Garden Crafts: Making a Simple Bookmark with Pressed Flowers

Pressing garden flowers is a wonderful way to preserve the beauty of summer and spring.  We discussed how to press flowers in our April 2013   posting on ‘Pressing Wildflowers’, which can be accessed at  http://mother-natures-backyard.blogspot.com/2013_04_01_archive.html    Spring and summer can be busy times in the garden.  With the coming of fall, you may finally have time to put your pressed flowers to use.   A simple craft idea uses pressed flowers to make colorful bookmarks.  These unique and useful gifts are easy to do if you have access to a laminating machine.

The flowers used for making laminated bookmarks need to be thin and pressed very flat.  Look through your collection of pressed flowers for ones that are attractive and the right size – about 2  by 5 inches is a good size.   For background, choose a paper that complements your pressed flowers. A wide range of papers are available wherever scrapbooking supplies are sold.  We used pressed Birds-eye Gilia flowers (a native wildflower) for our bookmarks.  We selected a light cream and dark purple papers for the background, because they bring out the colors of the flowers (see above).   After trying the flowers on both backgrounds, we decided to use the cream as background with purple as border.

You can make your bookmark using only pressed flowers, but we like to include a little information on our bookmarks.  This is easy to do.  If you’re talented, print the information by hand; if not, use your computer to print the information on a light-colored background.  You can make 3 bookmarks from an 8 ½ x 11 sheet of paper – printed horizontally (set the page layout to 3 columns).   For our bookmarks, we included the common and scientific name of the flower and where it was grown (see below).

Cut out the bookmarks to the correct size.  We cut our inner background to 2 3/4 by 6 ½   inches  and the outer background (purple) to 3 ¼ by 7 ½  inches.  If you scrapbook, you likely have punches or edge-trimmers to make your borders even more decorative than ours.  

Carefully assemble the bookmarks in a laminating pouch, being sure that all edges are straight.   Run the pouch through the laminator, following the manufacturer’s operating  instructions.   Cut the bookmarks apart, leaving a ¼ inch laminated strip on all sides of each bookmark.    If desired, punch a hole in the top of the bookmark and insert a ribbon or cord.   That’s all there is to it!

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