Air Dry Flowers - Adding Country Decor

It's a very simple process to make beautiful air dry flowers. The only things you need are some rubber bands, a place to hang them out of direct light, and either paper clips or florist wire.

You can use pieces of lattice attached to the kitchen wall and wooden pegged coffee cup hangers as places to air dry flowers. Another way to do this is to insert some cup hooks into a wall and use those.

After you have prepared your place to hang them, you can begin gathering flowers to dry. Hopefully you have an assortment of wildflowers growing in your own flower garden or yard to experiment with.

If not, you can find a large variety of wildflowers growing alongside roads or in forests. If you are using wildflowers, always take care of the plants you take the flowers from. This guarantees that there will remain plenty of plant growth for insects, birds and other wildlife to use.

Some typical examples of air dry flowers would include:

• Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)
• Pompon Dahlias (Dahlia hortensis)
• Poppy seed heads (Papaver somniferum)
• Roses (Rosa)
• Marjoram (Origanum vulgare)
• Delphinium
• Larkspur (Consolida ambigua)
• Lavender (Lavandula Augustifolia)
• African Marigold (Tagetes erecta)
• Strawflower (Helichrysum bracteatum)
• Globe Thistle (echinops ritro)
• Cornflower (Centaurea cyanus)
• Statice (Limonium sinuatum)
• Globe amaranth (Gomphrena globosa)
• Love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) seed heads

It's best to dry flowers when they are just beginning to open up. Depending on the flower, if you hang the flower too late the petals may fall off. With others, you may need to wait until the seed head is developed because that will be the decorative part.

The best time to cut flowers for drying is on a dry day after the dew has dried and in late morning .

After you have picked your flowers, you need to ready them for air-drying. Start by bundling eight to ten stems using a rubber band at the cut end of the flowers. The rubber band works best because as the flowers dry, the stems will shrink and the rubber band will shrink along with them, keeping a snug fit.

Next, insert a short length of florist wire or a unraveled paper clip inside the rubber band and bend it to form a hook. You can use the hook to hang the bunch over a piece of lattice, a peg, or a wall hook. Be sure to hang the flowers upside down. Depending on the weather, they should take anywhere from one to three weeks to dry thoroughly. When the flowers are crisp to the touch you will know they're completely dry.

Air dry flowers make a rustic decoration by themselves.