Upon starting my internship for Lacie, one project she was determined for us to do was to organize her studio closet. She opened her closet, the “holy grail” of flower preservation, and showed me the problem. She had SO much stuff. Over the years her Framed Florals supplies had collected to a mountain of pressed flowers, frames, tools, and other materials necessary for her unique framing process.

It is quite the collection! Her studio space is squeaky clean and organized, but it seemed that everything that needed storage was thrown into the closet with no real clear method of organization. Luckily, (despite what one may think when looking at my apartment) I love to organize! So I was excited to conquer this project.

Before, Lacie had her large collection of flowers organized in ziploc bags with the flowers in between pieces of paper and cardboard, which kept them flat in an airtight space. Keeping pressed flowers in an airtight space is important because it helps to preserve color and shape. She then would label the bags and put them into large clear bins, open opaque bins, or wherever they would fit. She also used a couple of white airtight bins for loose flowers. This was a step in the right direction but still not great because you couldn’t see what was in them without pulling them all out and taking off the lid. Lacie’s method of organization was effective, but not convenient when trying to quickly locate a certain type of flower.

First we needed to brainstorm how we were going to organize the flower collection. I made a board on Pinterest to collect ideas about airtight solutions (click here to view the board). This part of the process was more difficult than you would think. There are no containers specifically made for pressed flower organization, so we had to keep an open mind and work with what containers were on the market. We found some containers we liked on containterstore.com and ordered a bunch of large flat containers for bigger plants/flowers, and a couple of smaller ones for petals/smaller flowers.

Once the containers arrived, so did the tedious part. We took out all of the ziploc bag from the closet and then one by one sorted through the layers of pressed flowers. We separated the different flowers into the containers that we purchased using tweezers so that we didn’t break the petals. At first we were just going to organize by color, but once we realized that there were some colors that were overflowing, we started to separate those containers by type of flower/plant. We had mostly containers organized by color, some by size, and a few with specific types of flowers/plants.

After several hours of sorting out the ziploc bags we finally had our containers sorted out (kind of looks like food right?)

We stacked the containers away into the closet and admired our hard work. With these translucent bins it is way easier to find what flowers we need. Plus the closet looks so much better!

I tested out our flower organization method by creating some compositions on Lacie’s homemade plaster styling board. With the organized containers it was super easy to sift through and find what colors, sizes and types of flowers I was looking for.

Framed Florals Pressed Flowers // Organization