How to Preserve Your Wedding Bouquet: Ideas for Keeping Your Flowers Forever
Your wedding bouquet has a slightly unfair life expectancy.
You can spend months choosing the perfect flowers, colours and greenery. You carry it around for one of the biggest days of your life, it appears in approximately four thousand photographs... and then a few days later it's sitting in a vase looking decidedly less enthusiastic about the whole thing.
Understandably, lots of people start wondering what to do with their wedding bouquet after the wedding.
The good news is that there are plenty of ways to preserve wedding flowers, whether you want something traditional and delicate, something you can display on the wall, or something a little more unusual.
And, as people who regularly find ourselves surrounded by drying flowers, silica gel and alarming quantities of resin, this is a subject we know rather well.
Can You Preserve a Wedding Bouquet?
Absolutely.
Wedding bouquet preservation usually involves removing as much moisture from the flowers as possible before they deteriorate, then displaying or protecting them in a way that helps them last.
Exactly how they'll look afterwards depends on the flowers themselves and the preservation method used.
Some flowers retain their shape and colour beautifully. Others are slightly more dramatic about the whole process and decide they're going to change colour, shrink or generally refuse to cooperate.
Flowers, apparently, have personalities.
The important thing is deciding what you ultimately want to do with your bouquet.
Do you want to keep its original three-dimensional shape? Would you prefer something framed? Do you want a small keepsake tucked safely away somewhere, or something you'll see and use every day?
That makes choosing the right preservation method much easier.
Drying Your Wedding Bouquet
There are several ways wedding flowers can be dried, including traditional air drying and drying with silica gel.
Air drying is probably the simplest method if you're preserving flowers yourself, although flowers will usually lose some of their original colour and shape.
For the wedding bouquets we preserve at C&S Projects, we use silica gel rather than air drying. This helps us retain as much of the flowers' original shape and colour as possible before they're embedded into the resin river of the table.
Different flowers respond differently to drying, something we've learned through a lot of trial, error and staring suspiciously into boxes of silica gel.
Pressing Wedding Flowers
Pressed flowers are another classic way of preserving wedding flowers.
Individual blooms and foliage are carefully flattened and dried before being arranged inside a frame, picture or other keepsake.
You obviously lose the original three-dimensional shape of the bouquet, but pressing can preserve some wonderful details and produces something that's very easy to display.
It's also particularly good if you'd rather preserve selected flowers from your bouquet rather than the whole thing.
A few important blooms, perhaps flowers with a particular meaning or ones connected to somebody special, can become a lovely piece of artwork without needing to preserve every single stem.
Framed Wedding Bouquet Preservation
Professional flower preservation companies can create framed displays using either pressed flowers or three-dimensional dried flowers.
These can include photographs, invitations, ribbons, wedding dates and other small pieces from the day alongside the bouquet.
If you want something purely decorative that can hang safely on the wall, this is probably one of the most versatile options.
And unlike attempting to store your original bouquet in a box in the loft for twenty years, you're actually likely to see it occasionally.
Always a bonus.
Preserving Wedding Flowers in Resin
Resin bouquet preservation has become increasingly popular because clear epoxy resin can surround dried flowers and protect them while still allowing them to be seen.
Flowers can be preserved in resin blocks, paperweights, trays, ornaments, jewellery and all sorts of other keepsakes. We don't make these smaller resin keepsakes ourselves — at C&S Projects, we specialise specifically in preserving bouquets within handmade oak and resin river tables.
The crucial bit here is that the flowers need to be properly dried first.
Putting fresh flowers directly into resin traps the moisture inside them, which can cause discolouration, deterioration and other problems later.
We dry wedding flowers carefully before they go anywhere near our resin.
And we mean carefully.
We've spent a lot of time learning which drying methods work best because flowers are wonderfully inconsistent little things. Roses can behave completely differently to dahlias, peonies, gypsophila or greenery, and even two flowers from the same bouquet can apparently wake up and choose different destinies.
Turning Your Wedding Bouquet Into a Table
This is where we shine! Our particular version of wedding bouquet preservation gets a little less traditional.
Instead of putting the preserved flowers into a small resin block or frame, we make them part of a handmade live edge oak and epoxy resin table.
The flowers are carefully dried before being arranged within the natural opening between pieces of oak. Clear resin surrounds and protects them, creating what is essentially a floral resin river running through the table.
It gives you a wedding bouquet keepsake that isn't tucked away in a cupboard or sitting on a shelf.
It's furniture.
Which admittedly sounds slightly strange until you see one.
Then it makes complete sense.
Every bouquet creates a completely different table because we're working around the flowers rather than trying to force every arrangement into the same design. The shape of the oak, colours within the bouquet and the size and type of flowers all influence the finished piece.
Your bouquet doesn't have to be fresh, either. We can create our wedding bouquet river tables using fresh wedding flowers, which we carefully dry in silica gel ourselves, flowers that have already been dried, or artificial flowers that were used in your wedding bouquet.
Whichever type you have, our wedding bouquet preservation service is specifically about turning those flowers into a handmade live edge oak and epoxy resin river table. We don't offer framed flowers, resin blocks or smaller resin keepsakes — tables are very much our thing.
If you'd like to see how they work or what they look like, you can have a look at our wedding bouquet preservation table here.
How Soon After Your Wedding Should You Preserve Your Bouquet?
If you're sending us a fresh wedding bouquet to preserve, the sooner we receive it after the wedding, the better. Flowers naturally begin to deteriorate once they're cut, so getting them to us as quickly as possible gives us the best chance of retaining as much of their freshness, colour and shape as we can before we begin the drying process.
For posting, we ask that you wrap the stems in wet paper towel, then place a plastic bag around the wet paper towel to stop the moisture from soaking into the packaging during transit. The flowers themselves should remain uncovered.
It's worth having a rough plan before the wedding so you already know what you're doing with your bouquet afterwards. There are quite enough decisions to make around a wedding without somebody appearing with a clipboard demanding to know the long-term intentions of your hydrangeas... Lord only knows you don't need that stress too!
If your wedding flowers are already dried, there's much less urgency. We can use previously dried bouquets in our river tables, providing they're in suitable condition.
And if you had an artificial wedding bouquet, there's obviously no race against wilting flowers at all. We can preserve those in a table too, just without the slightly frantic post-wedding dash to get them to us!
Which Wedding Bouquet Preservation Method Is Best?
There's no single best option.
It really depends on what you'd like to end up with.
If you love traditional dried flowers, keeping the bouquet intact may be enough.
If you want wall art, pressed or professionally framed flowers are probably a better fit. If you want something small, resin blocks, ornaments or jewellery can preserve selected blooms without taking up much room. However, this isn't our skill set, but there are a lot of lovely sellers on Etsy that can achieve all of the above!
And if you'd rather turn your bouquet into something substantial that becomes part of your home, that's where a preserved flower table comes in.
We're obviously a tiny bit biased on that last one.
Your Flowers Don't Have to Disappear After the Wedding
Wedding flowers can contain an enormous amount of sentimental value.
Sometimes it's simply because they were the flowers you carried down the aisle. Sometimes particular flowers were chosen because they remind you of somebody, match flowers from a parent's wedding, came from a family garden or have another story attached to them.
We've had customers tell us stories behind individual flowers that completely change how we see the bouquet we're working with.
And that's probably our favourite part of making these tables.
Yes, we work with oak and resin every day. Yes, there will inevitably be bubbles to chase and Cassie will almost certainly discover another microscopic bubble that nobody else can see.
But we're also being trusted with something that can't simply be replaced if things go wrong.
So whether you dry your bouquet, press it into a frame, preserve a few flowers in a keepsake or turn the whole thing into a piece of furniture, don't feel as though your wedding flowers automatically have to end their career when the wedding does.
They've got options.
And apparently one of those options is becoming a table.
Who knew?!