How to Make a Dried Flower Healthy Again
This post has been updated. It was originally published on October 7, 2019.
Those flowers may have looked good when you lot offset received them, but despite your best efforts, y'all can't keep them fresh forever. If you really desire to preserve your blooms, yous need to remove their moisture with a process similar air-drying, pressing, or nuking them in the microwave. (Yous can also try dipping them in wax, but that method is harder to pull off.)
"There are many quirky and unconventional techniques out there," Alfred Palomares, vice president of merchandising at floral retailer 1-800-Flowers, told Popular Scientific discipline in an email. "All these ways have the potential to produce cute and consistent results." While y'all tin can try any preservation method, each 1 does have its ain pros and cons.
For the traditional: air-drying
To stick with a classic technique, you tin just hang your boutonniere upside down. Every bit the air wicks moisture away from the blooms, they should gradually dehydrate.
However, this method can be a little choosy: Flowers may shed their petals, and mold can set on them. Plus, the process takes a few weeks. On the brilliant side, this drying technique does preserve the flowers' stems.
To start, yous'll need twine or ribbon, a well-ventilated area out of directly sunlight (like a closet with the door open), a hook or hanger that will support your bouquet's weight, and, optionally, hairspray.
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If you lot'd like to experiment with air-drying, wait for your blooms to partially or fully open. Then tie a few of them together by their stems. Fasten them tightly enough that they won't slip out—every bit they dry, they may shrink—but loosely enough that they don't bend the stem, because those compressed areas will be damp and thus attractive to mold.
Next, hang the bouquet upside down in your drying area. Ventilation will help dry the flowers, and a lack of sunlight will reduce the amount that their colors fade. Leave the bundle for two to four weeks, checking back at regular intervals to come across how it's doing. Once your flowers are dry, a quick spritz with hairspray will assist prevent them from crumbling too hands.
For the risk-averse: book-pressing
If you desire an easy preservation method, with the least risk of messing up your results, you tin press whatever flower variety in a volume. That's not to say that the process is fast—it can take a month for the petals to fully dry out out—simply your workload upfront is minimal.
"At that place'due south petty try and upkeep that goes into this technique," Palomares says, "and the results are consistently wonderful." The just downside is that pressing works all-time when you remove the stems.
For this method, you'll demand a heavy hardcover book, such as a dictionary or coffee-table tome, a few sheets of paper or waxed paper, and a pair of scissors.
Start by trimming your flowers down to the heads, removing every bit much of the stalk as possible. Then have the volume, open it to the center, and cover the pages with a canvas of paper or waxed paper. Shut and reopen the book to crease the liner layer so it will stay in identify. Finally, place the bud close to the middle of one of the pages, press the bud flat on the newspaper, and close the book.
Over time, the liner newspaper or waxed paper will absorb moisture from the bloom, gradually desiccating it. Check your flower'due south progress once a week or then, replacing the liner paper to give it a fresh dry surface. After four to five weeks, you'll accept a stale flower that should final indefinitely.
For impatient driers: silica gel
If you want results fast, y'all can speed up the drying process. Still, these techniques require that you pay more attention to the flowers. Y'all can sometimes over-dry them, resulting in frail blooms that can crumble all too easily.
For a speedy version of the air-drying method, cover your blossoms in a moisture-absorbing desiccant like silica gel, which is made up of silicon dioxide, a key component of sand. Although silica gel can exist expensive, yous can always reuse it. In improver to the gel itself, you'll need an air-tight flat-bottomed container, such as a jar or slice of Tupperware.
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Pour some silica gel into the bottom of your container to form a layer between 1/ii inch and 1 inch thick. Add a layer of flowers, and so pour more gel on top, making sure it gets in between the petals, until the blossoms are completely covered. Popular the lid dorsum on the container, and leave it for a couple of days.
Check on the dried flowers every two days, for up to a couple weeks, until they feel dry. And so remove them, brush off any remaining gluey gel, and save the leftover silica for some other day. Y'all can go on using it until it turns pinkish, indicating it has lost its moisture-absorbing abilities.
For impatient pressers: microwave pressing
Just as silica acts like a speedy version of the air-drying technique, you tin can use microwaves in an update of the pressing method. As the microwave radiation heats up the liquid inside flowers, it escapes as vapor, drying the blooms.
"While information technology may seem unusual, pressing flowers in a microwave is a perfectly safe and quick option for those looking to save time and resources," says Palomares. However, he says, "Like any shortcut, there'south a slightly higher chance of this method producing mixed results when compared to the others."
For this option, you'll need ii microwave-safe ceramic plates, several java filters, and, of course, a microwave.
To start, layer your materials in this order: face-upward plate, coffee filter, flower, java filter, confront-upwardly plate. Popular this sandwich into the microwave for 1 minute, and so take it out, bank check the dryness of the flower, and replace the coffee filters with fresh ones. Repeat this process until the blossom is as dry as you want it to be.
All the techniques can turn your flowers from ephemera into mementos. Try experimenting with a couple of different methods to see which one gives you lot the best results.
Source: https://www.popsci.com/save-dry-flowers/
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