Nature Printing: With Herbs, Fruits & Flowers

This full-color instruction book brings nature's delicate beauty indoors with prints and other easy-to-make decorative objects. Laura Donnelly Bethmann explains how to select, collect, and press plants to create designs on paper, fabric, and other surfaces. Step-by-step instructions for more than 20 projects are included. Photos & illustrations.

In a nicely packaged format, this slim but helpful guide demonstrates how to capture and preserve the ephemera of nature on paper, for use as framed pictures, stationery, gift wrap, and adornments on fabric, furniture, and walls. In addition to printing with flowers and leaves, the instructions cover the use of fruits, vegetables, feathers, shells, fish, even a spiderweb. Accomplished with various types of inks and paints, the prints have a lovely watercolor quality, a subtle cross between the delicacy of a pressed-flower picture and the look of rubber-stamping.