Please Help Me Decide What To Make

Good morning, all! I hope you had a fantastic weekend! Last night I started working on a project that I thought would be quick and easy. I started at about 6:00pm, and at 12:30am I was still working. By the time I went to bed at 1:00am, this is what I had…

Can you tell what my flowers are made of? If not, I’m going to keep you in suspense for just a bit longer. 🙂 (Edit: Ha! I just realized I put it in the subtitle of the post. Oh well. Pretend you didn’t see that, and pretend to be utterly amazed when I tell you later in the post what they’re made of, mmmmkay?) 😀

Here’s how this project evolved…

I’ve been inspired lately by a couple of different products I’ve seen online. The first one was this frame from Pier 1.

Shortly after seeing that frame, I saw this art piece from Joss & Main.

Each of those are described as made of “shells”, but when I saw each of them, I thought to myself that they looked an awful lot like pistachio shells.

It just so happens that pistachios are one of my absolute favorite snacks, so I started saving up my shells.

So last night, I decided to get them out and make something quick and easy with my shells. I wanted to make some sort of artwork that included one brightly painted flower on an interesting background. I felt inspired by this felt flower wall hanging from an Etsy store called BedBuggs.

My first flower only took minutes to make, but I still had loads of pistachio shells left, and I really wanted to use most, if not all, of my shells. So I decided to change course and make as many flowers as I could. Also, the more flowers I made, the more I fell in love with the natural color of the shells. I couldn’t bear the thought of covering up that beautiful natural color with all of the subtle color variances with a single color spray paint.

But then a brilliant reader on the A2D Facebook page suggested dying the flowers. (Thanks, Mary!!)  Since I still had quite a bit of fabric dye left over from this art project, I decided to get them out and give it a try.  I used four different colors, and left the flowers in varying lengths of time to try to get different shades of the colors.  It worked beautifully!  It gave the flowers color without covering up all of the natural beauty of the shells.

So now the question is…what should I do with them? When I’m finished making flowers, I should have about double the amount you see in that picture. I thought about making something inspired by this living succulent artwork from BHG.

I was set until two people on Facebook mentioned making a wreath out of them. I think that would be really pretty, too!

So what would you do with dyed pistachio shell flowers? Tell me your creative ideas! I’ll wait and see what brilliant ideas you have, and hopefully have the finished project tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve got more flowers to make and dye! 🙂

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