If you want to preserve your beautiful flowers, I've got this way to do it that I found on YouTube, as a matter of fact, and it's a really cool process. Now there's a way to do it fast or a way to do it slow, and I recommend the slow version. The slow version is basically submerging your beautiful fresh flower. By the way, this one's dried. Can you believe that's a dried flower? I can't believe it. Anyway, you submerge your beautiful open flower in silica gel and then sprinkle the silica gel very carefully around that flower and position it as you go. And then leave it there. Leave... I left the rose for four days in the silica gel and it seems to be very well dried. Some people leave it longer like a week and I've seen some people will leave some flowers up to a month. You have to very carefully remove the flower from the beads. So the first thing I do is I kind of sweep the silica gel off the top of the flower, kind of until I can see the flower and then I'll take maybe a fork or a spoon. Like a fork is good because it also lets the silica gel beads fall between the tines and fall back down into the rest of the pile. And so I'll use a fork and I'll slide it underneath that flower. When most of the weight is off of the flower and I'll kind of tip the flower over and let more of the beads fall off and then very carefully, very carefully, because the flowers are extremely brittle when they're dry. As you probably know. So then I'll tip it over and I'll kind of tap it and I'll just carefully tap on leaves and maybe move the petals out of the way a little bit and more of the silica gel will then fall loose out of that flower. They kind of rattle a little and you can tell they're still silica gel beads in it. So here's the silica gel package and here is the basically the dried flower preservative that I'm using, which smells really good by the way, although you shouldn't be smelling it while you're spraying it. But after the after the stuff's dry, you can still smell a nice scent on it. This is an echinacea and what I've done is I've cut the stem off the back of the flower. I put a little I put a little silica gel in the bottom of my container and you can put this kind of flower, you can put face down or face up. So I'm just going to set it face up and I'm going to look at the petals and see if they're laid out nicely. You can adjust them while they're still soft. And then I'm going to just cover, you know, maybe a quarter of an inch deep, just cover the surface of that flower and that's it. Set it aside for like four days and you will have a very well-preserved dried flower. So here's a wet flower and I'm placing it down into some silica gel beads. And I just reuse these containers that have lids. I think they're great for this. And right now I'm arranging the petals really nicely and just carefully, you know, dropping some beads around it so it retains its shape. Just getting it between the layers that I want kind of held apart because I think the flower, like when it's open, is the most beautiful. And that's why I'm drying it at this stage. But if the petals flould over, he just adjust them. Because once it's dry, I mean that's the position that this flower is going to be in. So you want to carefully, carefully do this part for sure. Actually the whole process is pretty finicky and careful. And so if that's not the kind of labor you like to do, maybe dried flowers is not for you. Because it is finicky. And so is what you're going to use the dried flowers for. It's you're going to be decorating. And what I've learned from my jobs like working with a decorator, decorating is very finicky. It's very move this thing one inch. Look at it. See if it looks the best like that. Move it back a quarter of an inch. Adjust these ribbons, just write, center things. Put them in a display. It's all about displaying things for their highest level of beauty and their most aesthetic quality. And beauty matters. I think we talked about this in my last video. I think surrounding your life with beautiful stuff is really it's really a it's a noble thing in a in its own way. And it's beautiful. It's beautiful. And you want your life beautiful. You want to have a peaceful feeling when you go into a space and think it's just lovely in here. You know, it smells nice. It's clean. It's got the beauty from outside has been brought in. And you can make a beautiful life for yourself. And why don't you? If you have the opportunity to make your space that you spend a lot of time in, more life affirming for you, more happy. Make it happier. I mean, I don't like when you go into a place and it just looks like a dungeon. It's so spare. I did get into some of the minimalist concepts for a while there. And I started getting rid of a lot of my stuff. And I think there's a lot of stuff in our lives that's like not pretty or we bought it just to be useful but we didn't concern ourselves with how attractive that thing is. And maybe that's not the best way to live. Maybe we should, you know, when you have the means to do a better job of surrounding yourself with nice things, maybe you deserve those things. You know, do you? Do you want that for you? So yeah, hot glue is pretty much the most painful substance that you can get on your skin. So I did see online where you go buy special gloves for doing hot glue. And I think that's not such a bad idea. I have seriously considered buying some hot glue gun hot hot glue glove hot glue gloves. Yeah, I have seriously considered buying some hot glue gloves for protection because I always seem to burn myself. Luckily, I managed to get through an entire day without burning myself on the hot glue. So that's good. But yeah, what I've done here is just you just hold it while it cools down. And then, you know, once it's once that hot glue, mine changes color and it gets kind of a dull color to it and then you know it's cool enough and then you can let it go. The danger with the hot glue is those little strings that seem to stretch on forever. One of those is strong enough to break a flower petal. You know, that just looks beautiful. I can't, I'm having trouble getting over the fact that is actually like a dried out dead flower. But it is, it is. After I did the stick on this flower, I noticed that some of the outer petals were kind of loose and I wanted a kind of tighter, tighter feel at the base. So I dropped a little hot glue down there and held it in place until it cooled. And that I think holds the flower together. It's going to be less rattly, less, less likely for like all those petals to fall apart. Try to use the lowest setting possible on your hot glue gun. I'll tell you, a burn on low temperature is a lot less painful than a burn on high temperature. I'm going to show you a flower that I did that is not pretty because I did this other flower using the microwave. And basically what you do is the same thing. You take that flower into a microwave safe container, you bury it in a silica gel and you cook it for two minutes in the microwave and it kills the color. You know, it looks even worse in person. There's blue beads in there when the blue beads turn pink. That means that they've already absorbed all the moisture. Stick them in the oven for 30 minutes at 250 degrees. At least that's what the directions say. And that will recharge those beads so they'll start accepting moisture again. These littered containers are great. The tins that you get tea in are just the perfect size to hold a rose. So try and use those. You get to recycle them and they're not even plastic. Yay! That's about it. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you have any questions please leave them in the comments below and I reply to almost every comment. Bye! You can even glue two flowers to what stick if you like but that looks kind of ridiculous. So don't do that.