One of my favourite activities of the last few weeks has been flower pressing. It started one sunny day when our patio garden had sprung back into life after the horrible cold winter. It's a little unloved. Despite it's small size I'm still struggling to properly tame it and make it into an urban oasis. Yet amongst the chaos flowers were popping up and cascading over the fence from next door. Little M would have picked every single flower in sight if I'd let her - pressing the flowers seemed like a good diversion to continue the flower based activities without destroying the garden!
Everything we used was grabbed on the spur of the moment - some scrap paper torn into appropriate sizes, a pile of books...and the flowers - that's it. I had a flower pressing kit when I was young but this rough and ready approach seemed to work just as well. We layered the flowers between pieces of paper - I think we had three layers. Then we picked a few heavy books - one went on the bottom, then the flowers and then about five more on top. I popped it on top of a high bookshelf where it would be out of reach and easily forgotten. I actually expect little M to be pestering to see them every day but the spot I picked was well tucked away and she forgot about them completely I think.
Until one day when we needed something to lighten the mood! Hey presto - instant sunshine!
I stepped outside and covered some coloured paper with spray glue - probably not very environmentally friendly but I've had it languishing in the draw for years and this seemed like a good chance to make use of it. It worked a treat as the fragile flowers could be laid straight onto the paper.
The results were slightly chaotic - little M got rather excited by the whole process and stuck nearly all the flowers down in about two minutes! A great two minutes fun though!
I think we should hide flowers on top of the book case more often to whip out when we both need a little cheering up. I don't think we'll ever quite repeat little M's amazement when she opened up the papers and found the pressed flowers but I'm sure we'll have fun with this many times.