Beauty Everlasting - Dried and Pressed Flowers - Learning the Ancient Art of Drying and Pressing Flowers and Creating Things of Beauty

Book excerpt: Table of Contents Introduction How to Skeletonize Leaves Drying Flowers Naturally Traditional Drying with Sand Preparing Your Flowers for Drying Two Ways of Drying Flowers – Face up and Face Down Dry Filler Items Drying with Silica Gel How to Prevent Over – Drying Air Drying Methods and Glycerin Glycerin Assembling Your Flowers Dried Flower Projects Flower Frame Flower and Herb Leaf Ideas Appendix Conclusion How to Make a Rose Potpourri Crystallized Violets Author Bio Publisher Introduction The art of floral preservation has been en vogue for millenniums, all over the world, in some form or the other. You may have heard of dried flowers, dried herbs, dried seeds, bark, roots, and even potpourri. The only reason why I would want to live in the age of Cleopatra is that the ancient Egyptians knew all about a flower preservation method with which flowers kept their original color, shape, and looks for more than 6 months after they had been cut. Cleopatra’s rooms were full of these flowers. Unfortunately, we have lost this method of preserving flowers, with the burning of the library at Alexandria. However, even up to 1638, Signor Ferrari living in Siena – Italy – described how flowers could be preserved and kept everlasting and alive. Nevertheless, the flowers that we dry today do not have their original color not do they have the rich feel of a thing alive. What we have is something mummified because it has been dried in sand and silica gel. When I was a child, I asked my science teacher to give me a little bit of silica gel because I wanted to preserve all the flowers in our garden in all their colors, and that nice gentleman told me that the colors changed and turn brown, when the water content was removed from that particular plant. I believe that was the first disappointment in my young life, because I wanted all of those colors and their shapes to last forever. But, well, that secret has gone with the ancient Egyptians. Nevertheless, today we are drying flowers, through air drying processes, and this book is going to tell you all about how you can create things of beauty from dried flowers, and anything natural, which you can dry and turn into a thing of beauty and a joy forever.