve arranged them, gently close your book, then weigh it down with several more books (and a Brussels griffon pooch, if you have one on hand!). Leave your flowers for several weeks until they are completely dry.
4. Now it’s time to create your masterpiece. Remove the glass from one frame (discard the backing board) and, with your glue gun on a low setting so the heat doesn’t break the glass, put a blob of glue on each corner of the glass. Insert it into the frame glue-side down, until it’s firmly in place. Once the glue has set, gently arrange your flowers on top of the glass in a pattern that pleases you.
5. Once your design is complete, dot glue onto each corner of the glass, remembering to use a low heat. Then take the glass from the second picture frame and place it on top of the first piece of glass so your pressed-flower arrangement is sandwiched between the two pieces of glass. Once the glue has set, you’re done! Put your pressed-flower art on display, then go outside and pick some more flowers to press – and voila, your new hobby.