Flower Pounding - Fabric Dying Technique

The art of pounding flowers to dye fabric was used by Cherokee women and has been rediscovered by Ann Frischkorn and Amy Sandrin. Their book, Flower Pounding: Quilt Projects for All Ages provides clear and succinct instructions, so I will not rehash everything they say. What I will do is to give you a few pointers that I learned and share a lot of photos of my experience with flower pounding.

Simply put, flower pounding entails placing flowers on fabric, taping them down and then pounding the flower with a hammer to dye the fabric with the flower's juices.

Tips:

• Be careful when taping close to the edge of the fabric. When you pull the tape you may cause the fabric to pull and fray.
• Start pounding in the center of the flower and work your way out. This keeps the shape of the petals and preserves the lighter centers.
• Pound the background petals and leaves first and then do the foreground. This give a nice dimension to the arrangement.
• Have a paper towel handy. Wipe the hammer head when you start to see frequent runs while pounding. Small runs will not show through, but the wetter the hammer head becomes, the more they show through.
• When you iron to set the flower dye, be prepared for a horrible smell. It is like moldy leaves. Maybe different flowers produce a different smell and I just picked the wrong ones.
• Dark fabrics and light colored flowers do not turn out very well. They just look like stains on the fabric.

The bad thing about this method is that the colors easily fade, so I did not want to put too much time into a wall hanging that is not going to last. Ann and Amy state in their book that direct sunlight and washing will cause the colors to fade. I am hanging my quilt where it will get occasional sunlight. I'll update to let you know how the colors hold up.


One thing that I did differently then what Ann and Amy recommended was how I outlined the flowers. They recommend using Perma pens and drawing outlines. I chose to use freestyle quilting with variegated thread. I think the effect worked well. It also gave me more practice using the freestyle quilting method. Not back for only a second attempt.

This was a fun technique and was great to do with my daughter. She had a great time.

If you cannot find the book for the instructions, they are also available online at http://www.hgtv.com/crafting/flower-pounding/index.html