Pressed Flowers Gift Frame

I have always liked the look of pressed flowers in floating frames, so I thought I'd try it myself.

I did zero research, and here's how it went:

Backstory: We took 5 year anniversary photos and brought my mother-in-law to be a part of the experience and took her on a little tour of the area where we got married (she was unfortunately unable to make it to the wedding originally because of unexpected health reasons)

We went to the Badlands National Park and I hired a friend/photographer to travel up for the occasion. She had suggested bringing flowers so the shoot had a more anniversary vibe.

I bought a bunch of flowers from the grocery store (still in 2020, options are limited in a pandemic and on short notice) and we assembled bouquets on the way to the photo location while Drew was driving.

I saved the flowers, even through the moving process, and laid a lot of them out between wax paper and heavy (old art history textbooks) books.

I let the flowers sit/ squish for a few months- I wanted to gift this as a Christmas gift, and there were a lot of house projects to tackle... Once I went to check on the flowers though, they were a bit of a mess. Most of them were not the most appealing once I started to take them out of the wax paper:

(again, I'm sure research would have prevented this, but I just went for it on this)

And some of the flowers were breaking down the waxed paper and ended up on the shelf I had them on- it caused a bit of a mess:

I found a "floating photo frame" at the store- it was a black rimmed 12"x12" Black frames aren't quite her style, but options were limited so I bought it anyway. However, I found a light wood colored 11"x13" frame that's right on the mark for her personal style so I bought that one too and decided to keep the black one for our house.

Then, I sorted out the flowers -I'd say half of them were useable, so I picked those out and started to arrange them in the glass space of the frame, attaching them with clear double sided sticky squares that I found in the Target home office/craft section. I just needed something that would hold them in place.

I kept in consideration the size of the photo I had in mind so I could arrange them around it.

I finally ordered prints of the photos- for this project, I picked an 8"x10" print size of a photo of the 3 of us, and then I just picked one of the two of us for our frame, aka the leftover one.

If I did this again, I'd do a few things differently:

• Find out the proper way to press flowers (it can't be that messy)

• Flatten the flowers more strategically (some of them were too crumpled to use, or the leaves folded in strange ways)

• Assemble the project more quickly (so it can't break down the wax paper and damage the other things around it)

She kept asking to see the photos and I could only "ignore" it for so long, so I decided to give it to her for Thanksgiving instead of Christmas, and it went over really well.