Book Review and Giveaway: Woodland Style

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!

As if Diwali weren’t colorful and fun enough, The Festival of Lights: A Lift-the-flap Diwali Celebration by Namita Moolani Mehra, illustrated by Darshika Varm, makes it even more fun to read about with flaps and things to lift and pull to see more information or details in the illustrations.

The book is a story about a family getting ready for Diwali and what happens on the different days of the five-day celebration. There’s cleaning, shopping, crafting, food preparation and getting the home altar ready for the big day.

It covers decorating the outside of the house with rangoli, diyas and lanterns, buying sweets to share with family and friends, the sights and scents of the mandir (home temple), getting dressed up in new fancy clothes, the story of Diwali and celebrations with relatives.

Flaps (there are more than 140 in all) give you vocabulary words for different foods and definitions, as well as fun things like what’s inside the shopping basket or where the cat is hanging out. They also help illuminate the story of Diwali, which is the triumph of good over evil as Lord Ram defeated the demon Ravana to save his wife, Sita.

This pretty and colorful book helps kids understand what Diwali is and how it is celebrated, regardless of whether they practice it at home. This would be a nice book to keep in a classroom (it’s rated for kids ages 3-7) or to have at home to teach kids about Diwali even if it’s not something you celebrate. Where I live there are a lot of people from India so we are probably exposed to Diwali more than some other regions of America, but it’s a nice holiday to know about wherever you live.

Combine with the book Diwali and check out some fun lantern crafts and printables for kids to round out your experience.

About the book: 24 pages, hardcover, published 2025 by Wide Eyed Editions. Suggested retail prices $22.99.

Have you read?