I love to garden and I’m passionate about nature, so in my home I like to bring a little bit of the outdoors inside. While I’m no Monet, I have tried my hand at some simple crafts and the one I like the best (it’s easy!) is pressing flowers.

A hundred million years ago when I was a little girl, my grandmother introduced me to pressing flowers. She used them to decorate plain greeting cards and envelopes, but she started pressing plants to preserve precious moments from her youth. We still have a pansy nosegay one of her beaus gave her as a girl. I use pressed flowers just like grandma, on greeting cards, but I have also made a pressed flower and foliage botanical print.

Ways to Press Flowers and Foliage

There are several ways to press flowers but I use the old-fashioned method of drying them between books. Simply take your flower and lay it flat on a piece of parchment paper that has been laid across a hardback book. Close the book, making sure the parchment folds over the flower. Weigh down the book with some more books and leave for a few weeks to dry.

You can also use a flower press, an iron and even the microwave to press flowers, but since I’m notoriously cheap, I stick with the books.

A few tips before you get started”¦

Pick your flowers at their peak on a dry, sunny day. Pick more flower and foliage than you think you need, as some of the pressed flowers will invariably become damaged.

Be aware that flowers fade as they are pressed, especially if you use the lengthier drying time involved with book pressing. If you want more vibrant colors, try using the microwave method for drying or change the pressing paper more often to speed drying.

Globe shaped blooms should be cut in half before pressing. Good options for pressing flowers include:

• Apple Blossoms
• Asters
• Buttercups
• Campanula
• Chives
• Clover
• Columbine
• Cosmos
• Daisy
• Forget-Me-Nots
• Goldenrod
• Lily of the Valley
• Primrose
• Snowdrops
• Pansies

Options for foliage drying include grasses, ivy, herbs like sage and dill, ferns, maple and oak leaves and coral bells.

As to what you can do with pressed flowers, the sky’s the limit, or rather your imagination is. Hope you enjoy capturing the seasons and bringing the outdoors in as much as I do.