If you are an enthusiastic gardener, a paper crafter, and you happen to be planning your wedding, consider blending your passions by creating your own wedding invitations, each featuring a pressed flower whose meaning carries special significance for you and your partner. For those who would like to press their own flowers, cottage gardens abound with summertime flowers excellent for pressing. Daisies, baby’s breath, yarrow, cosmos or pansies are excellent choices. Springtime apple blossoms, fall leaves or other plant materials from any season, such as ornamental grass seed heads, are also an option. Lawns overgrown with violets can become an abundant resource for the pressed flower artist. For those without a green thumb or city dwellers, visiting woods and meadows will provide plentiful foliage and wild flowers. Allergies or busy schedules?—pressed flowers are just a mouse click away at Greetings of Grace, a Web site that beautifully showcases their pressed flowers for purchase. Their product line features pressed flowers with an innovative, contemporary flair—blossoms are pressed folded in half, others are pressed with the stem still attached, and some blossoms are dyed before pressing.
Methods for pressing flowers range from using a phone book with bricks to pressing with a beautiful mahogany, hand-sanded flower press from Garden Expressions. For the do-it-yourselfers, instructions for building your own press are available, and for anyone working under a tight deadline, a microwave press will provide pressed flowers almost immediately. If you are looking for expert instruction, consider the book, Microwaved Pressed Flowers: New Techniques for Brilliant Pressed Flowers by Joanna Sheen. This author and artist has been pressing flowers for 21 years, and her book appears to be getting rave reviews.
Your choice of pressed flower may be based on several factors. If you are picking and pressing your own flowers or plant materials, you may make your choice based on what is in ample supply in your area. If you choose to focus on a particular color theme, pressed flowers will retain their brilliant or subtle colors if pressed properly, and some can be dyed for a perfect match. Couples may choose a flower based on traditional meanings: red rose symbolizes passionate love, blue violet means faithfulness, and apple blossoms have traditionally symbolized good fortune. Perhaps a particular flower or leaf evokes mutual memories of a favorite walking path or vacation spot that you've shared often. (Whether you choose to associate a traditional meaning or your own personal meaning to your flower choice, consider a reference in your wedding program to the pressed flower presented on the invitation, describing the symbolism that flower holds for the two of you.) One might also make a choice of a particular pressed flower based purely on an aesthetic response. Perhaps you have found a beautiful decorative paper and would like to create an exciting compliment to that paper with a pressed flower embellishment.
To exemplify the dramatic impact of decorative papers combined with pressed flowers, here are two combinations. For a contemporary Asian flair, pair striped Japanese Chiyogami Paper with pressed Japanese Leaves. The leaves can be attached to a cardstock insert with the Chiyogami paper serving as a wrap—one of many possibilities for these elements.
A stunning combo: striped Japanese Chiyogami Paper paired with two pressed Japanese leaves
Another beautiful combination is pearlised floral print specialty paper in ivory with a red verbena pressed blossom—this lovely repeating of floral motif in paper and accent is a start to a high drama wedding invitation.
Pearlised floral specialty paper combined with pressed red verbena flower
One other excellent paper complimentary to pressed flowers that deserves mention here is cotton handmade paper. This artisan-made paper is a lovely backdrop to nature's creativity—the flower blossom. The supple quality of handmade paper also may allow a pressed flower with stem to be attached easily by piercing the paper and inserting the stem.
Whatever choice you make, a pressed flower or other plant material, is an object of beauty in itself, and will evoke warm memories of summers past or fragrant walks in the woods—a natural for adding romantic style to your wedding invitation.
Tags:Flowers, Pressed flowers, Japanese Papers, Handmade Invitations
said on : 05/18/09 @ 12:44
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