Home and Garden

Ideas For DIY

Book Review and Giveaway: Woodland Style

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You’ll find this fabulous fern kitchen backsplash is featured in the delicious book, Woodland Style: Ideas and Projects for Bringing Foraged and Found Elements Into Your Home. It is chock full of fabulous ideas for your home using responsibly collected bits of nature. It doesn’t matter if you live in an apartment in the middle of the city, or in a rustic cabin on the side of a mountain, your home can be accented with touches of the great outdoors.

Artist and author Marlene Hurley Marshall shares numerous projects using pine cones, tree bark, acorns, twigs, moss, and river rocks, and shows you how to turn them into everything from a miniature terrarium to functional pieces of furniture. This bark vase is a prime example of how she brings the lusciousness of the outdoors onto your patio or inside to your living room table.

Photographer Sabine Vollmer von Falken captures the combination of nature’s beauty and Marlene’s creative talent and turns them into pure eye candy. The photographs in this book are breathtaking and show us projects as simple as an acorn wreath and as unusual as a moss covered garden table.

Marlene also shares the work of other artists and sculptures. Sharing images and stories of fairy-tale fortresses made from twisted twigs and branches and the awesomeness of tree sculpting, where a tree is formed as it grows into a work of art.

After perusing this book, I challenge you to look at nature in the same light as you did previously. Let Marlene introduce you to the beauty of outdoors in your home.

The Giveaway

I’m jealous. I don’t want to give this book away, I want to keep it all to myself! 🙂 But alas, one of you lucky, lucky Craft Gossip readers will win this. I’m green with envy and think I’ll have to buy this book for myself.

To qualify to win this lovely book, you must:

1) Have a U.S. shipping address (even if you live elsewhere, we must be able to ship to the United States)

2) Leave a comment below stating what type of project you have made or would like to make using nature

You may earn additional entries by doing the following (if you already do one or all of these, just state that in the comments):

EACH one of these counts as 1 additional entry, but you must leave a SEPARATE comment for each one

1) become a fan on Facebook
2) Follow Craft Gossip on Twitter
3) Become a Craft Gossip newsletter subscriber
4) display one of our buttons on your blog sidebar and link it to either the CG homepage (http://craftgossip.com/) or the CG H&G channel (http://homeandgarden.craftgossip.com/) – you can get a button here

The giveaway runs through August 31st at midnight CST. Winners will be chosen at random through Random.org

I couldn’t resist. Here’s one more piece of eye candy for you. Naturally dyed wool…

GOOD LUCK!

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Comments

  1. Hi,
    I truly ENJOY this website and share it with as many people as I can… I’ve recently been INSPIRED to create a “botanical wall” in my sunroom… I had basic ideas in mind, but this site continues to give me even more. I have no idea what I’ll end up with, but I’m fairly certain that it will be FANTASTIC, thanks to all of the ideas here.
    THANK YOU for all that you do and share!
    Kim

  3. I have made christmas ornament wreaths from mini pinecones, twig frames, pine candle rings, dried queen anne’s lace “snowflakes”and framed botanicals. I need inspiration!

  5. What a fabulous and lovely book! I could draw a lot of inspiration from it. I have a leaf casting that I made from my Elephant Ear
    Plant that I use to water the wildlife in our
    yard. Many thanks, Cindi

  9. I made a fairy house out of sticks and old wood for my grand daughter. She still asks if the fairies have returned to their house.
    This book looks great!

  10. In grade school we all collected twigs &/or branches & placed the end into a empty wooden sewing spool that we painted. We then cut small rectangles out of colored tissue paper & gathered them into little flowers & glued them onto the branches-very pretty! I have never forgotten this or the extraordinary art teacher I had!

  14. hi, i think the majority of our home and yard are decorated inspired by nature. From arbors and wreaths made from items found outside … our home reflects the area(s) we have lived. While living in hawaii we collected sea glass and shells, in wa state large pine cones, in new england items impressed with ferns, queen annes lace etc. It puts us at ease and reminds us of the varied places beauty we have enjoyed.

  18. I have always loved using found objects. When I was a child in New York the leaves, pine cones and acorns were my favorite. Now on Miami Beach, shells, sand and many other found items from the beach find their way in the decor of my cottage. The print of the fern is ingenious and I want to include it, too. I would love this book so I can get more ideas for fun things to make. Thanks for your wonderful newsletter that I find each morning when I get up. Keep up the good work, Laura

  19. I love using rocks and plant imprints in cement when I am making stepping stones for the garden and yard area. I have also used branches to make hangers for some of my stitched bell pulls.

  20. I’ve loved incorporating nature in to my home for years…..possibly even before it was “cool”! My husband still lovingly teases me about the year I decided to use small birch trees cut down from our yard as curtain rods. Unfortunately, the cat decided to fine tune his acrobatic skills by continually walking the length of the tree/curtain rod and quickly shredded any curtain that I put up!

  21. This looks like a great book and I am sure it would inspire me. I love picking “roadside abundia” (flowers and weeds in the ditches by my house) and making fresh and dried arangements.

  22. I love nature. In summer I’m always in my backyard. I work with herbs: lavender, rosemary, thym… I would love winning this book. thank you.

  23. As a kid, I used to make those little solar cards where you take leaves and put them on a piece of paper in the sunlight, and then an image develops. I would love to try something more sophisticated!

  24. this book looks like so much fun! i’ve been trying to pull off a bit of cottage garden theme and not quite getting enough of the outside in. the bark vase is just what i need to make this one tablescape work and this book looks like just what I need for help with the rest. i’d certainly love to win, thanks for the opportunity.

  25. I have made many pictures and cards with pressed flowers and leaves from around my property. Also wreaths made from hickory nut hulls and acorns.

  30. I love having nature in my house. I have plants every where. I love fern prints and have some printed on canvas paper. This book would give me so many other great ideas to bring the outside inside!

  31. I would love to have this book for inspiration! I’m constantly bringing nature home – I’ve been doing a lot of dyeing wool with plant materials, and this summer I built an arbor for our hops vines from logs that washed up during high water along the creek opposite our house. My family gets involved, too – we can’t go out in the woods without bringing home a special rock.

  34. I can’t bear to walk through the woods without gathering something of natures wonderful gifts. I collect pine cones (which I havenðt done anything with) and lots of plants which I either dry or put in oil and then use them in soaps and creams. My largest gathering involved large logs that I wanted to make into a bench.
    The book looks very interesting.

  35. The Boy and I recently made a mobile using his “nature collection” which included feathers, pinecones, and acorns.

  39. Nature inspires all my decorating and color choices. When my son was younger we made a bunch of stepping stones with leaves and other items in them and when the leaves are removed it looks like a fossil. Good memories.

  40. Wow, I love it! Definitely want to try that backsplash. Thanks for the opportunity to win. I’m a newsletter subscriber.

  41. My daughter is always making things with nature. She loves to use rocks to make little figures and flowers to decorate.

  44. I already have the book but wanted share anyway…This book is an amazingly crafted guide through some of the most spectacular “natural wonders” fostered by a true artist. Marlene Marshall so gracefully encourages all of her readers to truly look closely just outside their door – there is art to be had! The other artists and their works included in the book just compound the inspiration that art is not just created – it is sometime wrestled with, dug up, turned over and “ruined” by the elements. Each one of the projects encouraged by this author offers everyone a chance to feel the excitement that working with natural components brings. Rather than feeling like we can tame nature, she urges us to join in its wild dance!

  46. I have made pounded flower pictures. They turned out rather neat. Took me awhile to get the hang of it but I started to get rather good at pansies.

  49. I would love this book, I make and teach classes on leaf castings using leaves from my gardens. A very popular class!

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