One weekend day, armed with a hammer and a pair of scissors, I wandered through my mother's garden snipping here and snipping there as I went. There was an occasional cry of "No, not that one!" from my mother, but I was able to harvest a good number of flowers and leaves in various colors for my foray into the world of Flower Pounding.

You may be wondering what in the world "Flower Pounding" is. Put simply, it is the process of transferring plant pigments to specially treated fabric via pounding with a hammer to create floral imagery reminiscent of water color painting. When I read through the book Flower Pounding: Quilt Projects for All Ages, I was amazed at the beautiful projects within and wanted one for my very own. What you see below is the result of my first experimentation. I haven't yet had time to put a border on it and quilt it, but I will be doing so in the near future. I ended up doing a meadow scene because during my testing of various plants and flowers, I fell in love with the impression made by a fern and made that the focus of the picture.

It is hard to know by looking at the flowers and leaves how they will turn out once they have been pounded, so it is important to do a test run first. The book has a wonderful alphabetic index of common garden flowers in the back and all of the gallery photographs list the flowers used in the projects for reference which I found to be very helpful. I was limited in my flower selection because here in the southwest we are at the end of the blooming season. Successive days of hundred degree plus temperatures tend to do that to flowers. Some of my favorites were the smaller, more delicate flowers such as purple verbena, red starflower and lantana. I also had success with petunias and pansies. I was particularly pleased with the clear green tones yielded by the leaves of the mesquite tree (these are what I used for the blades of grass in my meadow scene). The way I looked at it, if it was growing and had color, it was taped and pounded.

The book takes you step by step through the fabric treatment process which is easily done using alum and washing soda, both obtainable at your local grocery store. If you don't want to bother with treating your own fabric, you can purchase it by the yard and half yard at the Flower Pounding website.

Along with detailed visual instructions for every step of the process from fabric treatment through pounding to completion with outlining, there are numerous photographs in the book of scenes created by the authors, Ann Frischkorn and Amy Sandrin. They have also included instructions for nine projects complete with quilting how-tos and templates to get you started. And, lest you think that this a project limited to the spring flower season, there are examples using fall flowers as well as poinsettias. I can't wait until December when the poinsettias are available.

Due to the fragile nature of the plant pigments, you will not be able to wash your pounded items and while it does state in the book that they are not able to be dry-cleaned either, the authors have conveyed to me that the items can indeed be dry cleaned. And, if you are looking for permanence, you can use a color copy method to transfer the images to color-fast fabric as suggested to me by Ann Frischkorn.

The authors glibly suggest that once you try flower pounding, you will never look at flowers the same. I must say that they are right in this assessment. Just the other day, I was at Costco and I eyeballed the fresh flower bouquets as I walked by. But, I was not thinking how pretty they were, no, I was wondering how they would look pounded!

Try it and see if you don't start thinking the same way!

Flower Pounding: Quilt Projects for All Ages