Preserve Flowers in Shadow Box

I love flowers. I love them as decoration. I love them in fabric prints. I love paper flowers, fake, and real. Most of all I love receiving flowers as a gift.

The flowers that Kevin bought me for Valentines day happened to be the first flowers that I had received from him. They were absolutely gorgeous and I decided to dry them. Months later, as I moved out of my house at IU I realized I had no clue what to do with a bunch of dried roses.

Luckily I am absolutely addicted to pinterest and happened to run across this beautiful shadow box display that inspired my creation. See Brooke's crafty idea HERE!! Check it out, I absolutely love the simplicity of it, yet it is still so unique.

So I immediately set out to find the perfect shadow boxes. I found a couple that I loved but decided to spray paint them to match the colors in my bedroom. I absolutely love the ridges around the frame but decided a grayish/silver tone would be a much more suitable accent.

First I (excessively) taped off the front glass in the shadowbox. (I tend to be extraordinarily messy, even when attempting to limit the mess so I decided to cover every inch than have essentially a guarantee that I would have to scrape paint off of the glass).

This is what the backing looked like... 

So I obviously needed to cover that up... I bought a couple sheets of scrapbooking paper at Hobby Lobby to cover it up. I simply glued it on top of the backing for the shadow box. 

I carefully cut off the stems of my roses. Some were fairly fragile so I actually dabbed some glue in between the petals to try to make sure they wouldn't fall apart. 

My pile of stems looked kind of cool - now I want to find a craft to do with the stems!

I didn't take any pictures of the process of glueing the roses down because I was too wrapped up in it but it is fairly easy. I started out by trying to calculate everything. I drew a heart on another piece of paper and use it as a form. I quickly became aggravated with that and just started free forming my heart. I started at the bottom in order to get the shape as close to a V as possible. 

I used hot glue to secure the roses to the scrapbooking paper.

 I also decided to make mine a little more personal... "You're stuck with me" is obviously a statement of our love for each other (or something I remind Kevin when I'm being annoying...) Here is a picture of the final product!!

 I also made a shadow box to keep various momentos from our activities together. Check out that diy here!!!

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