Love your wedding flowers? Want to turn them into a lasting keepsake? You can preserve them yourself, or hire a professional. There’s an entire industry dedicated to making sure your bridal bouquet never fades.  The most common method is by preserving your flowers with silica gel. The silica gel – yes, the same stuff you find in packaging sometimes – quickly dries the flowers while preserving their color and shape.

If you’re going to preserve your bouquet this way, you should arrange for a flower preservation method ahead of the wedding, and make sure to get your flowers to your craftsman as soon as possible after the wedding.

For the greatest freshness, put your bouquet in cold water or on ice, and take it as fast as possible. You might want to ask your mother or maid-of-honor to do this for you, if you’ll be leaving immediately for your honeymoon.

These preserved flowers can last a lifetime, but of course, you should keep you flowers out of direct sunlight and humidity.

You can also turn your flowers into art in a low-budget, DIY way, by pressing and preserving your flowers yourself. If you’re artistic, this gives you a greater control over your special bouquet. You can add a few pressed petals to a wedding scrapbook or wedding photo album, or make an arrangement for framing. There are many ways to turn your bridal bouquet into a  keepsake!  But no matter how you choose to preserve your flowers,  you will always have great pictures of them in your collection of wedding photographs.

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