This is a wonderful fun pastime and a chance to be creative and have some fun as well.

What we did as children is get flowers, leaves, and so on, and then put them in books to dry.

They can be put in old books that you were going to throw out or in newspaper, or some form of paper to protect the books pages, and also dry the flowers etc.

They can also be dried hanging on a line inside the house, in an oven, and so on.

If you use the book method then when the flowers/plants/leaves are in the book, a big phone book (like last years out of date phone book), add some other books or weights on top and leave the books like that for about a few days to 10 days – experiment. They will be dry and flat. If they are hung to dry they won’t be flat. Again, experiment, enjoy.

You can add them to scrapbooks and they can last for years.

Some people recommend cutting the flower in half and putting the flower flat side down and then it will dry faster and still look good.

To flatten the flowers you can:

• Get 2 pieces of board.
• Drill 4 holes at each corner of both boards, insert bolts in the holes.
• Put sheets of paper inside with the flowers between them.
• Then tighten the bolts with the matching nuts or wing nuts, which hold the two sheets of board hard up against each other with the flowers between them.
• Open a few days later to see the results.