Drying Flowers, Iron vs. Books
I decided to do a little test this summer to figure out if ironing flowers would work as well as my tried and true method of pressing them between the pages of a book.
The book pressing method is so simple, but requires some patience. It takes about 10 days to get blooms perfectly flat and dry.
Below are my flowers and foliage after being pressed between 2 sheets of parchment paper under a stack of heavy books. This was on day 10. The leaves are nice and green and very flat. The petunia flower kept it's beautiful purple color.
They're kind of perfect, but let's see if we can get these results without the wait. It's time to get out the iron!
Here's a new batch of flowers and leaves.
Just as with the book method, I placed my flowers and leaves between 2 sheets of parchment paper.
With my iron on the highest temperature setting without steam, I went over the flowers for about 3 of 4 minutes.
And the results are in. This was definitely not as effective as using books for pressing. The leaves are not flattened and, what's worse, the pretty purple petunias turned brown. And my bell flowers look like they've been run over by a truck, or at least a bicycle.
So there you have it. If you want really gorgeous pressed flowers that retain their color, you'll have to just wait. You'll have better looking results and there's hardly any active time at all.
