What to Do With Leftover Roses & Petals

My birthday was this week, and a friend gave me a dozen stunning red roses that morning.  They looked gorgeous and smelled divine, but after a few days, I wondered (as I often do) how I can utilize them in the best possible way.

Some people say that if you want to preserve them, you can hang them upside down to preserve the color while they dry.  I've tried that before.  While the color of the petals does fade into a more dead-looking color, it's usually a deep pretty brownish-purple.  However, the leaves all stuck right up and looked stupid whenever I did it.  So next time I decide to try that, I'll figure out a way to keep those leaves from looking like they got stuck in an electrical socket.

One of my favorite things to do with roses is to make homemade potpourri, and of course, I love using my homemade incense recipe.   But this time... I have a few other tricks up my sleeves, so keep coming back and checking up on my developments. ;)

With this batch so far, I've begun preparing the roses for use in crafts.  First, I took off the rubber bands and saved them for another use.  Floral rubber bands are awesome, by the way; they're very strong, and usually you get a couple of different sizes in each bouquet.

My next step was to separate the roses from their petals.  I put the petals of eleven roses into my metal mixing bowl, and pressed the petals from the twelfth rose into the pages of an absolutely terrible hardback book (Here Kitty Kitty by Jardine Libaire).  Some of the random leaves were pressed into Make Your Own Luck: 12 Practical Steps to Taking Smarter Risks in Business.

I'm going to be washing the petals in the bowl.  They need to be as clean as possible for a cooking project that I'll be doing.  And the stuff in the book will probably be used to accent something that I want to frame, so we'll see how it goes!