The bride’s bouquet forms an integral part of her wedding dress in a sense. Everyone will remember the bride holding the bouquet as she walks up the aisle to take her vows, and it makes sense that you would want to preserve it if you can.

And even though real flowers will be used for the bouquet there is no reason why you cannot keep them for a long time if you preserve them in the right way.

So how can you make your bridal bouquet last?

If you are good at pressing flowers, your skills will come in extremely handy at this stage. You will need to take the whole bouquet apart to do this, but before you do so make sure you take some close up photographs of it. Don’t rely on the wedding pictures for this – take some of your own from every angle and also from the top looking down. This will give you plenty to go on when it comes to rearranging the dried flowers later on.

Put every petal, leaf and stem through the drying process, and when they are all dry you can start arranging them on a flat surface to create the picture you want. This can then be framed when everything is positioned in place and hung on the wall for everyone to admire.

This is where the pictures you took will come in handy. They give you a 2D representation of your bouquet to use when you try to recreate it on a flat surface for the picture frame. It’s amazing how much easier you will be able to do this with some Polaroids to guide you!

The good news is that there are people who will take on this task for you if you don’t feel you can do it yourself. It does take some time and if you are restricted time wise you are better off paying the professionals – you only have a certain amount of time to preserve your bouquet before it dies.

The professionals will use one of two main methods. The first one is freeze drying. This enables you to keep the bouquet exactly as it was when you held it. The second method is pressing, which obviously means it is flatter and it can be framed in this way.

You can dry your bouquet and then leave it assembled in a vase just like any other flowers. But the downside of this is that they will be extremely fragile. Even the slightest knock could destroy them, which is why some people prefer to use the pressing method to complete the job.

Consider which method you would prefer to use and then make plans to follow through with it before the actual wedding. If you are going to use a professional perhaps you could ask a member of your wedding party to take the bouquet to them after the wedding, while you head off on your honeymoon. This way you will know that it is being taken care of while it is still fresh.



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