- Decorations to make as a family
- Favorite seasonal recipes that are fun for children to help make (and eat)
- Ideas for celebrating the holidays together
- Suggested reading lists of children's picture books about the seasons and holidays The Artful Year is a fun and active resource for crafting and celebrating around the year
Terrariums are a vibrant, unique way to inject a little greenery into any home. In Tiny World Terrariums, authors Katy and Michelle of Brooklyn's celebrated Twig Terrariums offer step-by-step instructions for building your own, from selecting glass containers to layering soil and filtration to adding moss, succulents, and other plants. To give each terrarium a whimsical, personal touch, Katy and Michelle demonstrate how to use tiny figurines and toys to create to-scale scenes, such as a couple at their wedding, a CSI crime scene, and Central Park in springtime. Photos of gorgeous finished terrariums and detailed instructions will empower anyone--whether green-thumbed or not--to create their own Lilliputian worlds.
Praise for Tiny World Terrariums "Terrariums have been popular with adults since Victorian times. But Katy Maslow and Michelle Inciarrano, authors of Tiny World Terrariums, make a case for younger enthusiasts too . . . Their enclosed gardens range from sophisticated to silly, with dinosaurs, unicorns and an array of other figurines telling enchanting stories in mossy tableaux. Their wonderful book provides detailed instructions to guide you through the process." --Chicago Tribune " The authors] provide all the information needed to create the five layers of aterrarium . . . inspiration for readers who want to make their own mini world." --Better Homes & Gardens Country Gardens (Spring 2013 issue) "I've been reading my fair share of how-to books on terrariums] but I have a brand new favorite. Hands down . . . The tips on plant selection, preparation, and planting are the best I've seen (I learned a lot )." --Babble.com "The book provides all the necessary instructions to create successfully healthy terrariums . . . But illustrations are the real delight. They show all sorts of tiny world photos labeled with container types, plant names, and more so you can more easily create contained life exactly as you envision it." --Wired.com "If you love terrariums as much as we do, this is going to rock your world: Brooklyn-based Twig Terrariums will be selling a photographic collection of their finest miniature green gardens . . . with a step-by-step guide to creating tiny themed worlds that even the least green-thumbed person will be able to make and maintain." --Inhabitat.com
Thousands of natural materials can produce glorious color--the insect cochineal produces pink, maroon, and purple, and more than 500 species of plants produce indigo blue. Now, in The Modern Natural Dyer, expert Kristine Vejar shares the most user-friendly techniques for dyeing yarn, fabric, and finished goods at home with foraged and garden-raised dyestuffs as well as with convenient natural dye extracts. Demystifying the "magic," Vejar explains in explicit, easy-to-follow detail how to produce consistent, long-lasting color. With stunning photography of the dyes themselves, the dyeing process, and 20 projects for home and wardrobe (some to knit, some to sew, and some just a matter of submerging a finished piece in a prepared bath), The Modern Natural Dyer is a complete resource for aspiring and experienced dye artisans.
Give Your Home That Special Touch With Fresh Wild Flowers
In Foraged Flower Arranging, floral designer Rebekah Clark Moody shares more than 40 new ways to use the natural beauty of your backyard or neighborhood to enhance and brighten any room in your home. Foraging for local, wild plants is easy and free, allowing you to avoid the expensive, corporate cut-flower industry. Plus, it gets you and your family outside exploring nature together. Use these tutorials to craft commonly found blooms, branches and greens into a gorgeous arrangement that will breathe fresh life into your home. Adorn an end table or bookshelf with a sweet springtime arrangement of blooming dogwood and forsythia. Grace your dining table with a centerpiece dancing with honeysuckle. Or enhance your entryway with a large, stunning display of colorful autumn leaves and wild roses.
The tutorials show how to create each arrangement step by step, along with tips and advice on how to make the arrangements your own, regardless of where you live and what's available or not. With Foraged Flower Arranging you can have fun, inspire your creativity and wow your friends and family with gorgeous floral d cor all year long.
Truly exquisite designs, intricate details, and brilliant color schemes come together in this new DIY book on decorating eggs. This age-old craft is given new life through gemlike color dyes and beeswax. Design a simple two-color pattern, such as a snowflake or a Mexican stamp. Go traditional with a Ukrainian egg. You can even "quilt" on your eggs with a patchwork or appliqu design. Using dyes and beeswax, these eggs can be fanciful house decorations or fun gifts for family and friends. Chapters include basic decorating tips and how to choose your colors. With illustrated step-to-step instructions and a gallery of completed projects, you'll be creating your own dynamic eggs in no time at all. This book is perfect for crafters and painters of all skill level.
Create Beautiful Herbal Soaps The Safe, Easy & Fast Way
Feel good about pampering yourself with these artisanal soaps featuring natural botanicals, colorants and exfoliants. This comprehensive, beginner-friendly guide to melt-and-pour soapmaking from Jan Berry, author of Simple & Natural Soapmaking, includes 50 inspiring recipes plus design tutorials and a stunning natural colorant gallery. Her method is incredibly easy; all you need to do is melt your soap base, infuse it with healing herbs or flowers, add essential oils and natural colorants, and pour it into a beautiful mold. As soon as your soap is dry, it's ready to use
This method is a safe soapmaking technique that doesn't require handling lye. Plus, because it's so simple, many projects make for excellent family-friendly crafts. Kids will love helping out with simple soaps like Sunflower Sunshine Bars or playing with Aromatherapy Soap Dough. As you work through the projects, Jan leads you through a variety of techniques step by step. From simple herbal infusions in Wildflower Honey Soap to advanced methods of layering and swirling as in the Ocean Waves Soap, there's always another project to excite beginner and advanced soapmakers alike. Here, you'll find all the information and inspiration you need to make soaps that are gentle on your skin and fun to make
Expand your herbal product collection with these other books in Jan Berry's bestselling series:
- Simple & Natural Soapmaking
- The Big Book of Homemade Products for Your Skin, Health & Home (coming April 2020, available for pre-order now)
For the Jane Austen enthusiast, or quite simply all the "Janeites" out there, So Jane will help them bring all things Austen into their homes, be it decorating, gift giving, or entertaining.
With 30 craft ideas and 30 recipes organized into six chapters bearing the titles of Jane Austen's novels, enthusiasts can enjoy breakfast in Bath, via Northanger Abbey by creating Decorative Egg Cozies to keep their Soft-Boiled Eggs warm, or serve Honey-Lemon Teaspoons with Rose Petal Tea at the Middleton's of Sense and Sensibility. Enjoy a picnic that Emma would love to have shared with Mr. Knightly, or create an I Heart Mr. Darcy Pillow that all Elizabeth Bennett wannabes would love to cuddle up with.
Hollie Keith has had a passion for crafting beautiful things and reading classic literature since she was a child. She has worked as an editor for more than ten years and is editor-in-chief of LittleMissMarmalade.com, a blog dedicated to crafts, DIY, and surface pattern design. She lives with her family near Salt Lake City, Utah.
It's time to go back to basics If you're interested in art, but find that it's becoming an increasingly expensive hobby, The Organic Artist is just the book for you
The Organic Artist encourages you to return to those days when art was made with all-natural materials, like charcoal and birch bark. Immersing you in the natural world, The Organic Artist seeks to inspire creativity by connecting you to your organic roots.
In addition to offering a wide variety of suggestions for using nature as supplies for art, this book also introduces the concepts of awareness and perception that are foundational to the creative process. Readers will refine drawing skills, as well as increase their appreciation for the visual arts and the natural landscape.
Some of the projects and skills covered include the following: making paper and wild ink, working with soapstone, clay, wood, and rawhide, printmaking and stenciling, natural pigments and dyes, camouflage and body painting, and nature journaling.
Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes share a love of art and design, handmade pleasures, and a well-lived domestic life. Almost a decade ago, they began their first year-long project together, posting a photo from each of their mornings on their blog, 3191 Miles Apart, named for the distance between their homes in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon. 3191 Miles Apart quickly acquired a worldwide following of readers drawn in by the delicate intimacy of their shared experiences.
A Year Between Friends celebrates their most recent project together--a visual representation of 2015, month-by-month, side-by-side, but miles apart. In addition to 400 photographs recording their daily inspirations and creative undertakings and a foreword from New York Times bestselling author Molly Wizenberg, this unique collaboration expands on their prior work with over 25 handmade crafts and seasonal recipes, notes on simple living, and personal stories that follow the tide of a year filled with new life, change, and loss. It is an intimate joint portrait revealed through photographic snippets--mending a sweater, making a mobile from a cherished collection, creating fabric dyes from natural materials, baking scones--that defies distance through the celebration of shared moments of calmness, warmth, and family.
Both aspirational and down-to-earth, A Year Between Friends is an inspiring visual love letter to friendship and creativity, a timeless reminder to appreciate life one day at a time, to slow down, to cherish simplicity, and to make the extra effort to do things with care and with the people we love.
