Artist tools: ballpeen hammer, heavy rolling pin.

 Remember those flowers neighbors were giving me and I was saving in the freezer?  They were in play this morning.

This episode was triggered this morning by a leaf suddenly falling off my staghorn fern, a rescue years ago from an owner who wasn't up to it.

So the gardener in me said too bad, and the artist said whoa, a candidate for hammering.

And proceeded to find a piece of fabric to hammer the color from the leaf and other petals and leaves into it .

I came up with a lovely piece of linen which I shibori dyed years ago with black walnut dye from nearby trees.

Set the leaf in place and proceeded. You can cover the leaves and petals with another cloth and hammer through the lot. In fact if you have some nice cotton lawn, you can get the color going on the base fabric and the top one at once.

I added local red rose petals, daffodil heads, lily petals and my favorite Japanese maple leaves. All the plant material is from a radius of about fifty yards of here. A local habitation as Will might have said, but in a different context.

The rolling pin helps secure the plants down by squashing out some liquid. Then the hammer transfers color and shapes. I love hammering, you can work off a lot of irritation that way.

The skills required are minimal if you can refrain from hitting the hammer on the thumb in your excitement. It's better for older kids for that reason, too.

And it's lovely. This piece needs to dry and be pressed before I decide what its function, if any, will be. The fastness of the dye depends on the flowers and leaves you use. So this is not really a washable item, more of an artwork. And the colors that emerge are sometimes surprisingly different from the visible color of the petals.

So, a casual glance at the upstairs plants, and I'm suddenly in a frenzy of searching and hammering. My neighbor is renovating his kitchen, unlikely to be disturbed.

I've made many artworks involving the ballpeen hammer, just the right weight for me, from flowers to metal beating ( peening, its original purpose) to handmade paper thumping.

The foliage I used has now given up most of its pigment, but is back in the freezer for future papermaking, since its fibers are intact.

And the board I was hammering on picked up some design and a few new dents

I had intended to get on knitting my new doll, after using yarn I'd spun and plied for the boots

 what can I say, I'm a hapless prawn of fate.