How To Store Pressed Flowers

Once you’ve opened your flower press, you might want to start creating with your beautiful pressings straight away. However if you’d like to store them for a future creative project, they can last for many years under the right conditions.

Store your pressings somewhere cool and dark - this will help them to retain their lovely colours until it’s time to use them; sunlight speeds up the fading process. It’s also really important to store your pressed flowers somewhere dry. If they start absorbing moisture, there’s a risk that they will curl, wrinkle or start to mould.

I keep my pressed flowers in a large wooden box which has lots of different sized compartments for my pressings; it has small compartments to store individual petals and small flowers and longer, wider spaces for full stems. I like to group similar colours of pressings together so that each compartment has a different colour group - this is purely because it looks pretty! Some pressings, especially longer stems, do curl a little over time when stored, so I place these between layers of blotting paper which are then also kept within my wooden storage box.

To tackle any moisture that may find its way in, I keep a bowl of sodium bicarbonate in the box, which is a desiccant (this means it’s good at absorbing moisture), and I also add little packs of absorbent bentonite clay that you often find in packaging when you purchase something (packs of silica gel also work well). For a temperature climate such as here in the UK, this is all that’s needed, however if you live somewhere with a more humid climate, you may need to use more desiccants, an air-tight box or consider other ways to reduce humidity levels.

If you store your pressed flowers somewhere cool, dark and dry, they’ll be in good condition for when it’s time to start creating with your perfect little captures of a moment in time - isn’t flower pressing wonderful!