Your wedding flowers are an important and special part of your day. You spend a lot of time and money on them, and they likely symbolise something special to you. As a result, many brides look for a way to preserve their flowers. But how can you preserve them and display them beautifully?
Join the team at True Bride as we discuss the different ways you can preserve your wedding flowers forever!
1: Don’t Throw Your Bouquet!
If you want to preserve your wedding bouquet, you need to be extra careful with it on your wedding day. Which means you need to make sure it won’t be damaged. And throwing the bouquet is definitely going to damage it!
Some brides opt not to throw the bouquet at all. Other brides get a smaller, cheaper or replica bouquet to throw instead.
2: Plan to Preserve Your Wedding Flowers
If you are going away, going on your honeymoon or are not going to be around to preserve your flowers, then you need to enlist some help. Have a parent, bridesmaid, groomsman or friend start the preservation process for you. You need to have your bouquet shipped out within 72 hours if you’re going to get the best results. If you are preserving your flowers yourself, you will need to have them hung up, or put in a fridge, until you are ready to begin.
If you are having your flowers professionally preserved, don’t expect your flowers to return right away. It can take anywhere between 6-16 weeks to 9 months to have your flowers finished.
3: Decide How You Want to Preserve Your Flowers
The next step is important because it will affect how you treat your flowers after the day. There are a wide variety of ways you can preserve your flowers from air drying to pressing to resin and even freeze drying! Let’s explore some of the popular and unique ways to preserve your wedding flowers.
4: Pressing Your Wedding Flowers
Pressing wedding flowers is still a popular way of preserving wedding flowers. To press your flowers, select as many as you would like and place them on clean paper. Then lay the paper inside a heavy book and place another piece of paper on top. Close the book then weight it down with more books or something heavy for 7-10 days. Once they are flat and dry, you can arrange them as you like.
5: Air Dry Your Wedding Flowers
This is another, easy way to preserve your flowers. Gather the stems tightly together and tie them up. Hang the bouquet upside down in a dry, temperate area, like a wardrobe. Leave the flowers to air dry for a couple weeks.
6: Dip Your Wedding Flowers in Wax
Waxing flowers is not a permanent form of preservation but they will extend the life of your flowers. Melt paraffin wax in boiling water until it is even and smooth. Turn the stove down low so that the wax cools slightly but is still warm. Gently dip your flowers into the wax and immediately pull them out again. Hang them upside down to dry.
Another wax method is creating your own candles, preserving petals in the wax. You can even customise your candles with special scents that remind you of your wedding day. Many brides also make candles for their family and friends as a thank you gift.
7: Get a Painting of Your Flowers
While this won’t preserve your actual flowers, a still life of them is a lovely way to preserve the memory of them. You can commission an amazing local artist to depict your flowers or, if you’re artistic, why not paint them yourself?
8: Have Your Wedding Flowers Dipped in Gold
A new trend, popular in Singapore, is to have your flowers dipped in gold to preserve them. Not only is this a trendy, quirky way of preserving your flowers, it also allows you to turn them into stunning jewellery. However, dipping your whole bouquet is incredibly expensive. But choosing one or two flowers might be within your budget.
9: Create a Flower Ball
While you can’t preserve a whole bouquet in a flower ball, you can however preserve a small sample of flowers. This method encases your flowers in a beautiful, glass orb. Prior to this, the professional artist will freeze dry the flowers, before encasing them in glass, to keep forever as a lovely decoration.
10: Preserve Your Flowers in Resin or Silica Gel
If you don’t want to preserve your entire bouquet, you can preserve petals in resin. This allows you to create unique shapes, turning petals into pendants, earrings or even bowls and vases. This is a method that has limitless uses.
Technically, silica gel isn’t a real gel but porous sand. It works to absorb water and dries flowers in 1-7 days. You can get silica gel at any craft store. You form a base of silica in an airtight container and set the flowers in the sand. Then pour more gel around the petals, ensuring it doesn’t ruin the shape of each flower. Fill until it reaches the top and place an airtight lid. Silica can also preserve the colour of your flowers, which means all you need to do after 7 days is to remove the flowers gently and spray with hairspray or artist/s fixing spray to preserve them.
Visit True Bride’s directory, today, to find the perfect florist for your wedding day! Find out 10 great tips for wedding bouquets and flowers.
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