In our opinion one of the most iconic parts of a wedding day is the bridal bouquet. It’s one of the most photographed items, and for good reason!
It can be hard to part with it once the big day has passed, which is why we often get asked if we preserve bridal bouquets.
While it’s not a service we currently offer, a member of our Bloom Crew, Megan, recently DIY-preserved her own bridal bouquet, and we want to share the tips and tricks she learned with all of you!
If you haven’t seen the video of her preserving it, go ahead and watch it here.
It’s important to decide what kind of bouquet preservation you want to attempt. In this post we are specifically talking about pressed flower preservation, but there are other versions, like preserving them in resin, that you can attempt or send out to a professional to do it for you. Here is a resource for resin preservation!
Once you’ve decided you want to press your blooms from your bridal bouquet, how should you go about it?
STEP ONE: Make sure you assign someone to bring your bouquet home from the wedding! No bride wants to hear her bridal bouquet got lost or even worse, thrown away after the wedding. So make sure you have someone who knows it is their job to hold on to it at the end of the night! For Megan, that person was her mom.
💐 tip: you want to make sure your bouquet is kept in water until it is ready to be pressed. Megan pressed hers the Monday night after her wedding, and they still looked great!
STEP TWO: Next you want to make sure you have the proper supplies. Here is the kit Megan used. We recommend ordering it before your wedding so that you're ready when you go to press them. However if you don’t have a flower pressing kit, parchment paper and a large hardback book (like an encyclopedia) would also work!
STEP THREE: Choose which blooms to press. Smaller blooms like delphinium, sweet pea, chamomile, and saponaria press great! Be sure to remove the blooms from the stem with scissors, and place them between the pages to be pressed. Try not to overload each page with too many blooms.
💐 tip: Bigger blooms like roses and peonies can be pressed, but you should remove all of the petals of the flower and press them individually and then go back after and reconstruct the flower. Some blooms like orchids and lilies don’t press well because they retain too much water and will produce mold in the press, so we recommend you look into a different preservation technique if your bouquet has a lot of these gorgeous blooms!
STEP FOUR: Once you’ve got the desired amount of blooms in the press, you can put the bolts back on and screw it tight. Now is the hard part, waiting! Generally you’ll want to wait 2-4 weeks for your blooms to fully press. Megan pulled her blooms out of the press after around 2.5 weeks.
STEP FIVE: Once you’ve taken the blooms out of the press it’s time to get creative! Start sorting which ones you like the best, and reconstruct any bigger blooms you took apart. Map out how you think you want them to look. Megan chose to try and recreate her bouquet and used a photo to put them in similar spots in the frame as they were in the original bouquet–but you can do this part however you want!
Choose how you want to display them. You can purchase a double-glass picture frame for a floating look, or you can put them in a scrapbook. Megan chose to glue hers to a piece of paper and then put the finished product in a frame to hang up.
STEP SIX: All that’s left to do now is admire them! Megan loved her bridal bouquet, and she is so happy that she can hold on to a piece of it forever to remind her of her wedding day.
Is pressing your bridal bouquet something you would try? Let us know if you attempt this DIY and how it turned out! Tag us in your photos @bloom.shakalaka or stop by our flower shop in Lakeland FL.