Preserve Nature’s Beauty: A Guide to Drying Flowers and Understanding Its Benefits
Flowers can be dried and used in many different things. Salves, Soaps, or even making teas and adding to bath salts or bath bombs. Many people will think about drying flowers as something hard and time consuming, but in reality, while it is time consuming, hard it is not.
There are different types of ways you can dry out flowers. My top choice is air drying. It doesn’t use electricity, and it requires really no skill at all. Depending on what your drying there may be a little bit of initial prep work involved. For example, when drying out Roses, its best to pluck off each individual pedal. I was drying dandelions, and there wasn’t much to pluck off. I did make sure there wasn’t much of the stem left, and laid them out near a windowsill so it got as much sun as possible. Normally I’d like to sit it outside where it can get sunlight, and the warmth from the sun helps dry out the flowers faster. But this particular day the wind was blowing and I was worried I’d blow them all over the place.
First Day:
Not much change the first day. By the end of the day you could see them wilt a tad. I have no idea how long it will take, its all dependent on temperature, and humidity. If there’s too much moisture in the air, your flowers could take a long time to dry, or could even potentially get moldy.
Second Day: Not much change in the morning. However, its supposed to get up to 75 today, so I’m hopeful I’ll be able to see more progress as the day goes on. By the end of the second day, the spot I set my flowers on were dry enough to make some Dandelion infused oil.
Why Dry?
You might ask- Why dry them? Well, when you dry them, your preserving them, and then able to save them for a later date if you need to. And for some things, you don’t want moisture in it, so to create it, so you need dried flowers. I don’t always get to gather enough flowers to infuse oil right away, so sometimes, I need to dry them since it buys time for me to find more. I can do it more at my pace.
Infusing Oil? What?
First things first, to make an infused oil you need a carrier oil. What is a carrier oil. Well funny enough, its an oil that ‘carries’ the essential oil or infused product to the skin for its benefits. So then…what IS a carrier oil?
-Olive Oil
-Almond Oil
-Sunflower Oil
-Almond Oil
-Castor Oil
-Coconut Oil
I’m sure you get the point by now. There’s even loads I didn’t list, Avocado Oil, Grapeseed Oil, ect. And We’ll go over how to create an infused oil in a later post.
