Preserve your Memories with a Dried Flower Wedding Bouquet
Preserve your Memories with a Dried Flower Wedding Bouquet
Flowers are perhaps one of the most memorable parts of a wedding, besides the beauty of the bride and her dress, of course! Your personal taste as well as tradition dictates the color, style and look of your flowers just as much as what the meaning of each one is. Sometimes, you can form an attachment to your flowers making you wish that you could keep them forever. Well, you can keep them forever with a dried flower wedding bouquet.
Preserving your Wedding Flowers
A dried flower wedding bouquet can be arranged in a variety of ways with the most popular being a simple boxed frame that you can hang anywhere in your home. Other times, people may choose individual flowers from their wedding bouquet to make keepsakes such as bookmarks and framed prints for their special circle of family and friends.
While you can pay a professional to create your dried flower wedding bouquet, there are a few ways to do it yourself. You have to decide if you feel confident enough to trust your skills with your expensive wedding bouquet. The use of silica gel is one way to create a dried flower wedding bouquet as well as air drying and even the microwave. Freeze drying is the method that most professionals use and you can expect to spend approximately $100-$200 for the process.
There are some flowers that work well for all sorts of preservation techniques to create your dried flower wedding bouquet while others only work for one type of process. For instance, tuberoses, calla lilies, gardenia, orchid, narcissus and bird-of-paradise are best for only a freeze dried process. Some flowers like lilacs and chrysanthemums do not work well for freeze drying or a pressed flower process. You must be prepared that some of your flowers will not survive for your dried flower wedding bouquet.
The Preservation Process
When you invest in a freeze drying process, the flowers should look as if they had just been picked from the garden. Not all flowers as some listed above have those qualities after freeze drying. Therefore, you might want to consider the air drying process in which you hang the flowers upside down in a fan shape in a dark, non-humid dry place. It will take several weeks but the out come will be an attractive dried flower wedding bouquet in which the colors might be slightly muted from the original fresh flowers.
Using silica gel to preserve flowers for your dried flower wedding bouquet takes some time as you have to treat each individual flower with a dousing of silica gel. This process is done in a large paper bag or large box. Once each flower is treated, they are then stored in the bag or box with the air removed to create a dark, dry environment. About four weeks later, with a little gentle blowing and shaking to remove the silica gel, your flowers will be preserved and ready for creating an artful framed arrangement or whatever you plan.