Pressed Flower Bookmarks- Trendy Without Being Spendy

Ok, so a few weeks back I made you all embark on the adventures of The Flower Pressing Promenade.  For those of you who did it....(eh em...Ashleigh)...this blog post is for you!



So you've waited a week or two for your flowers to press, you've opened up the  book and found your beautifully pressed petals. Now what do you do with them? Here are the instructions on how to make one of my favorite and easiest crafts with pressed flowers, bookmarks.

Bookmarks are great gifts for almost everyone: students, mothers, grandmas, friends, etc.  They are also a great way to really give someone an affordable and special message that shows you care. You can customize a personalized message, put lyrics from a song, or add in your favorite quote or poem. What I decided to choose were some flower poems and quotes for my friends and my grandma. I figured since we are using flowers, that would be cute to put on a bookmark.

Materials you will need:
Poem or quotes you would like to use
Computer and printer with Microsoft Word or other writing program
Pressed flowers
Scissors
All purpose glue
Self adhesive laminate sheets
Hole puncher
Some kind of ribbon

Now that you have all of your materials ready, it's time to start creating.  Using you Word Doc, make a text box the desired size of your bookmark. I filled up the Word Doc with as many text boxes as I could so, I didn't waste any of the laminate sheets. Inside of the text box, add in the poem, quote, lyrics, etc. you want to be on your bookmark.  Make sure you leave enough space to add on the pressed flower(s). Once you pick the font, color and style of your liking, print them out.

Next I get out my pressed flowers. Since I picked several varieties of flowers with different sizes for different crafts, I needed to pick ones that would fit the size of the bookmarks.  The only ones that would fit were the violets and some wild flowers I found on the side of the road.  I had to prune the wild flowers a little bit to fit.

Once I trimmed them up, I laid them out on the paper the way I wanted them to look. After they were placed exactly how I liked them, I glued them on with Elmers glue.

Now comes the challenging part...the laminate.  It is self adhesive and can be very tricky. You have to be very careful not to get air bubbles or you will be screwed and not be able to get them out. Reason being, once the two pieces of laminate are stuck together, it's impossible to tear them apart.  Go very slowly! Take the paper off of one sheet of laminate, carefully and very slowly, work them on top of the Word Doc. Start from one side to the other, evenly working down the sheet so that no air bubbles are left over. As you can see from my picture below, I did not take my time. Because of this, I had to spend another 20 minutes try to reshape the bookmark so, that there weren't any bubbles in it. Super annoying! Anyway, once you do this the right way, flip the Word Doc over and begin the process again with another sheet of adhesive laminate.

Alright, now for the fun and easy part! Like a kindergartner, start cutting out the bookmarks.  They should look like this when you are done.

Take your hole puncher and punch in a hole at the top.  Then take the ribbon you picked, string it through the hole and tie it.

Cool! Now, you have really awesome bookmarks to give to the ones you love. And the best part is, they were super affordable and the meanings can be priceless.  Enjoy! And I will see you in a couple weeks with another pressed flower craft, picture frames!! :)