Botanical Christmas Bunting - Christmas 2021

Seven hand-crafted pieces representing botanical elements/plants, relating to Christmas. They are 1) Hand-painted, star-shaped ginger biscuit with scissor-cut, white, deckle edge. 2) Three hand-cut felt, fabric and glitter-embellished ivy leaves, stapled to green-leaved brown twine. 3) Dried, scented orange slice tied to green-leaved, brown twine. 4) 'Mistletoe' poem by Walter de la Mare and green kissing lips image, printed in green ink onto pale green, zig-zag edged card. 5) Long strip of antiqued paper, stamped with the words 'Deck the Halls' and embellished with holly bough, tissue paper. 6) Snowy, fir trees photo, printed on sticky-backed paper on a Poooli instant printer stuck on to brown kraft card. Both cut out with deckle-edge scissors. 7) Kraft paper seed packet, printed with copyright-free, vintage Poinsettia image, containing four real poinsettia seeds and instructions for growing. Transparent, plastic pegs and a 1.5 metre length of green hemp string for hanging. All supplied in brown, greaseproof bag sealed with Poooli print sticker with illustration of complete bunting. Also supplied - a tea light, fragranced with frankincense and myrrh/decorated with gold leaf, wrapped in holly bough-patterned tissue paper, tied with vintage twine.

Still in Covid times and some periods of lockdown in 2021, I have become really aware of the natural world on my daily walks, especially wild flowers/grasses/trees. I've started to press flowers/plants and use them in my artwork and have been getting to know many more botanical names of the new plants that I'm coming across.  I've increasingly enjoyed nurturing and observing the plants in my garden and spending more time outdoors. So I started to look into all the plants/botanicals associated with Christmas to see if I could design a Christmas card featuring botanical elements. There were so many - it was impossible to include all of them. In the end I settled for Holly, Ivy, Orange, Ginger, Poinsettia, Fir and Mistletoe in order to achieve a variety of textures, shapes, colours, elements of plants - leaves, berries, fruits, roots, branches etc. I also wanted to incorporate popular Christmas traditions, stories, tastes and other associations. I decided to create a length of celebratory bunting for the recipient to assemble, plus a small, fragranced tea-light to light on Christmas Eve (with more botanical elements - Frankincense/Myrrh). I used a huge variety of techniques to make the seven pieces - hand-painting, cutting, stamping, collage, decorative cutting, stapling, gilding, digital printing, photography and illustration. I also added optional, interactive suggestions for the recipient to add their own eighth piece to the bunting. Packaging up all the pieces accurately took a great deal longer than I had planned!