Dried flowers have seen a great boost in popularity lately — and it’s not hard to see why. They look fabulous on your kitchen table or hall console and need minimum maintenance – just a little blow of a hairdryer now and then to keep them dust free. They are also perfect for rooms and locations with little or no natural light.
Preserved and dried flowers and foliages don’t need any special treatment and they will last for a very long time. Of course, eventually they do fade unless treated, but you have plenty of months ahead of you before you have to worry about that.
PRO TIP: Dried flowers can be treated easily with a misting of regular hairspray! Dried flowers don’t like water or damp rooms, if they get wet they will go mouldy so don’t put them in water and best not to display them in the bathroom.
How to Dry Your Own Flowers?
Drying your own flowers is very easy. Follow the steps below and you will have dried flowers in no time:
- Keep the flowers dry and out of the direct sunlight.
- Hang them upside down on a string in the attic or airing cupboard. Keep the stem bunches small for quicker drying.
- Let them dry for a couple of weeks and you’re done!
What Flowers Can be Dried?
You can dry most flowers. It’s fun to try something new so I would encourage you to experiment with all kinds of flowers and foliages.
Rose’s heather & lavender dry really well, so I would recommend starting with these.
If cutting from the garden, the flowers should be harvested on a dry day don’t cut the flowers just after it’s been raining. One of my favourite flowers to dry is hydrangea especially the dark burgundy one, if you can gather enough blooms they can be bound round an old coat hanger {tied on with string or wool} and displayed as a door wreath in the kitchen. It will look fabulous whether the door is an old pine or an on trend pale grey.
Here are my suggestions of best flowers to dry:
Yellow Natural Achillea Yarrow
Small Natural Brown Wide Cortaderia Pampas Grass
Blue Natural Globe Thistle Echinops
Natural Exotic Palm Spear Bunch
Multi-coloured Gypsophila
Pussy Willow Branches
Natural Flowering Cloud Grass
Natural Fragrant Lavender Bunch
How to Arrange Dried Flowers
I’d suggest you either keep with just one variety {the hydrangea mentioned earlier} or a complete mix like roses. Spay roses work fantastically well with grasses, poppy seed heads, lavender and even some cereals – like wheat, which looks fantastic all year round.
It’s good to mix in something with a nice fragrance as well: herbs are great for this, you can add in bay leaf, oregano or thyme. The best tip I can give you is to get all your flowers in a bundle and give the stems a little twist in the middle {just like Jamie Oliver does with spaghetti ;)}, keep the more robust blossoms to the centre and the light wispy grasses to the edge and mixed throughout. Once done, tie off with a rustic piece of string or even old rope.
If you find this method too difficult then try inserting the stem ends into a medium such as sand, small sea shells or gravel.
Another method is to just get some garden twigs, pop them in a fruit bowl and lace the stems thru them. If this proves to be daunting too, you can always go for an ultra-simple display: get an old milk jug {the older & more rustic the better}, fill it with a big bunch of poppy seed heads, some wild grasses and voila! you have a beautiful arrangement.
How to Place Dried Flowers on Canvas
You can also make a very pretty picture with dried and pressed flowers on canvas. Follow the steps below:
- Prepare you canvas by painting it completely. You can go with a mint green or mustard tone to take the stark white away, this will make covering a lot easier.
- Cover that with a good coating of wood glue and frame it.
- Fix the flowers in place with hot glue. I prefer to use a glue pot rather than a glue gun as it allows me to have both hands free.
- Use a mixture of dried flowers and pressed flowers for different textures and there you have it 🙂
How to Get Pressed Flowers
We love Pressed Flowers! I’m sure you remember, as kids we all did it, just take the blossoms and place between the pages of a heavy book for about ten or twelve days. Naturally flat flowers are best for pressing, flowers like pansies or violas, passiflora and clematis work wonderfully well. Autumn is a fantastic time of year to reward you with falling leaves to mix in.
Lastly I’d like to share a couple of tips I’ve learned over the years:
- This sounds odd but flowers are best dried when they are still fresh! They hold their shape and more importantly their colour if dried from fresh. Our Red Roses in Ceramic Pot are a great selection to start.
- Dried Old flowers look like dead OLD flowers.
- Hang a bunch of dried lavender or thyme in the wardrobe to ward off moths and keep your clothes smelling fresh.
