Wedding Flowers: how to preserve your bridal bouquet

Hello beautiful people!

We recently posted on our Instagram about a flower press I received from my eldest daughter as a gift for Mother’s Day, and it inspired me to write this journal.

Flowers are always such a special part of any luxury wedding, and, not surprisingly, many couples want to know how to preserve them in some way as a reminder of their wedding day. With dried wedding flowers, especially, being so popular at the moment, I've had quite a few of my couples get in touch with me asking how they can keep their wedding flowers longer than they would usually last.

Of course, many of you will have your wonderful wedding album full of lovely photos, but more and more of you are looking for a little bit more than that - a tangible keepsake to pass on in the future.

So here's a few ideas on how to do just this:

Upside-down method

This is the time-honoured way of preserving your bouquet. Simply hang it upside down in a well-ventilated spot and let the wedding flowers and foliage dry out.

You'll find that you will lose some of the colour as the petals dehydrate and become less vibrant and you’ll also you will need to keep an eye on the bouquet and re-tie the stems as they shrink in size as the original bindings will loosen. Bear in mind too that although this is by far and away the least expensive way of keeping your luxury bouquet, it may be very fragile too, so you'll probably need a nice box with a bed of tissue and a couple of those silica gel sachets to keep it safe.

Here’s a beautiful example of our bride Sarah’s bouquet, she hung it upside down as soon as she got back home.

Pressing the flowers

I used to do this when I was a child - remove chosen blooms and then carefully press them between tissues. I used to use loo roll inside a really big heavy book and put them under the frame of my bed thinking that my weight when I slept at night would help the process!

If you want to DIY your flower pressing, then use a big book with cartridge paper either side of the blooms and weight the book down with something really heavy. You'll need to check them after a month or so, I used to leave mine 2-3 months, if I could stand the wait! The main thing to know is that you need to watch if moisture has been absorbed into the paper and hasn’t produced mould.

Thankfully, you can also buy flower presses from craft shops or online on places like Amazon. You can also purchase special pressing paper too - I've even seen tutorials on how to make your own press if you'd prefer the real crafty/DIY experience!

Professional Flower Preservation

I've noticed that there are quite a number of professional services out there which you can find through search engines. A couple that popped up for me were Precious Petals and Flowers Forever.

It's slightly better if you can find out about using these services before your wedding day, but with the amount of brides I have asking me about bouquet preservation, I think that maybe many don't realise they’ll want/need this service until they’ve seen their wedding bouquet and realised that they’d like to keep it a while longer!

If you do decide to use one of these services, then it's best to ask a trusted family member or friend to package your wedding flowers up carefully and send them asap by mail. They will then be dried (which can take approx. 6 weeks or so) and very skilfully re-assembled into a frame of your choice.

Expect the whole process to take around 2-3 months in total. It's a really time consuming process and so the cost of preserving your bouquet will reflect this. Prices are very much dependant upon how large the frame is, the type of material the frame is constructed from, the type of glass used etc.

Take a look at some of the amazing pictures of Kat's bouquet on her wedding day and after it was professionally preserved!

It's been a fun journey sharing my experiences and love of preserving flowers. If you have tried your hand at this craft then I'd love to see how it has worked out for you, and if you have any pictures of your preserved wedding bouquets, please leave me a comment below - I'd love to take a look!

Make sure to take a look at our other journal advice pieces and if you’re looking for fresh flower inspo head to our Seasonal Wedding Flowers section.