Difficulty level: Beginner
Time required: 15 minutes, plus 2 hours for preparing fabric
Age range: 5 and up
Things you’ll need:
Tote
Fresh flowers from the yard
Floral snips or scissors
Iron
Cutting board
Towel
Alum powder
Scrap cardboard (to fit inside bag)
Painter’s tape
Wax paper
Hammer or rubber mallet
Things to do:
- Soak the tote in hot water mixed with alum (about 3 tbsp per liter of water) for about 2 hours. Air dry the tote.
- While the bag soaks, gather your flowers. Flat flowers work best, as full blooms can just look like a blob of color when they are pounded.
- Using floral snips or scissors, remove stems from the flowers. Some flowers will pop right off the stems, so you may not need to cut all of them. Remove any parts of the flower that will not lay flat.
- Iron the tote to remove any wrinkles.
- Set up your workspace by first placing a towel on the table. Place a cutting board on top of the towel, then place the tote on the very top. Place a piece of scrap cardboard inside the tote so that the flowers do not soak through to the other side.
- Begin placing flowers on the tote. We placed the larger flowers first.
- Fill in around the larger flowers with small flowers until you are happy with your design.
- Place painter’s tape over each flower to secure it.
- Place a piece of wax paper over the flowers, then tape the wax paper on four sides to secure it.
- Using a hammer or mallet, hammer the flowers. The more you hammer, the brighter the color will be. You may want to go over some flowers more than once.
- Peel away the wax paper, then peel away each flower. You may have some flower residue on the tote, but that’s ok.
- Set the design by ironing over it.
