Seaweed Sunday - Pressing Seaweed

If you are anything like us and are completely seaweed obsessed, you may want want to see seaweed in all it's beautiful glory. 

While diving underwater and seeing a kelp forest alive might be the ultimate seaweed(ers) dream, maybe the next best thing is seeing the seaweed pressed and displayed as incredible natural art.

Seaweed seems to be everywhere now (not just in the ocean!) but people are starting to wake up to the real possibilities and game changing solutions seaweed can provide, whether that's in food or replacing plastic for packaging.  All of which we will cover soon.

This Seaweed Sunday though, we want to focus on pressing seaweed.  We've all heard of flower pressing but did you know you can press seaweed and make your own beautiful artwork from it?

We are unsure when the first pressings of seaweed happened but this incredible article, in The Guardian, talks about how seaweed pressing made in the Victorian times can reveal about how our oceans have changed over time.

Read the full article here; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/27/what-victorian-era-seaweed-pressings-reveal-about-our-changing-seas

A brilliant modern day 'seaweeder' we have discovered recently, is Sarah who runs Seaside Moocher, a licensed seaweed collector based in West Sussex, who presses the seaweed, to create seriously beautiful natural art.

Follow Sarah's Instagram here;  https://www.instagram.com/seasidemoocher/

We've even recently had a go ourselves, collecting various bits of seaweed washed up on several Anglesey beaches. 

We dried out at the caravan, and placed onto watercolour paper, layered up with grease proof paper and weighted down with  some very heavy old breeze blocks and have left to dry. 

The results we will reveal soon. If all goes well, our plan is to use some of the pressings as designs on our new UK made T-shirts containing seaweed, which will also include seaweed artwork on the front!