Pomegranates and Pistachios - a Visual Feast?

Here are 2 little bits from my Playing With Paint class (Quilt U, Lyric Kinard). The assignment was printing with fruits & vegetables, so I dutifully made a nice vegetable soup and carefully saved various stumps & interesting little pieces and set them aside to dry. Next day, they're nowhere to be found - my dear sainted husband had foolishly considered them compost, and off they went to enrich my garden. Hmmmm, there's a song in there somewhere - no, wait, it's already been done, perhaps by Pete Seeger...And I know, I know, how much complaining can you do when the man is tidying up the kitchen, eh?

Anyway, not being in the mood to embark on any further cooking when I was in printing mode (what, again with the dinner? I don't think so!), I was left with a dried out old pomegranate and some pistachio shells to print with. The base fabric is some previously hand-dyed cotton that was loitering around in the vicinity of my desk. I used at least 2 closely-related colors to print with, one of them a "shimmer", but you can't see that in these pictures. The purple "smudges" in the green piece are very fine prints of a shell I found in the Bahamas - they show up very well in person; I guess this is a crappy low-res scan. Also better in the flesh: the repeated but barely visible print suggesting wild grasses that I mad a long time ago by glueing some leftover slivers of fun foam on a piece of box cardboard.

And then, because everything looks better with a little sparkle, I whisked a little "shimmering pearl" and/or some very diluted metallic gold hither and yon over the whole thing.

I have to admit to loving the little pistachio shell prints - so clean, so shapely, so available, so free of any preparation other than eating them! I predict that they will be making future appreances in my work. And I learned something useful about pomegranates, too: even when they appear to be all dried up past edibility, the seeds inside remain juicy and fully, edibly, tasty. Handy to know, huh?