The Fine Art of Flower Pounding

Hi, I'm John Fisher from the LifeLab Garden Classroom. And today I'm going to share an activity from the book of gardening projects for kids called the Fine Art of Flower Pounding. So what we mean by flower pounding is taking the colors out of the flower petals and pressing them into our paper. You can make bookmarks, greeting cards, and such. So the first thing to do is to take your piece of tape and take some of the stickiness or the tackiness off of the tape. What are you doing? Getting a tack. How many times are you doing it? Ten. The next step is to arrange your flower petals on the paper. You can choose to put your petals on the tape. Composite flowers like these calendula that have lots of petals are a great choice. And these nasturtiums seem to make a lot of color. It sometimes helps to put your bookmark on something like a paperback book or a phone book. It dampens the noise as you pound. Halfway through you can check to see if the colors came through. Ooh, that nasturtium did a real good job. Finish it off by adding a hole and some decorative string like yarn or raffia. And you got yourself a quick and easy flower print bookmark.