If you haven’t tried this activity yet with your children, you are in for a treat!
Flower pounding has been a summertime crafting highlight in our household. Both of our girls ages 3 and 7 love this activity. Using natural pigments from the flowers to create a flower and leaf design onto the fabric is both entertaining and beautiful.
Experimenting with the natural colours from the flowers and watching them transfer into the fabric is a great science and STEM experiment too!
We enjoyed collecting wildflowers around the yard and seeing which ones work the best. For this blog post we mostly used purple wildflowers from an invasive weed that grows plentiful in our yard ~ the creeping bellflower. We also used a weed with yellow flowers that we found and some green leaves.
The great thing about this activity is that you don’t need many materials! You can use recycled fabric and all you need is a hammer, the rest you can find outside. We made a hammer using pieces of wood.
You can create all sorts of fabulous things with the fabric, especially if you are handy at sewing! We created this cute banner to hang up! We put coloured felt on the back of our flower fabric so that the colours would shine through onto the white fabric when the sun hits it.
The Materials you’ll need:
White fabric - we used hemp and cotton, you can also use white paper
Wildflowers or garden flowers (if you don’t mind smashing them)
A hammer. Use a smaller wooden or kid hammer for younger children, We made the one seen in the photos Using two pieces of cut yew branch.
Steps:
All made by Charlotte age 7
One:
Put a flower (or several) on top of a piece of white fabric or paper.
Two:
Place a second piece of fabric onto the first piece, sandwiching the flower in the middle. Note: the flower pigment will transfer onto both pieces of fabric.
Three:
Start to pound directly onto the flower with a hammer. For best results use the edge of the hammer‘s face. The edge helps release more pigment, but both will work. All of these were created by Charlotte age 7.
Four:
Stop hammering when you are happy with the results. Now peel back the first layer of fabric to see the results!
Five:
Some of the flower will be smushed onto the fabric, carefully peel away any flower remnants off of the fabric with your finger.
All finished!
Keep repeating this process until you have decorated your fabric with beautiful flower pigment! You can add as many flowers to the pieces of fabric as you want and pound all of it before you reveal the design, or do one at a time!
We cut our design out into triangles and sewed them onto coloured felt, then added some colour fabric binding to hang them altogether!
Have fun testing different flowers and see which ones give you the best results!
We hope you have fun creating beautiful fabric art using natural pigments of wildflowers! If you’d like to share your creations with us, feel free to tag us on Instagram @acorns.and.aprons, we love to see other people’s creations and feel inspired by them.
