Using Dried Flowers In Your Scrapbook

Using dried flowers in scrapbooks has a long established tradition - in fact, drying flowers to preserve them was once a passtime of many a wealthy country lady.

Dried flowers make elegant embellishments and accents in scrapbooks. Flowers can be placed whole, in bunches with other flowers, as petals, or punched into various shapes. Flowers can be used to add a homey touch to photographs or to draw the eye away from cluttered scrapbooks. Flowers can also be used to add to an outdoor or elegant theme.

Choose flowers that will press well and not be too proud on the page. Place them carefully between two sheets of blotting paper in a flower press, or within the pages of a heavy book, underneath a stack of heavy books. The pressing process will take several weeks, and some flowers will be more successful and retain more color than others. Don't rush the process because if the flowers are not completely dry they will spoil once stuck into your page, and may harm other elements of the page or the page itself.

When gluing flowers, place a thin line of glue along the stem or directly on each petal. Alternately, use embroidery cotton to tie the flower or a bunch of flowers into the appropriate place on your scrapbook.

Remember that flowers are not lignin free and acid free. They will reduce the life of your scrapbook page.

Too busy to dry your own flowers? There are many dried flower products available from scrapbooking suppliers now, including gell-stickers with tiny dried flowers inside - these are expensive, but provide a lovely accent to your pages.

Natural objects as embellishments

Back to Scrapbooking For Beginners