Continuation of Drying of Flowers

January 24-25, 2015

Originally I planned to leave both orchids in the silica gel for only 5 days, but once I checked the flowers after 5 days, the petals still had moisture in it. Since the flowers required more time in the silica gel I left it for one more day.

These are how the flowers looked like after 6 days in the silica gel.

I then started the process of coating the flowers with silica gel by measuring 0.5ml of both the resin and the hardener. I mixed it for about 2 minutes and let it stand for 5 minutes to get rid of excess bubbles.

I then used a brush to paint the resin all over the flower. Once I was done coating both flowers I left it overnight and painted a second coat of resin the next day.

The white flower seems like it was fully dry since the petals were not drooping and seemed to stand on its own, though the purple orchid’s petals were drooping, showing that there may have been moisture present in the flower. I decided to still coat the purple flower thinking that the resin would cause it to harden, therefore making the petals stand, though I found it a challenge to paint the petals since they were very fragile. In my next batch of flowers I plan to dry as much flowers as possible, hopefully at least 10 flowers. I also plan to make sure they are completely dry to help make the process of coating them with resin an easier task.

I would also like to give an update on my last experiment, in which I coated a fresh flower with resin instead of drying it first. In this experiment I thought that if I coated a lot of layers of resin on the flower the flower would remain preserved and not wilt, though my results show that even with multiple layers the flower will wilt within the resin.

Here is how the flower from my last experiment looks

 As you can see the flower is already beginning to turn brown, showing the importance of drying the flowers before coating with resin. I expect that within the week the entire flower will turn brown.