Keith and I created this "How to Press Flower" course for these reasons:
We get asked over and over again how we press our flowers.
The two main questions we get asked on our Instagram account are; how do you preserve your flowers and what glue do you use? We think if you get asked something enough, then maybe it's time to teach it, so we did.
We do not accept shipped wedding bouquets to create commissioned pieces.
We really did not enjoy making commissioned pieces from wedding bouquets that were shipped to us. In fact, we stopped accepting shipped bouquets all together. Hence we think there's more room for local preservation businesses to serve their local communities. Creating a business as a full time preservationist is EXTREMELY time consuming, but we think it would be an awesomely rewarding side hustle. We also think flower preservation would be such a cool thing for event florists to offer to their clients.
We wanted to encourage the DIY personality to Press Flowers
We thought this course could be a great resource for the DIY personality that wants to try pressing their own wedding bouquet or that of their soon to be married friend. We think that there are so many crafty things you can do with pressed such as making your own resin art/jewelry, framed pressed flower art, DIY escort cards or wedding invites, pressed cake or cookie flowers, cyanotypes, or eco printing. The list goes on.
Pressing flowers can be a super environmentally friendly craft.
We hope exposing people to rad pressed flower art will inspire them to grow their own flowers or to seek out a local flower to purchase flowers from to try to press. Just about everything used to press flowers can be reused over and over again and if you mess up a flower, you can compost it! But we really REALLY encourage you to find local flowers to press rather than buying imported flowers.
By creating a How to Press Flowers course, we would be challenging ourselves to improve upon our flower pressing techniques.
There's an old saying that goes, "teaching someone else is the best way to learn". There is SO MUCH truth in that statement. The amount of thought that went into and continues to go into figuring out the best way to teach and to organize this information in this course has pushed us to become better pressers. We are really looking forward to continuing to add content to this course as we learn and try new things.
We wanted you to learn from our Flower Pressing mistakes.
The first flowers we pressed did not look as they do now. It's been a long and sometimes expensive journey to get to where we are now. One of our worst flower pressing debacles occurred during our first peony season. Our second flower pressing debacle occurred during our first dahlia season, with many smaller debacles filling in the gaps between Spring Peonies and Fall Dahlias. We will continue to fill out this course with our most problematic flowers we've met along the way (with the exception of tropical flowers because we do not live in a tropical region and they just aren't our passion).
If you decide to purchase our course we hope it serves you well!
