Getting your kids to love gardening may sound impossible but there are different ways to engage them in your hobby. Encouraging your kids to get their hands dirty in the garden or working indoors on gardening projects is an excellent way to share quality time with them. While you’re at it, you can teach them elementary botany and inspire them to love and respect the environment. One of the gardening projects that you can do with your kids indoors is pressing flowers. You can use these pressed flowers as bookmarks or greeting cards. Your kids can also use them as romantic stationeries that they can use to send letters to grandma and grandpa. Using flowers in season can make the activity more enjoyable. For example, you can press poinsettias and create holiday cards for you and your child’s friends.

Pressing flowers can be done by pressing flowers between the pages of a heavy book between two sheets of newsprint or paper towels. You can press different variety of flowers to create more interesting and artistic stationeries or cards. Rounded flowers like roses or mums need to be dismantled petal by petal before they can be pressed. Have your kids arrange the petals in a padded board and place a sheet of blotting paper over the petals. Top it with a sheet of cardboard and bind them together with rubber bands. Allow flowers to dry for a couple of weeks or if you want, you can use the microwave oven to speed up the process.

Pressed flowers can be used in scrapbooking, candle-making, paper and card making and many other crafts projects including refrigerator magnets, decoupage frames and boxes and paper weights. There’s really no end to want you can do with pressed flowers, but to get them from your garden into a pressed state does require a bit of know-how. This article will walk you through what you need to know.

Pick the flowers you want to press when they are at their freshest and at a time of day when there is no moisture clinging to them. For most of us, that means to wait until mid to late morning and not to pick after any rain or if the day has been foggy at all. You will be drying the flowers, after all, so you want to start them in their most dry state. Pick flowers at different stages of opening. Having all fully opened flowers in a craft project does not look as natural and is not as visually interesting as having flowers at different stages of bloom. So pick a few buds, a few leaves and a few half-opened flowers in addition to the completely opened ones.

The easiest and cheapest way to press your own flowers is by using books. You will need a few large, heavy books — encyclopedias, phone books and over-sized coffee table books are good choices. Put the flowers in between two pieces of standard white photocopy paper to protect the book. Do not be totally surprised if a few of the flowers’ juices bleed through the paper into the book’s pages. It is a good idea to use older, less than precious books for flower pressing. Also, have at least a 1/4 of an inch of book pages between each set of pressed flowers. Put something heavy on top of the closed books to press the flowers.

You can make your own air-dry flower press by getting two same-size pieces of plywood and connecting them with a long bolt. Put several sheets of cardboard or mat paper between the plywood sheets, then put about six to eight sheets of white paper between each piece of cardboard. Put the flowers you want to press inside those layers of paper. Then use clamps or bolts drilled through the plywood to tighten the pieces of plywood together.