Flowers can make a big impact on your wedding day. Chances are you’ll spend a lot of time researching floral inspiration, carefully planning what your flowers might look like, and ultimately holding your bouquet tight and smelling those fresh blooms the day of you marry the love of your life. Cue the tears of joy, right?!
As part of your planning process you may want to consider how to preserve your wedding bouquet to keep on display and admire well after your wedding day passes. Preserved floral artwork can be a great keepsake to look back on. It can even be just a generally attractive piece of artwork to have in your home. We’ve rounded up 5 ideas for saving your wedding flowers.
Dry Your Entire Bouquet
Drying your bridal bouquet is a very common way to go about saving your wedding blooms. By drying your entire bouquet, you can preserve your bouquet exactly as it was designed. It can the be displayed in a deep shadow box or even just propped up on a shelf in your home.
How to Air Dry A Bouquet
An easy way to dry your bouquet is to hang it upside down in a cool, dry place for a few weeks. By hanging your flowers upside down, you ensure that they dry in an upright nature once you flip them back over. If you were to dry them with the flowers facing upward, you risk smashing certain flowers or allowing gravity to weigh the stems down and bend in an awkward way. You can use rubber bands or thick twine to hang your flowers from a closet rod or laundry drying rack.
Alternatively, there are companies like Fantastic Blooms in De Soto, Kansas that will preserve and frame your bouquet for you.
Center Dried Rose Bouquet | Left and Right Bouquets
Create a Shadow Box
If you don’t want to preserve your entire bouquet, you can take it apart and dry your favorite flowers and greenery (again hanging them upside down). Once they’re dried, create a shadow box by clipping the flower heads from the stems, then arranging and hot gluing them artistically on a piece of card stock or mat board.
A shadow box doesn’t have to be limited to flowers only. You can also glue in small design details from your wedding like your invitation suite, cake topper, or even photos. If you have a lot of flowers left over, you could create a small shadow box for your parents or grandparents.
Press Your Flowers
The art of pressed flowers has made a huge come-back over the past couple of years. Instead of hanging flowers upside down to dry, you select individual flowers to press. It’s best to do this when the flowers are still looking nice and fresh, so if you want to go this route it’s important to prepare for it pretty quickly whether you do it yourself or hire someone to create a work of art for you.
If you’ve got pressed flowers left over after creating your own keepsake, you can create small pieces of artwork for family members or unique homemade cards for your bridesmaids and/or groomsmen.
Framed pressed flower art | Pressed flower cards
Have Your Bouquet Painted
If the thought of trying to preserve the physical flowers themselves is not appealing, hire an artist to paint your bouquet. Make arrangements with an artist before your big day so you can hand your bouquet off while the flowers are still fresh and in good condition. This is a one-of-a-kind way to capture your one-of-a-kind bouquet, and is sure to be something you’ll cherish forever.
Local Springfield artist Tim Breaux paints incredible portraits from fresh bouquets. The photos below show bridal bouquets set up on the right, with his final work of art on the left.
Preserve Flowers in Epoxy
Not interested in floral artwork you can hang on the wall? Make some 3-D epoxy art! This is a unique way to preserve your flowers as a functional paperweight or sculptural piece of art. If you’ve got a crafty streak, you can do this yourself. If not, send it off to a company like the Flower Preservation Workshop.
Are you engaged to be married? Take a moment in between your to-do lists to think about how you might preserve your wedding bouquet for the future. Whether you choose to have your flowers painted or to create shadow box, your wedding blooms can be a beautiful and sentimental piece of artwork to add to your home decor.