5 Ways to Preserve your Wedding / Bridal Bouquet
Keep your precious flowers forever with these simple preservation ideas.
For full transparency I got married in Vegas with a fake bouquet I do recall. Based on what I do now for a living I feel a little saddened by that fact as I so love my garden now and the flowers I get to work with through Wattle & Daub, but it was a moment in time and a fun one at that.
Wedding flowers are a precious thing with much planning going into this piece of the wedding puzzle. From the colours to the style of flowers used to create something so special and often seasonal for the day it is no surprise that many couples wish to have a keepsake of that day.
Of course what makes flowers so very special is their fleeting nature, the fact that they are with us at their best often for just a matter of days.
I wanted to share with you some ideas for preserving your bouquet but there does need to be a little planning in this area to ensure that the process can happen as soon as your big day is over.
Before I get in to the options it is worth noting that in order for any of these processes to be as successful as possible the petals should be vibrant, colourful and unstained. If it is left longer than 48 hours after the wedding the flowers will already have started to wilt. It is also dependent on the temperature on the day of the wedding and what care was taken to keep them looking as fresh as possible (ie did they get thrown to a bridesmaid or stamped on on the dance floor!) Anyway here goes….
1. Pressing the Flowers
Select the flowers you wish to press which can be the whole bouquet if you wish. Spread them out in between two pieces of wax paper so that they are sandwiched between the paper ensuring that no flower is touching another flower. You may well need a number of pieces of wax paper depending on how many flowers you wish to press.
Weigh the wax paper down with something heavy, ie a pile of books, some magazines. Now leave to dry for up to 14 days (no sooner than 5 in my experience).
Once the flowers have been dried you can then begin to arrange them on to a mount that you can have framed. Use glue to fix them to the page.
2. Photographing the Flowers
If you already have a photographer booked for the wedding this is something that is likely already included in your request for images. However your flowers could be rearranged after the big day to create a different look to the one your bouquet represented. Something may work as a print.
3. Drying the stems
First take the bouquet and individually separate the stems. Now hang the stems either together or individually in a place which is dark and dry and allow them to hang for at least one week checking them intermintently. The flowers will be fragile so do take care when handling them. The flowers could either be arranged into a vase at this point or see the cloche arrangement detailed below.
4. Creating a still-life cloche arrangement
There are two ways of creating the still life arrangement. For both scenarios you would need the flowers to have gone through the drying process. A frog (the flower kind not the reptile kind) will be the best tool for creating this kind of arrangement, you just need to check the size of the prongs on the frog. Depending on the size of the cloche (so how many flowers you can actually fit inside it will depend on how many you use for the arrangement). Something of a more Japanese vibe can work well, negative space between the stems. You can either leave the stems as they are or spray them with an acrylic spray as seen in this image. I used an ivory colour.
5. Botanical Tile Casting
A botanical tile casting of the flowers is a beautiful way of preserving your bouquet and create something special for your home.
And this is where I tell you I think you should come to a workshop at Wattle & Daub to learn the process or commission me to preserve your bouquet for you…
There are a few other ways you can preserve your bouquet such as make a resin paperweight or soak them in glycerin however they are not processes I work with so I haven’t included them here.
I have linked to the page detailed more about these processes.
