The March issue of Living is always our annual garden-themed issue, and over the years we've developed many different plant- and nature-inspired craft projects to appear in it. This year Silke and I collaborated on the story "Bringing Nature to Light," which explores a number of techniques that rely on the silhouettes created by the shadows cast by real plants in different ways. We had done sun print projects years ago in the magazine, and we revisited the technique using a specially treated light sensitive fabric... resulting Silke's totally beautiful velvet pillows, above.

Another project was the lampshade below-

This is pretty cool because it's made by tracing the silhouettes made by flowers that are temporarily positioned between the lightbulb and shade. It's a paper lampshade and the lines are hand-drawn with colored pencil.

I loved developing this because there are so many different possible results, depending on the plants being used and the color applied, etc. If you happen to have an iPad, you can see the full story and the a behind the scenes video here. These projects are really nice for those of us hankering for those first signs of spring!

Posted by Athena Preston on February 22, 2011 in Behind the Scenes