Large grasses and sunflowers 1

This striking baby taught me two big lessons. In full-size dried florals I often use floral preservative to keep the flowers a bit protected. When this beauty was finished and photographed, I noticed that because the hand-painted sunflowers stand out from the grasses, they were a little vulnerable, so I thought I'd spray them with preservative.

Big mistake. At large scales, either you don't notice, or what happened next doesn't happen: the tiny flowers curled up and turned into something that resembled shrivelled buds. Ruined wreath. I tried washing the stuff off, pressing the flowers back into shape, etc. to almost no avail. They're open again but still shrivelled and odd, so this fall wreath gets to stay at home now. I couldn't put it up for sale.

Two lessons:

If you want to try preservative on your flowers, do it on ones that you have *not* made into anything yet;

Preservative is probably not the answer for tiny flowers. Ah, well.