If you want to keep the presented bouquet for a long time or make an eternal bouquet as a gift, you can preserve the flowers with glycerin.
Glycerin allows you to keep the flower almost in its original form, the plants even remain flexible and only slightly change color. The only "but" is that too young foliage cannot be preserved with glycerin.
To preserve flowers, you will need
- glycerol
- water
- transparent containers (plastic or glass with a lid, preferably low and wide, since small flowers will float)
- flowers with thick leaves and stems, as flowers with thinner foliage retain their original appearance worse.
So, let's begin:
1. Put the flowers in cleanly washed containers in random order, because after pouring the liquid, the flowers will still mix. Light single flowers usually float after pouring liquid. The flowers must be prepared in a certain way: make an oblique cut of the stem, remove the lower leaves, remove the skin or bark and split the stem about 6 cm so that the solution better penetrates the flower.
2. Prepare the solution: mix boiling water with glycerin in a 3: 1 ratio (one part of glycerin and three parts of water). Cool the resulting solution to room temperature.
3. Pour the solution into prepared containers with flowers. If after filling you do not like the arrangement of the flowers, correct it with a stick or tweezers.
4. Close the lid tightly. The lid can be decorated with ribbons, raffia, cloth, dried flowers, in general, everything that is at hand.
5. We put it on the shelf. After 2 weeks, when the flowers are saturated with glycerin, the solution may become cloudy - from pollen, flower sap, etc. You can drain the solution, rinse the flowers (the smell can be unpleasant) and refill with the same solution. Everything. Then the flowers will remain unchanged until you want a new bouquet.
Advice
You can decorate the lid with a linen cloth and soak it with essential oils.
