At Griffin’s Floral Design, our Columbus flower experts are here to tell you that dried flowers definitely did not go out of style after the 1980s. When skillfully dried and artfully displayed, dried flowers can add a chic, elegant, or whimsical look to your decor. They’re also a great way to stylishly preserve your memories. Whether you make a lovely keepsake creation from your bridal bouquet or simply want to continue enjoying a particularly beautiful mixed bouquet, drying flowers is the way to go!

Floral Topia

The Best Ways to Dry Flowers

The best way to dry flowers is the most traditional way, hanging bouquets upside down to air dry. This method produces the most life-like, vibrant dried bouquets, but it can take more than a week for flowers to dry completely.

For speedier results, we recommend either microwaving your flowers or baking them in the oven. To microwave dry, you’ll need a microwave-safe container and silica sand. Remove leaves and excess stems from flowers. Cover completely in silica sand and microwave with a cup of water in 30-second intervals. Flowers should be completely dry in two or three minutes.

Hanging Dried Flowers

You can also dry flowers in the oven on a day when you’ll be available to monitor their progress. Preheat the oven to its lowest setting and line a cookie sheet with parchment or wax paper. To prevent the flowers from sticking to each other, make sure there is no overlapping on the tray. Leave them in the oven for eight to twelve hours with the door cracked open to allow moisture to escape.

Caring for Dried Flowers

After drying your flowers, you can fortify and protect them by giving them a few coats of hairspray. This will strengthen their delicate structures, while also protecting them from the elements. Display your flowers in a place where they won’t become faded from direct sunlight or damaged by high humidity from a bathroom shower. To prevent dust from building up on your flowers. You can dust dried flowers using a hairdryer set to “cool” on its lowest power setting.

Bouquet of Dried Roses

What to Do with Your Dried Flowers

Taking good care of your dried flowers is important to keeping them looking beautiful. The key to preventing dried flowers from looking messy or tacky is how you choose to display them. It’s perfectly acceptable to display an entire bouquet as a dried arrangement in an attractive vase or pitcher.

You can also restructure a bouquet by trimming flower stems and arranging them around a wicker wreath base. The wonderful part of making new creations from a dried bouquet is that your assortment of flowers has already been professionally selected and color coordinated.

Dried Flower Bouquet in Glass Vase

If your dried flowers are from a special event, it can also be fun to use your flowers and other keepsakes to create a shadow box collage of memories.

For more advice on the art of drying and displaying flowers, we welcome you to stop by Griffin’s Floral Design. Our flower experts can also help you choose the best floral arrangements to enjoy fresh and dried.