Tag: dye techniques

Behold, the destruction by smashing of a lovely wisteria flower spray, all of the sake of art.  Here is the flower cluster before its demise, I auditioned the placement of it among the impressions of pink dogwoods.

Next, I plucked each floret from the main stem and placed them on my fabric to re-create the arc of the flower cluster as it had danced in the spring breeze on its parent vine.

Finally, the flower, post-pounding.  It created a watercolor paint look, I just hope the blue and purple tones don’t turn brown as it dries.

Next week, will I have an 8 X 10″ piece finished?  Check back to find out if I stuck to that goal, or distracted myself with something else!

Sadly, I still have not have any success in completing an 8 X 10″ quilt in a week.  I am so easily distracted, and I almost always have to set a piece aside for a while while I think about what I need to do with it.  The whole point of a mini quilt a week is to train myself to think and work faster.  Ironically, that training will take more time!

Meanwhile, I might be inching closer to some quick small pieces to finish.  Now that spring flowers are popping open in great abundance, I have been playing with flower pounding.  Using fabric treated with soda ash and alum, I am literally hammering flowers and leaves onto the fabric, releasing the pigments into the fibers for an interesting variant on dyeing.

Here are the pink magnolias that resulted in the lovely four-petal flowers in the above image:

This is the thistle-like flower that made the print in the lower right of the first image:

Not all flowers made good candidates for this technique.  As you can see from my little test piece of fabric (lower right), some of my favorite flowers, lilacs and violets were terrible.  The fern leaf was promising, I will try that again.  This is the best of two worlds that mean so much to me, my gardens and creating art.  Of course, some of my art prior to trying flower pounding has been inspired by my garden and wild flora, but this truly combines the two.

There is a book dedicated to the technique, Flower Pounding by Ann Frischkorn and Amy Sandrin (C&T Publishing, 2000).  I have one very big problem with the book – the authors failed to include a crucial discussion of the ethics of plant collection.  Make sure that you are not picking rare or endangered plants, for every one flower you pick, leave at least 10 untouched, do not collect from state or national parks, and make sure you have permission for other properties.

Check back tomorrow for a progress report on my flowers.