You love flowers, and everybody knows it. Every year friends and colleagues gift you beautiful bouquets. Last year, you spread the flowers through the house to enjoy their fragrance and vibrancy until they wilted and you had to throw them out.
Try something different this year so that you can enjoy that beautiful bouquet of flowers for birthday celebrations much longer and decorate your home with the most remarkable of blooms. Use one of these ideas or a combination to keep your birthday bouquets around longer.
Preserve Your Bouquets
Although this doesn’t count as a decoration tip, the biggest problem with those stunning bouquets is that they start wilting within a week. Before using them to brighten your home, look at these few tips to preserve them a little longer.
We’ll start with the most straightforward tricks to keep flowers fresh for longer, then look at ideas for drying and displaying especially beautiful or sentimental ones.
Floating Petals
Keeping bouquet flowers fresher for a little longer can be as simple as simply cutting the stems and leaving the blossoms to float in a bowl of water. Doing this can double the lifespan of your birthday bouquet. You can use a bowl that adds class to an otherwise simple display.
Microwave Your Bouquet
You read the heading correctly. Microwaving flowers is a quick, safe, and effective way of drying and preserving the blooms. Place a coffee filter onto a ceramic plate. Put the flowers onto the filter and sandwich them between a second one and a ceramic plate. Microwave the blooms for a minute at a time until you’re satisfied with the result.
Press Your Flowers
Pressing flowers is as easy as putting the blossom between two wax paper pieces and putting a heavy hardcover book or weight on it. Make sure you use flat surfaces in a dry place. Within a week, you’ll have a beautiful pressed flower that lasts for years. These dried versions are perfect for framing.
Silica Gel
Fill a suitably sized airtight container halfway with silica gel. Place your flowers in the gel and fill the container to the top before sealing it. Be careful not to damage the blossoms as you fill the container. Within seven days, you’ll have a beautifully preserved bouquet with the color close to the original fresh blooms.
Air drying
Hang the flowers upside down in a dark, dry space like a cupboard. Check on them every few days until they’ve dried out. You can tie them loosely in bunches, but it’s better to keep them as separate as possible to avoid the risk of mold.
Resin
You can buy a mold and resin from most craft stores. Fill the mold halfway with resin, carefully place the flowers and fill the container with the remaining resin. Once the liquid has set, you have a perfectly preserved bouquet ready for permanent display. You can find many excellent descriptions of keeping flowers in resin online.
Our 5 Decorating Ideas
Now that you’re confident that your beautiful bouquet can be preserved and displayed, let’s look at a few ideas for decorating your home with these gorgeous birthday blooms.
Table Centrepieces
Using your floating blooms as a table centerpiece for either a dining table or even a coffee table adds color and vibrance to the setting. Try using a glass bowl and adding dye to the water. Some blooms change color to match the hue. Experiment with white roses in a blue tint and watch the transformation.
Table Compositions
As an extension to the centerpiece theme, you can make a composition with different flowers or alternate between dried or resined bouquets and fresh blooms. Try using low and narrow containers with arrangements keeping the colors simple.
With the range of colors available in flowers, it’s tempting to make the composition too colorful, distracting guests and inhibiting conversation.
Framing and Hanging
Pressing a flower from a bouquet with sentimental value or wonderful memories is an excellent way of preservation. Beautiful blooms in a simple frame with a plain background are perfect for a hallway or passage.
This idea can bring back memories of the occasion every time you walk past it. For a larger bloom or arrangement from a bouquet, you can arrange the flowers in the frame to resemble a painting and hang it in a sitting room or above the mantle.
Interesting Containers
Who says birthday bouquets need to be in vases? You can display both fresh and dried flowers in almost any container. More unusual holders make more interesting displays.
You can decorate your home with bouquets sticking out of old wellington boots or try a soup tureen. You can even use teapots, glass bottles, or gift boxes as vases to add a little uniqueness to your decoration. Try putting a bouquet of dried flowers in a miniature watering can.
Lighten Up Dull Corners
Use your birthday bouquets to lighten up any dull corners in your home. A simple display of colorful blooms in an otherwise bland corner can brighten a room and make a massive difference to the atmosphere.
Use a lovely bouquet preserved in a resin cube with a soft backlight to give that dull corner a romantic feeling. You can even try a fresh or dried birthday bouquet in an old birdcage, adding a little originality to the display.
Decorate Your Home With Beautiful Birthday Bouquets
If there was ever a time when we needed color and vibrancy in our homes, this is it. The pandemic has forced many of us to work from home and limit our contact with loved ones. Why not try decorating your house with birthday bouquets, impressing family and friends with newfound creativity when all this is over.
If nothing else, you’ll brighten your living space and have a way to remember fun times and amazing friends. Even dried or preserved flowers turn a house into a beautiful, loving home. Use your birthday bouquets to decorate and make wonderful things happen in your house.