How to dry your craft leaves?

Autumn is one of the most beautiful seasons of the year. This season, a huge amount of foliage of different color appears on the trees, and in fact it can be easily used to collect a full-fledged herbarium or for ordinary creativity - creating original children's school and home crafts.

With the help of well-dried leaves, you can easily make quite beautiful and in their own way original applications, all kinds of products, the purpose of which is the full development of children's creative thinking. In addition, with the help of many manipulations with foliage, you can successfully develop fine motor skills.

Collect yellow, red-brown, orange-green leaves from trees, as well as collect other gifts of autumn nature, which can be safely used in children's crafts, correctly in dry and maximum sunny weather. It is best to do this as far from the carriageway as possible.

It is worth considering that even very well-dried materials will be characterized by increased fragility. And therefore, it is necessary to collect them with a good supply (ideally, about 3-4 times more than you need to work on future crafts or to compile a herbarium).

In order to dry the autumn leaves for unusual crafts with high quality, they must first be very well revised - if there are any serious damages on them.

Next, the leaves need to be cleaned:

• rinse gently under the tap (or you can just gently wipe with a damp cloth);
• dry with ordinary paper napkins;
• can be laid out on paper towels that have been laid on a flat surface - this will help remove excess moisture from the collected material.

Well-dried leaves and other plants should be stored in a dry, but not too dry, room. Ideally, it should be darkened.

The air temperature will not matter at all, for this reason an ordinary balcony, loggia or shed is perfect for storing material.

If the collected and carefully disassembled herbarium is stored in a pantry or in your home on a closet, small harmful insects like moths can be a huge problem for them and for you. They will easily eat up your crop before you find time to work with it or take it to school. This means that all collected and dried materials sometimes need to be well inspected.

Bunches of blades of grass, leaves and flowers can be left hanging to dry, or simply tucked into spacious paper boxes. In extreme cases, you can carefully wrap the collected herbarium in an ordinary newspaper, because the main thing is to protect the plants and foliage from the direct rays of the aggressive sun.

If you have prepared a lot of material, but you are not going to use it right away, in one day, it is worth signing the names of the collected plants, herbs, flowers and foliage on the boxes. So in the end it will be much easier for you to find exactly what is suitable for full-fledged creativity.

There are many ways to quickly dry the necessary leaves or plants, the best are those that allow you to save the collected leaves and flowers for the longest possible period.

More often than others, you can find a way to dry leaves and plants just in the open air. It is the most straightforward and hassle-free. The collected leaves and flowers can be neatly wrapped in small napkins (it is best to choose rice) or other material that perfectly absorbs moisture, and then carefully spread out in large boxes or simply on top of a sheet of cardboard.

Some beautiful plants wilt rather quickly, for this reason they are extremely difficult to dry. For them, you can apply the popular combined method - dry with air and water at the same time.

The tips of the stems of flowers collected for creativity or herbarium will need to be slightly trimmed, and the whole bouquet is then placed in a vase of water. At the same time, the cut stems are immersed in water by 4-5 cm, no more. As soon as the liquid begins to evaporate, and the plants themselves will dry perfectly. As soon as the flower buds are slightly tilted, remove the flowers from the vase, cut off the slightly wet ends of the stems so that unpleasant and destructive mold does not appear on them.

After that, you should dry the semi-dry plants by dividing and spreading them evenly on a cardboard sheet.

The simplest, but not the fastest, can be considered a method using a press. This option is most often chosen for perfectly flat leaves and plants.

To obtain the necessary material, usually autumn leaves or small flowers are placed between the pages of a large book., which is additionally covered with a heavy press on top (you can take another heavy book).

On average, the drying period will be about 7-10 days.

Very often there is a need to dry rather thin flower petals. After drying, they can become excessively brittle and, moreover, lose their original color.To prevent this, you should smear such petals with a composition of PVA glue with water, then transfer the blanks to very thin paper (tracing paper).

Allow the adhesive to dry well, then lay it between two large sheets.

You also need to put the press on top, and then you can preserve the color of the delicate petals and prevent their increased fragility.

Quite simple, fast and widespread option. With it, you can get perfectly flat, optimally smooth leaves, which are excellent for flat crafts.

The best option may be to select the silk or delicate (wool) mode. You will need to take a regular white sheet of paper. The leaves are placed one at a time on a piece of paper, which is best placed on a hard surface (on a table) so that the leaves are not wrinkled or squeezed. Cover the top of the autumn leaf with the same sheet of paper.

The iron turns on, and with its help the material is ironed for a couple of minutes - the ironing process is carried out from side to side.

This manipulation must be repeated until the autumn leaves are completely dry.

Drying foliage in the microwave can also be considered very popular - this way you can dry leaves suitable for children's crafts in just 5-10 minutes. True, here everything will also depend on the thickness of the leaf itself, and on how wet it is.

Usually they take a plate of water for safe drying.

On top of the plate with water, another plate is installed, it is in it that the leaves will be located.

Before drying, the material itself should be wiped with a damp cloth and slightly smoothed. After that, the microwave must be turned on at maximum power, for about 1-1.5 minutes. If the material does not have time to dry within this period of time, just add another 0.5-1 minute, and then, if necessary, another minute.

If you want to dry the leaves as quickly as possible, and at the same time their final appearance does not bother you at all, then instead of a microwave oven, you can use an oven. Take a clean baking sheet, put the previously washed and dried leaves on it in the thinnest layer.

In this case, the leaves will have to be pressed against the surface of the baking sheet, they should fit as tightly as possible to it. The oven should be heated to 100 degrees.

If you need to quickly prepare a herbarium, dry the leaves for school crafts the next day, using a regular household hair dryer would be an excellent solution.

To get the ideal material for future original work, you need to distribute the leaves on the most even horizontal surface, and set the device to low or medium power.

Do not dry flowers, foliage and plants for the future herbarium right away. From time to time, let them just lie down, "take a break" from the effects of the hair dryer. Otherwise, you run the risk of seriously overdrying your material, and some specimens will crumble into dust after such drying in your hands.

A rather unusual way of drying not only autumn leaves, but also whole flower bouquets, can be considered the technique of canning. The most common choice for this procedure is glycerin. It must be mixed with water (in proportions 4: 1).Next, a fresh flower bouquet is taken, the ends of its stems are cut off and divided into 4 parts, and then the mixture will perfectly penetrate into the flower.

Further, any suitable container is filled about 4 cm with the ready-made mixture, and the stems are lowered into it. From time to time, the solution is poured into the container.

The color and shape of foliage and petals will be preserved 100%. They will not turn dark or transparent.

Canning in wax or paraffin can also help to preserve the appearance of the leaves:

1. first you need to melt the wax (paraffin) in a water bath (but do not boil);
2. the leaves must be immersed in the resulting composition;
3. after that, the foliage needs to be hung to dry.

In this case, powders are free-flowing substances with hygroscopic characteristics: borax, semolina, salt and even chalk. Leaves will also dry out perfectly if they are immersed in ordinary flour, potato starch or sand from the river (calcined in a pan), but you will not keep an even shape.

In addition, ordinary cotton wool will perfectly absorb water. The positive side of this kind of drying lies in the fact that it allows you to completely preserve both the shape and color of foliage and plants.

Borax and silica gel are considered very expensive materials, although they help to quickly dry all foliage and plants. A cheaper drying method is using corn or wheat flour and starch.

In a small container, it is necessary to pour a certain amount of the absorber on the bottom, carefully lower the leaves or inflorescences inside, and cover it with the material used. Drying is usually completed in 5-7 days.

Few people know about this, but leaves of different plants not only dry, but also behave differently when working with them, are also stored taking into account individual characteristics.

So, using the air method, it is best to dry various ornamental grasses, ears of cereals (rye, wheat), as well as various medicinal plants such as fragrant mint, stinging nettle, St. John's wort.

Air drying without the hanging process - it can also be excellent for foliage and inflorescences of heather and periwinkle, goldenrod and lavender and the like.

Drying with a hanging procedure is useful for artichoke leaves of ball and scent clove, sweet heather and luxurious hydrangea, as well as yarrow.

Powder-type drying is suitable for all voluminous, as well as fragile flowers, in which the petals are seriously fixed on the base - for asters and marigolds, carnations and calendula, lily of the valley, lilies and daisies, violets.

Barberry and luxurious fern leaves can be preserved in a glycerin base.

The foliage of various trees and plants that are flat in shape can be dried in a thick folio or under a large press. These include most of the meadow flowers and those that grow in the fields, as well as medicinal plants - bells, lilacs and violets.

The iron can dry almost any woody leaves, as well as iris leaves.

The microwave will perfectly dry flowers with a sufficient number of smooth petals: carnation, dahlia, goldenrod, calendula, peony, rose, chamomile.