The Art Of The Natural Home

This book is perfect for those interested in sustainability, natural products and mindfulness. It's all about taking the time to create your own homemade products, from facemasks to floor polish and from medicinal honey to massage oil. Taking inspiration from her grandmother's generation, Rebecca Sullivan has put together this thoughtful and appealing manual to caring for yourself and your home. Traditional methods are resurrected or updated to suit the modern home, using simple, natural ingredients. The first part of the book is dedicated to the Home, and covers cleaning products for every room, recipes for pickles and preserves, and tips on everything from natural laundry treatments to how to grow your own cocktail garden. The second part covers Health & Beauty, and includes bath salts, make up, serums, perfumes and even beard oil, as well as healing remedies such as burn salves and herbal teas. This inspiring guide is a must for anyone interested in living a simpler, more purposeful life.

This book is perfect for those interested in sustainability, natural products and mindfulness. It's all about taking the time to create your own homemade products, from facemasks to floor polish and from medicinal honey to massage oil. Taking inspiration from her grandmother's generation, Rebecca Sullivan has put together this thoughtful and appealing manual to caring for yourself and your home. Traditional methods are resurrected or updated to suit the modern home, using simple, natural ingredients. The first part of the book is dedicated to the Home, and covers cleaning products for every room, recipes for pickles and preserves, and tips on everything from natural laundry treatments to how to grow your own cocktail garden. The second part covers Health & Beauty, and includes bath salts, make up, serums, perfumes and even beard oil, as well as healing remedies such as burn salves and herbal teas. This inspiring guide is a must for anyone interested in living a simpler, more purposeful life.

The Natural Home is a place where natural materials and motifs are the key elements of a decorating style that is a joy to live with and a joy to behold. Influential art director and stylist Hans Blomquist starts off by exploring the essence of his style. Firstly, Plants and Flowers celebrates the beauty of nature, botanical prints and pictures, and the cycles of the natural world. Display reveals Hans’ passion for creating vignettes that showcase treasured pieces, while Color presents his favorite earthy palette, which provides the perfect muted backdrop for hits of brighter natural hues. In Texture, he revels in the textures and patinas of natural materials—scuffed wood, frayed rope, beaten metal, and bare stone. Finally, Hans shows how to use Fabrics to bring warmth and softness to any interior. In the second part of the book, The Natural Homes, through a series of case studies, Hans explores houses and apartments that showcase the beautiful simplicity and elegance of the natural look.

The popularity of natural building has grown by leaps and bounds, spurred by a grassroots desire for housing that is healthy, affordable and environmentally responsible. While there are many books available on specific methods such as strawbale construction, cob or timber framing, few other resources introduce the reader to the entire scope of this burgeoning field. Fully revised and updated, The Art of Natural Building is the complete and user-friendly introduction to natural building for everyone from do-it-yourselfers to architects and designers. This collection of articles from 60 leaders in the field is stunningly illustrated with over 400 photos of natural buildings from around the world. At 465 pages, this massive resource is over 50% longer than the original edition. Out of 64 chapters, 26 are new to this edition, and nearly all of the rest have been completely revised to reflect recent developments. Learn about: The case for building with natural materials, from the perspectives of sustainability, lifestyle and health What you need to know to plan and design your own beautiful and efficient natural home Explanations of thirty versatile materials and techniques, each with and up-to-date resource list of where to go for further information and training How these techniques are being used to address housing crises around the world, with 12 case studies from China to Argentina. Clearly written, logically organized and beautifully illustrated The Art of Natural Building is the encyclopedia of natural building.

Including more than 35 step-by-step recipes from the Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking Most DIY cheesemaking books are hard to follow, complicated, and confusing, and call for the use of packaged freeze-dried cultures, chemical additives, and expensive cheesemaking equipment. For though bread baking has its sourdough, brewing its lambic ales, and pickling its wild fermentation, standard Western cheesemaking practice today is decidedly unnatural. In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher practices and preaches a traditional, but increasingly countercultural, way of making cheese—one that is natural and intuitive, grounded in ecological principles and biological science. This book encourages home and small-scale commercial cheesemakers to take a different approach by showing them: • How to source good milk, including raw milk; • How to keep their own bacterial starter cultures and fungal ripening cultures; • How make their own rennet—and how to make good cheese without it; • How to avoid the use of plastic equipment and chemical additives; and • How to use appropriate technologies. Introductory chapters explore and explain the basic elements of cheese: milk, cultures, rennet, salt, tools, and the cheese cave. The fourteen chapters that follow each examine a particular class of cheese, from kefir and paneer to washed-rind and alpine styles, offering specific recipes and handling advice. The techniques presented are direct and thorough, fully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and triptych photos that show the transformation of cheeses in a comparative and dynamic fashion. The Art of Natural Cheesemaking is the first cheesemaking book to take a political stance against Big Dairy and to criticize both standard industrial and artisanal cheesemaking practices. It promotes the use of ethical animal rennet and protests the use of laboratory-grown freeze-dried cultures. It also explores how GMO technology is creeping into our cheese and the steps we can take to stop it. This book sounds a clarion call to cheesemakers to adopt more natural, sustainable practices. It may well change the way we look at cheese, and how we make it ourselves.

From Avocado and Rose Face Oil to Salt and Macadamia Hair Spritz, this handy little guide is the perfect companion for anyone who wants to save money (and the planet) by ditching chemical-filled, mass-produced beauty products and making their own natural ones at home. Rebecca Sullivan has researched and tested a whole range of treats and treatments for your face, body and hair, and even your teeth. Keep skin touchably soft with Chocolate Orange Body Butter, and create your own make up palette using petal powders. With Lavender Lip Scrub and Elderflower Night Cream, the ideas in this book will inspire you to overhaul your entire cosmetic collection and embrace the art of natural beauty.

A distinguished group of scholars here probes the complex structure of aesthetic responses to nature in a discussion enriched with insights from art history, literary criticism, geography and philosophy. Exploring the interrelation among nature, beauty and art, they show that natural beauty is impregnated with concepts derived from the arts and from particular accounts of nature. The distinction and relation between art and nature are questioned, and the volume culminates in philosophical studies of the role of scientific understanding, engagement and appreciation in aesthetics.

This long-awaited guide serves as a tool to explain the general principles of natural dyeing, and to help dyers to become more accomplished at their craft through an increased understanding of the process. Photos of more than 450 samples demonstrate the results of actual dye tests, and detailed information covers every aspect of natural dyeing including theory, fibers, mordants, dyes, printing, organic indigo vats, finishing, and the evaluation of dye fastness. Special techniques of printing and discharging indigo are featured as well. The book is intended for dyers and printers who wish to more completely understand the "why" and the "how," while ensuring safe and sustainable practices. Written by a textile engineer and chemist (Boutrup) and a textile artist and practitioner (Ellis), its detailed and tested recipes for every process, including charts and comparisons, make it the ideal resource for dyers with all levels of experience.