Flower Pounding a Mother's Day Gift

We are still perfecting the technique of flower pounding here. When the fabric gets wet the colors bleed. Since vinegar doesn't work to set it and it's too late to pre-treat the fabric like another advised to do we are going to try painting over the design with a clear fabric medium and if that fails we'll simply make a Mother's Day card instead of a pillow so the finished item won't ever need to even be laundered.

Anyhow we're using violets and the wild strawberries little yellow flowers for our project. We ripped a white sheet into squares to fit a 14" pillow form.

You simply lay the whole flowers or individual petals down into any design you like face up onto tape then turn that over and tape it where you want to pound it into the fabric. Turn the fabric over and pound with a rubber mallet or hammer or a judge's gavel like we did until you get the result you want. Peel off the tape and scrape off any bits of flowers remaining with a butter knife, credit card or your fingernail.

We used the entire yellow flowers and single violet petals to spell out "MOM".

We'll post pictures of the end result.





And meanwhile we have several other craft projects in the works. I found an outdated sweatshirt still brightly colored with a cute transfer on it and turned it into this pillow.




The design reads:

Potion of
Wine & Roses
for Love

Take three roses: white, pink and red.
Wear them next to your heart for three days.
Steep them in wine for three days more
and strain the wine into a goblet
and give it to your hearts desire.
When he drinks, he will be forever yours.
Ancient Love Potion

We don't believe in potions and spells of course but it's an amusing thought.

To make this pillow I simply cut a square adding enough length around the design for the fringe edging. I sewed it right sides out around the design leaving room to cut the fringe. We even used a rotatary cutter to dice the remainder of the sweatshirt to use as the stuffing and only had to use a very small amount of fiberfill to make it fluffy enough and finished sewing it closed. The last step was to cut the fringe.

Voila! It was just too easy and everyone here is fighting over it.

It's soft and the perfect size for traveling. It fits behind the back for just the right amount of support. It would make another great Mother's Day gift. And besides all these usefullnesses (is that a word?) it's just too cute.