The typical way to collect plant specimens is to press them and dry them in a 12" x 18" plant press (relatively easy to build-- there are instructions available online) and then mount them to standard-sized acid-free paper with glue, and also include a label with the ID, GPS coordinates, etc. This is a lot of work, though, and takes a lot of space. If there is a herbarium near you (probably at a university), you might get in touch with them and see if they’d let you go collecting with one of their botanists, teach you how to make really good specimens, possibly let you use some of their equipment (like a plant drier), and then let you donate the specimens once you’d learned the plants to your satisfaction. If you did that, you could store your specimens unmounted in newspaper while you were using them, and then let the herbarium take care of mounting them and providing long term storage.
For a less troublesome approach, many people use a smaller press and just laminate or tape their pressed specimens to heavy 8.5"x11" paper (maybe card stock?). This would let you have a personal reference collection to work with, but the specimens probably won’t end up being of a quality that would later make them desirable collections for a museum or university.
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