Flower Pounding?

It's not easy to see this, but this is an example of "flower pounding". It's something new we're experimenting with quilting. You take fabric that is "pfd" or prepared for dying, which means it will take a dye easily. Then you find a fresh, juicy flower or piece of greenery. You pull the flower apart, petal by petal and spread it out on the fabric, tape it down with masking tape, lay it on a hard piece of wood, and pound the juice out of it. When you pull the tape up, there is an image on the fabric. Usually it's quite smudged, so it helps to outline the image with permanent fine line marker.

The colors can surprise you. One flower we used is orange, but pounds out to be dark pink and is very pretty. I "created" a bouquet on the right and a Christmas wreath on the left. The wreath was made using fuzzy little sprigs off a flower stem and I added the orange/pink flower as accents. These blocks cannot be washed so they can't exactly be used in a quilt so I'll frame these. It may seem like a complete waste of time and flowers. But it was fun to create the arrangement.