Pounded Flowers - A Tutorial

I've posted several cards made with pounded flowers, so thought I'd make up a little tutorial. First off, gather your supplies: a hammer (standard or ballpeen), cardstock, flower(s), and some sort of cover sheet (I'm using wax paper, but plain newsprint or lightweight copy paper would be fine). You'll want to work on a hard, fairly smooth surface. Sidewalks are great as long as they aren't too bumpy. A large piece of wood would also work well.

Next, place your flower wherever you'd like it on the cardstock, then cover it. Hint: If the flower has a lot of petals, you may want to pull a few off just to avoid too much juicy splatter. I removed about half from the flower you see here.

Now for the fun part - start pounding! You can sort of see what's happening if you're using wax paper, so can get a sense of where you may need to pound a bit more.

And you're all done! Pull back the cover sheet to admire the results. You'll need to pick off the flower bits, and be careful not to smear it around too much on the cardstock.

It's a lot of fun to experiment with different flowers and see what colors emerge. These flowers are a very reddish purple, but the pounded images are much more blue toned. You can also arrange smaller flowers to make fancy edges or wreaths, as I did here and here.

So here's my finished card. You'll need a good quality adhesive to use with the finished product, as the cardstock will warp due to the moisture. For this card, I mounted the panel to Always Artichoke (both embellished with the Corner Ticket punch), stamped a sentiment (Hero Arts), and added a bit of ribbon (SU). The finished card is 5x7, and the printed paper is by DCWV (Old World Stack).