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“Felt so Good” Martha Stewart Living, 9/2009 Magazine

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I was so excited when I opened my latest issue of Martha Stewart Living and as I thumbed through the pages I came across a wonderful 6 page spread on new and fabulous felting ideas.   The September issue is on sale at your newsstand now, so don’t miss out on this issue.  Introduction to the article: Wool may be soft to the touch, but look at it under a microscope and you will see a tangle of rough fibers and you’ll see a tangle of a rough fiber covered in tiny overlapping scales.  A little coaxing makes the scales catch on one another and locked together with a craft called needle felting, you can take advantage of that quality decorating wool pillows, scarves, blankets, and other items with wool accents and no sewing or gluing is necessary. Just take a simple tool called a felting needle and moved it up and down through two layers of wool. Then watch as they fuse. Start with any woven wool as your base fabric and for embellishments use the fiber and in another of its forms yarn, felt cutouts or loose wool known as roving. The result is a stylish one-of-a-kind accessory to cozy up to this fall.

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Book Review: Off to the Nursery

One of the best things about the return of warmer weather is getting to plant new flowers and starting the vegetable garden if you have one. Off to the Nursery by Alice Oehr is subtitled “a celebration of gardening, plants and seasons,” and it’s also a celebration of diversity (because gardening is for everyone) and caring for the earth.

The book starts with the work of getting the garden ready for spring, pulling out the old plants and spreading compost made from kitchen scraps. They grab tomatoes and peppers, learn about zucchini and eggplant and explore the tasty world of herbs.

They also look through the seeds, succulents, berries and fruit trees, flowers and aquatic plants, talking about the benefits of different plants and how fun they are to grow. Maybe you can relate to the family buying what seems like way too many plants?

The book was originally published in Australia, so some of the flowers mentioned might not be familiar to your or your kids, but that’s kind of fun, too. You can also use this as an opportunity to talk about which plants in the book can grow where you live and that just like animals, plants have preferred habitats, too.

Illustrations are colorful and the book combines a standard font and a hand written font to make it feel more like a journal about the garden. The illustrations include fun facts and growing tips such as always planting mint in a pot or germinating seeds on a wet paper towel before planting.

If you want to introduce kids to gardening or just talk about what kind of plants can be grown at home where you live (yes to tomatoes, probably no to the kumquat tree), this cute book is a great addition to your spring reading list.

About the book: 30 pages, hardcover. Published 2025 by Scribble US. Suggested retail price $18.95.