How To Make a Pressed Flower Tea Towel

What do you do with your flowers after they’ve bloomed? Some arrangements hold significance, like a wedding bouquet or those picked from a loved one’s garden. Flower pressing is a great way to preserve your favorite botanicals. Take this popular project to the next level by creating beautiful surface designs with your pressed flowers. Spoonflower artist and maker Robert Mahar shares how to press flowers and turn them into a timeless tea towel on Linen Cotton Canvas.  

Robert: What if you could take flowers and foliage from your own backyard and rather than display them in a vase, learn how to preserve and transform them into surface designs to print on your favorite Spoonflower textiles? Join me in creating our own small-scale flower press, and then arrange the flattened results to create a pattern that blooms across a linen cotton tea towel.  

Bonus! Follow along as I demonstrate how to add texture and color to your printed fabric with embroidery embellishments.  

There are two easily accessible ways you can press flowers:

Unless you have a table saw, purchase pre-cut pieces of plywood that can be found in your craft and hobby store. I recommend working with plywood that is at least 1/4” in thickness. Thinner plywood is more likely to crack and splinter.

Begin by stacking your two pieces of plywood on top of one another and securing them together with painter’s tape—this ensures the edges and drilled holes will all be aligned.

With a ruler and pencil, measure 1/4″ away from the edge of your plywood and mark where you’re going to place your drill holes. Using a drill fitted with a 1/4″ bit, create a hole in each of the four corners.

Once you’ve drilled the holes, remove the painter’s tape. Smooth out any splinters with a piece of fine-grit sandpaper.

If you have any cardboard shipping boxes, this is a great way to recycle them!

Measure and cut 6-12 pieces of square corrugated cardboard that are 1” smaller than your plywood pieces. I’m using 6” square pieces of plywood, so I’m going to cut 5” square pieces of corrugated cardboard.

Measure and cut 6 to 12 pieces of white printer paper—I’m cutting pieces that measure 5” x 10”. I’ll then fold them in half individually, creating 5” squares. 

Now that we’ve measured, cut and drilled everything, it’s time to put it together.

To assemble your press, place your four 1/4” x 2 1/2” carriage bolts through the drilled holes in one of your pieces of plywood. Set it on your work surface, with the carriage bolt heads facing down.  

On top of the plywood, center and place a piece of corrugated cardboard between the four carriage bolts. Add a piece of folded printer paper on top of the cardboard.

Place your flowers and foliage within the fold of the printer paper. Be sure to arrange them so that they don’t overlap or extend beyond the edges.

Continue to build layers in this fashion, stacking the cardboard and the printer paper with botanicals in its folds. Finally place your second piece of plywood on top, with the carriage bolts positioned through the drilled holes.  

To secure everything in place, put a 1/4” flat washer over each bolt and then spin a 1/4” wing nut onto the threads of each bolt. Tighten each wing nut enough to hold the contents (cardboard, printer paper and botanicals) neatly in place, but not so tight that you run the risk of cracking or splintering the plywood. 

Now here comes the challenging part—we wait. Depending on the thickness of the plant you are pressing and the drying conditions—whether you are in a humid or arid environment—it can take just a couple of days to a few weeks for your specimen to completely dry.

When it’s time to check on your flower press, first, carefully loosen the wing nuts. Next, remove one piece of plywood and examine the flowers and leaves. If they’re dry and paper-like, they’re ready to go—otherwise, place the plywood back over, tighten the wing nut and allow them additional time.

Now, let’s print your pressed botanical specimens onto fabric! You’ll need either plants that you’ve pressed using your DIY flower press or you can purchase pre-pressed botanicals. If it’s not blooming season, or you don’t want to wait for your flowers and foliage to dry in a press—pre-pressed is the way to go. Pre-pressed flowers are available in a wide variety of botanical species. 

There are two easy ways to capture images of your pressed flowers:

Once you’ve photographed or scanned your pressed botanicals, they can then be arranged in a photo editing program. I use Adobe® Photoshop® software, but you can also use free versions of online photo editors like PicMonkey or Canva. 

And now we play! I love using a photo editor to manipulate the images of my pressed flowers and foliage—adjusting the brightness/contrast, hue/saturation and sharpness. While you’ve likely photographed or scanned your flowers and leaves in groups, the photo editor allows you to separate them and arrange them in a million different ways. It’s also fun to alter the scale of the botanicals, shrinking or enlarging them beyond how they actually grow in the garden.

Rather than create a repeat pattern, I opted to lay out the entire image to be printed on Linen Cotton Canvas. This gives me the flexibility to arrange my flowers and foliage so that they appear to be growing from the short ends of the tea towel. This configuration makes your design especially charming when the tea towel is folded and hung over a bar or appliance handle in your kitchen. 

Once you’ve made your desired edits it’s time to upload your images to Spoonflower for printing. 

Spoonflower offers excellent design guidelines to help you navigate the technical aspects of formatting your design for a tea towel, including a downloadable template. Pay special attention to the helpful directions for uploading your design. 

Once you’ve uploaded your design to Spoonflower, you can order it as a tea towel.

Prefer to sew your own tea towel instead? Order your design as a fat quarter of Linen Cotton Canvas. When your fat quarter arrives, cut off the selvedge and hem each of the fabric edges and you’re done! (You can see how it’s done in this blog post.)

If you’d like to make your design available for sale on Spoonflower’s Marketplace, you’ll need to complete the seller verification and then proof the design before making it available for purchase. 

I love adding texture and color to Spoonflower textiles through the addition of embroidery—and it’s a simple, (but totally optional!) way of elevating your pressed botanical tea towel. This is your opportunity to select your own colors, favorite stitches and their placement. Trace the outlines of stems, add veining to leaves and introduce additional colors to petals! 

Trace the outlines of stems, add veining to leaves and introduce additional colors to petals! Truly, there’s also no right or wrong way of adding your embroidery embellishment, but let me give you a few pointers to set you up for success: