SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) – Flowers are often a way to help you celebrate a special occasion like a birthday or wedding. For weeks you can look at them on your kitchen table and remember that moment. But they don’t last forever. Now a Sioux Falls artist is helping keep those memories alive.

For Lexi Erikson, flowers are much more than plants, they’re works of art.

She uses them every day in her business, Trykket Flowers.

Erikson started preserving flowers after she wanted to save her own floral decor from her wedding.

“I kind of looked through the different methods and found that pressing was the one that I liked the most and once I started figuring out how to do it, getting back at it, I thought ‘oh this is something that I need to offer,’ this is a service that would be beneficial in the area,” artist, Trykket Flowers, Lexi Erikson said.

That was about two years ago. After online classes and trial and error, she’s figured out how to perfect these pressed floral arrangements.

“Roses are really fun to work with because they can be pressed in multiple ways, you can open them up so you have a round disk, or you can cut them in half and have a profile, or disassemble and have the petals,” Erikson said.

While she says she does a lot of arrangements from wedding bouquets, she can do any bouquet you want.

That’s what led Dominique Boadwine to Trykket Flowers.

“At the time, I had just started as an OB/GYN and I was trying to decorate my clinic and I really wanted to use artwork, I was a fine arts minor, and using local artists to decorate my exam room was something I desired to do,” customer, Dominique Boadwine said.

So Boadwine and her family headed to a flower farm near Elk Point to not only pick flowers, but create a memory.

“My husband and my three kids and I went to Fleurish and picked our own flowers and we made our own arrangement,” Boadwine said.

Erikson took that bouquet and created this arrangement, which will now hang at Boadwine’s office.

“I thought what a good way to display this memory on the wall,” Boadwine said.

So how does a bouquet turn into a piece of art? Erikson says it takes time.

“Once I receive them I will disassemble the bouquet, get them into my presses, which they’re layered between paper cardboard so that can kind of soak out the moisture from the flowers, the whole drying process can take as little as a few weeks depending on the flowers or even as much as six weeks if they are very wet,” Erikson said.

She will get final approval from the customer before gluing down the flowers and putting it in a frame.

“The flowers are fragile, so I can’t just toss them on because I don’t want to break them, I want to make sure that I’m balancing colors as well as the size with the textures so I do put a lot of thought into the actual design of the arrangement,” Erikson said.

It’s a time consuming process, but worth it.

“It is really fun to hear feedback from people and how excited they are, like ‘oh my gosh, these are my flowers, these are the flowers from my wedding day,’ so it’s really neat to know that other people are appreciating it,” Erikson said.

Helping keep memories alive one flower at a time.

“What’s really cool about saving the bouquet is that’s the physical reminder of that special event and so not only can that transport back to the event it’s from, you still have it and you get to look at it,” Erikson said.

Erikson says she is not able to preserve dried flowers. She says fresh flowers are best, usually from within three days of an event, before they start browning.