Green Hour Challenge #14 - Pressing Flowers

For our Nature Walk today we actually decided to take to take a different route. This morning we went down a street in our neighborhood we haven't ever been down before. At first the flowers seemed all about the same as what we usually see. But a few houses had some new flowers to look closely at. We found one house with Wisteria hanging about the doorway. Another house had a bunch of different cactus plants in the yard and some big white flowers interspersed among them. Some thing to look up! The kids loved finding the faces in the pansies too.

I brought along a little notebook to collect flowers to press. Pressing flowers was the challenge for the week. I usually don't let my kids pick the flowers that are in people's yards. They sometimes get away with flowers in the sections between the sidewalk and the street. But most of the flowers we look at are in our neighbor's yards so don't belong to us. But today I let them pick a few that I thought we could get away with. We brought them home to press.

First I showed the kids some flowers I had collected last week (Shortly after reading what our challenge would be) and had pressed in a phone book for a while.

We compared what the flowers looked like before pressing and after.

These composite flowers don't press really well. I really don't know much about how to arrange them.
Here is what we brought home from this trip. We will look at them again in a week or two and see how they all turned out.

Sophie didn't want to draw this time. She said the challenge was to press flowers not draw so she didn't take her sketch book with her and wasn't interested in it after our walk. I think lunch was on all of our minds when we got home.