Stuff You Can't Have: Pounded Flower Textiles

Sunday, November 3, 2019

Pounded Flower Textiles

What better time than a trip to a friend's house in London to experiment with eco-dyeing with pounded flowers? I have tried this technique before, oblivious to lessons learned by those who have gone before, and the results were a miserable failure. That earlier experiment involved white T-shirts, lots of flowers, and vigorous pounding with rocks on a concrete surface. The result? Colorful torn T-shirts with ragged, gaping holes. They would have looked sort of punk except for all of the florals.

This time around I tapped into the expertise of a master. Check out Samorn at easternweft.com, who will brilliantly guide you through the basics. Key tips include wooden mallets and cardboard-covered surfaces. The results below are stage one in ongoing experimentation with use of these eco-textile florals as base materials for future creations.

In between visits to museums, galleries, and button vendors, I leisurely collected likely-looking flowers and leaves on lovely walks through the October rains.

Foraged flowers

The yard of 100% cotton I had brought with me was pre-died with what resulted in very faint, base colors using both regular Twining tea and a blend of Indian teas which included saffron, turmeric, and other spices. Here is the cloth drying above the Aga stove.

Drying cloth above the Aga

And below are the gorgeous results of the flower-pounding process. I left half of my creations with my host, who loaned me her solarium as an art studio during the stay. The other half are about to become something wondrous.

Stay tuned.

Click to enlarge

What flowers and leaves work? A large part of the fun is experimentation, and it would have been nice to have been scientifically methodical and keep track, but I didn't. You can see some gorgeous pansies above, and I vaguely remember begonias and fuchsias working well, but I had no idea what most of the flowers were to begin with.