Dried Flower Terrarium

11/23/2014

Hey folks!

A dried flower terrarium is a quick and easy way to save beautiful flowers from special occasions without decorating like Morticia Addams. They make great gifts too!

The Project

First, here is what the finished product looks like.

Materials

Flowers
Jar
Scissors or shears

Picking Your Flowers

Every once in a while I get flowers for a special occasion. When the flowers are beautiful and when the occasion is particularly important, I like to save the flowers. A few months after graduating from law school, I moved from Berkeley, California to Washington, DC. Before I moved, I made these dried flower terrariums for some special people I built an organization with during law school.

The flowers came from bouquets these people and my family gave to me for my law school graduation, and I let my giftees know that’s where the flowers came from!

Drying Flowers

This is easy. You might have already done it. I dry flowers in a few different ways, and it only takes a few days.

I often hang flowers, especially roses, upside down by taping them to the wall with blue painter’s tape. One purpose of hanging the flowers upside down is to keep them pointing straight up instead of drooping over.

Another option is to put the flowers upright in a vase or cup. Especially for roses, the flowers may droop over the side of the container. I like this look as well, because I can more easily get a view of the pretty top of the flower in the arrangement.

Finally, I sometimes put the flowers in a shoebox without a lid and set the box on top of an open shelf or a piece of furniture. This is definitely my partner’s favorite method, since I have a tendency to tape flowers to the wall in our kitchen and leave them up for a few weeks.

Picking Your Jar

Any jar would probably be cute for this project. I mostly used jars that I had leftover from beekind honey we bought at the Ferry Building Marketplace in San Francisco. On a side note, I highly recommend the Meadowfoam Honey. It tastes deliciously sweet, a little like marshmallows. You can find it here. I’ve also used empty Nescafe jars.

I removed the jar labels using Goo Gone and cleaned the jars using dish soap.

Arranging the Flowers

This part is pretty easy! I usually hold my flowers up to the jar to get an idea of where to cut them. I try to cut them at various lengths. I also like to have some of the flowers poking out of the top of the jar. But if you aren’t a fan of that idea, you could use burlap and string to give the jar a cute covering.

For some of the arrangements, I used chopsticks to position the short flowers the way I wanted. I considered using glue to get some of the finicky flowers to stay at their prettiest angle, but I ended up not having to do that.