big thumbs up love that all right you know I don't know about you but I
absolutely love love love flowers and you know when I'm lucky enough to get
them whether it's a special occasion or for whatever reason sometimes I want to
keep them as a memento and I don't I don't really know how to do that well
actually I do and I'm going to show you how to do that i'ma show you how to
preserve your own flowers several different ways you can do it you can press them or you can actually preserve
them in their entirety let me give you an idea here this flower right here this is what it looked like and then I
pressed it i press this one with a tool called micro floor in the microwave this
one right here this little Daisy right here press this in a phone book yeah and
this one right here it the flower originally looked like this and I
actually preserve these and what's called silica gel and there are lots of different ways to go about it and some
take a little bit longer than others but know this your flowers are always going
to change color some some more so than others so let's start with the easy one first that takes a long long time and
that's pressing your flower in a good old phone book okay and here's how it
works let me just show you what I did I took a phone book here where they've
gotten smaller these days and it just takes tricks and wax paper and I laid a sheet of wax paper fold it in half same
thing with a paper towel and then laid my flowers in and just like this you
what you want to do is you want to cause pressure so I'm going to leave this like
this probably it's going to take weeks and weeks and weeks for them to
completely dry out but a lot of pressure on that you can check them every once in
a while you might need to change the paper towel out but you know what a
couple weeks you're going to have some beautiful pressed flowers okay that's
one way another way of doing it is this little tool right here it's called the micro floor and it's a tool that you
actually use in your microwave and you can lay your flower out on the little
sheet like this and what this does in the microwave it absorbs the moisture
out of the flower but this is a press it's not going to preserve it you know in its natural state and then what you
do is you pop this in the microwave I use it in like 30-second increments okay
you want to do it every 30 seconds so that it doesn't burn and then you want
to check it see if it's still wet then do it again
so then you might want to go 15 seconds you got to keep an eye on it but
eventually it's going to come out and it's going to look just like that there is another technique that you can use to
preserve your flowers in its entirety I've seen it on the website and I tried
it and guess what didn't like it it's you preserve you put a flower in like a
little bowl and then you put it in the microwave with a cup of water and once
again 30-second increments you know what I did this one and it's still wet and
stuff underneath and and it turned brown and you know what it was beautiful when
I put it in and look at it now and I just don't like it so not not my
favorite but you know what you can give it a try the other other easy way is
just to take some flowers and simply when they're fresh tie a string around
them and hang them upside down and they will come out just like this and if you
want to spray them with some clear lacquer then they'll last a long time
and they won't crumble and fall one more technique that if I like the best is
this one right here and it's using silica gel and here's how it works you
pour some silica gel put it in the bottom of a Tupperware thing this will
preserve the flower in its entirety that's how I preserve this Rose right here believe it or not okay so I set it
in there cut the stems off set it in and then what you do is you gently pour the
silica gel you want to pour it around it so that you're you're supporting all the
petals if you just dump it right on top and you're going to flatten them you're going to break them and you're going to
cover it up in its entirety keep it in a sealed container depending on the flower
there's a little guide that comes inside the box depending on the flower it could
take three four five six seven days it depends okay you're going to cover this
all up and you're just going to let it sit and how do you know how you know
when it's finished well take this take a look at this right here do you see the
silica gel is actually blue I don't know if you can tell right here but this is
actually kind of a pinky lighter color the silica gel has act actually absorbed
all of the moisture inside the flower look at this I know when you dump it all
out look at that that is gorgeous look at how beautiful that is
so keep in mind depending on how quickly you want to do
this and what you want to do with them some take days this takes you know the microwave takes seconds but just keep in
mind that if you want to actually put it back into arrangement you can also
preserve the stems just like this look at this preserve the stem and then you can just use some floral wire wire and
reattach them or if you have a big enough container you can actually leave
the stems on and let that go but I was really experimenting Susan I tried I
tried an orchid that's how the orchid came out look at the pink rose oh it's
beauty we're not going to want to use and I have all the information and some
tips and some links to the websites and how to get and find all this stuff on
our website Sonoran living doctor oh my goodness George you know what she is
truly the craft Queen I love it I love it