How to Preserve a Wedding Bouquet: 7 Beautiful Ways to Keep Your Flowers Forever

Your wedding bouquet is so much more than a collection of flowers. It’s part of one of the biggest days of your life – carefully chosen to complement your dress, your colours and the whole feel of your wedding day.

So, when the celebrations are over, throwing those beautiful flowers away can feel unthinkable.

The good news is that you don’t have to!

There are lots of beautiful ways to preserve a wedding bouquet, from simple DIY methods to professional flower preservation in resin or a dry frame. In this guide, we’ll look at some of the best ways to preserve your wedding flowers and help you decide which option is right for you.

1. Preserve Your Wedding Flowers in Resin

One of the most beautiful ways to keep your wedding flowers is to have them professionally preserved in resin.

Your flowers are carefully dried before being arranged inside clear resin, creating a completely unique keepsake from your wedding day.

Depending on the flowers in your bouquet and the design you choose, they can be transformed into decorative blocks, arches, spheres and other display pieces.

Smaller flowers, petals and foliage can also be incorporated into matching keepsakes, meaning different parts of your bouquet can be used rather than relying on one large piece.

Resin preservation is particularly lovely if you’d like something you can have permanently on display in your home rather than storing your bouquet away in a box.

It’s important to remember that flowers are natural materials. Their colours can change during the drying and preservation process, and they will continue to naturally age over time. This is part of what makes every preserved bouquet completely unique.

2. Have Your Bouquet Preserved in a Dry Frame

If you love the shape and character of natural dried flowers, a dry frame is another beautiful option.

Rather than embedding the flowers in resin, selected flowers and foliage from your bouquet are professionally dried and arranged within a frame.

This can allow you to preserve more of the original feel of your bouquet while turning it into a piece of artwork for your home.

Dry frames work particularly well for bouquets containing a mixture of flowers, foliage and interesting textures.

They can also be a lovely choice if you prefer a more natural or traditional appearance.

3. Press Your Wedding Flowers

Flower pressing is one of the oldest methods of flower preservation.

Flowers are placed under pressure and allowed to dry completely flat. Once dried, they can be arranged inside a frame or used to create other decorative pieces.

You can even try this yourself using a flower press or a heavy book.

However, not every flower presses equally well. Thick or particularly fleshy flowers can hold a lot of moisture, making them more difficult to press successfully.

If you’re planning to preserve something as sentimental as your wedding bouquet yourself, we’d always recommend researching the flowers in your bouquet before getting started.

4. Air Dry Your Wedding Bouquet

One of the simplest ways to preserve wedding flowers at home is to air dry them.

The traditional method is to tie the stems together and hang the bouquet upside down somewhere dry, dark and well ventilated.

Keeping the bouquet away from direct sunlight can help reduce fading while the flowers dry.

Over time, the moisture leaves the flowers and you’re left with a dried version of your bouquet.

It’s an inexpensive option and can look beautiful, particularly with flowers that naturally dry well.

However, dried bouquets are delicate. Flowers can become brittle, petals may fall and colours will usually change considerably as they dry.

5. Dry Your Flowers Using Silica Gel

Silica gel is another popular way of drying flowers and is actually one of the techniques used within professional flower preservation.

Unlike air drying, silica surrounds the flower and draws moisture from it while helping the bloom retain more of its three-dimensional shape.

Flowers are carefully placed into a container and completely surrounded with silica crystals.

The process needs to be done gently – particularly around delicate petals – but it can produce fantastic results.

Different varieties of flowers dry at different speeds, so timing is important. Leaving a flower in silica for too long can make it extremely brittle.

Once completely dry, the flowers can be displayed or used within another preservation method such as resin.

6. Turn Your Wedding Flowers Into Jewellery

You don’t necessarily need to preserve the whole bouquet.

Sometimes the smallest keepsake can be the most special.

Tiny pieces of flowers or individual petals can be incorporated into jewellery such as necklaces, rings, earrings or other keepsakes.

This gives you something from your wedding flowers that you can actually wear rather than simply display.

It can also be a beautiful way to divide a bouquet between family members. For example, flowers from one bouquet could potentially become keepsakes for the bride, parents, grandparents or bridesmaids.

7. Create Several Keepsakes From One Bouquet

One of our favourite options is to use a wedding bouquet to create several different pieces.

You might choose a larger resin piece containing some of your statement flowers, a dry frame containing additional blooms and foliage, and smaller keepsakes or jewellery using petals from the remaining flowers.

This can make much better use of your bouquet and gives you several reminders of your wedding day to keep around your home or share with people you love.

Every bouquet is different, so the preservation possibilities will depend on the flowers, their condition and the amount of material available.