Although I generally find  pressing garden flowers easy… There are a few trickier ones…  Dahlias and snapdragons take a little more care…

Dahlia I treat similar to a rose… they have a very high moisture content and can turn brown very easily during the pressing process… I tend to remove as many of the central petals as possible, even slicing off the back off the flower, without it falling apart! You want to eliminate as much of the moisture as possible, then press it… I run these kinds of flowers through a food dehydrator for several hours, speeding up the process… When fully dried and preserved, using the excess petals, which I press individually, I reconstruct the dahlia, gluing them back on, covering any faded areas…

When pressing snapdragons, I remove quite a lot of the heads from the main stem, pressing them individually, they preserve so much better when  not attached to the main stem… Again, once everything is fully dried I reconstruct and glue the heads back onto the main stem…

You can read all my tips and knowledge in ‘my guide to flower pressing booklet’ which you can purchase with one of my flower pressing kits…