Quick and Easy Pressed Flower Candles

These candles are super quick and easy, and make great gifts for people.

To look at them, you'd think that they take a lot of skills and patience - pressing flowers for weeks then painstakingly positioning them in moulds, before carefully finishing them with wax to create a candle...

In actual fact, they take about ten minutes each from start to finish. We won't tell if you don't!

You will need:

• Pillar candles - we bought ours inexpensively from Ikea
• Flowers - wild or from the garden
• Absorbent paper or kitchen towels
• An iron
• Wax paper
• Hot air gun

First, you need to pick some flowers. We picked a random selection from the garden. We found that delicate flowers work the best, and that bright colours are better than pale ones, with white flowers worst of all. But have some fun experimenting with different ones!

Once you have chosen and picked some flowers, lay them out on several layers of kitchen towel or absorbent paper. Try and arrange flowers so that the flower will face outwards when pressed - we found it easiest to arrange the flower head face down rather than face up. Once you have done that, cover your flowers with several more layers of kitchen towel or absorbent paper.

Instead of pressing our flowers for several weeks, we are speeding the process up by ironing them!

You need to ensure that the steam function of your iron is switched off entirely, and that the heat is set low. Don't move the iron backwards and forwards as though you were ironing cloths - just hold the iron in one place, moving it every thirty seconds or so. You can peel back the layers of paper to peek and iron for longer if necessary. When the flowers are dry and slightly crispy, they are ready. Peel back the paper and carefully remove the flowers from the absorbent paper - they may stick slightly, but should remove undamaged if you are careful.

Once you have your flowers, it is time to stick them to the candle. Cut a length of wax paper to slightly shorter than the height of your candle and about 50% longer than its circumference. Arrange the flowers on the wax paper, than wrap the paper tightly around the candle, holding by the long tails of the paper so that the pressed flowers sit tightly against the candle. Using a hot air gun, heat the wax paper, working quickly and keeping the gun moving at all times, the aim is to heat the wax paper so it melts, encapsulating the flowers against the candle, but without melting the candle itself.

Once you have done that, you can remove the wax paper and reveal the candle underneath! I hope you like them!