Crafting with Nature

Book excerpt: A beautiful and practical step-by-step guide to growing and gathering plants and using them to fill your life and home with natural homemade creations.Crafting with Nature offers an incredible collection of easy projects using natural materials you can gather or grow and form into beautiful and useful crafts. Readers will love making and using items like the DIY Solid Lavender Perfume, or sewing beautiful Rustic Wooden Buttons they made from gathered branches onto a favorite sweater, or decorating their homes with a Lambs Ear Flower Stalk Wreath with lambs ear they grew in the garden. The book also includes gift ideas and recipes such as Amy's Red, White and Blue Jam using home-grown blackberries and Ginger Pickled Tomatoes with fresh-picked tomatoes from the garden. Each chapter focuses on a different common plant, starting out with a beginner-friendly guide for how to gather or grow it (most are commonly found in home gardens), then ideas and projects for what readers can make with it. The book has a total of 58 detailed step-by-step tutorials and 44 quick-and-easy inspiration ideas and crafting techniques. Amy Renea is the founder of A Nest for All Seasons, chosen as the reader's choice best gardening blog in the Better Homes & Gardens Blogger Awards.