On a bright, chilly spring day, poppies and irises had just begun blooming in the yard of Michelle Wallace’s Marshfield home. She snipped the blossoms from their stems and placed them gently on a round wooden table on the porch.
The tabletop was already jam-packed with a variety of plants, including leathery horsetail, which looks like miniature bamboo; aromatic branches of balsam fir; and the crinkly leaves of lady’s mantle. There were animal and mineral contributions, too: one mason jar of porcupine quills, another filled with bright white stones.
Wallace has worked at Vermont nonprofits for the past 26 years. In addition to her full-time job, since 2017 she has been making mandalas from items she gathers in nature. She photographs each one and uses the images on items such as cards, calendars and magnets. I met up with Wallace to try making some mandalas of my own.
What’s a mandala? From the Sanskrit word for “circle,” it’s a symmetrical and geometric design that represents the universe and is frequently used to assist meditation. My path to Wallace’s porch was appropriately circuitous. Two years earlier, I’d taken a stroll with Newport forager and artist Serena Morgan. Though we were focused on harvesting edibles and preparing a meal, I was enchanted by one of Morgan’s other endeavors: transforming materials she discovers on her hikes into jewelry, wreaths, salves and smudge sticks. She sells them at farmers and artists markets around the state.
In recent years, during my cancer treatment, I found art making therapeutic and was eager to learn new ways to make beautiful and practical items for my home — without dropping big bucks on supplies. So I sought out people who could show me how to pluck items from woods and fields and use them to create.
Enter Wallace and her spiritual side hustle. “Each image contains an intention, an aspiration, or hope or wish or prayer,” she explained. “I now have nine years of these vivid images of place and time or important life events and my own inner growth.”
How does Wallace get started? “When you’re walking through the landscape, if you’re paying attention, you’re going to notice things,” she said. When a particular color, texture or shape is appealing — provided the item isn’t endangered, rare or poisonous — it can be collected and incorporated into a design.
Once you’ve selected materials, Wallace continued, let intuition be your guide. Using a piece of fabric, a decorative plate, the earth or the floor as your base, organize your pieces into a pattern that you find pleasing. “There are no rules,” she said. “You can approach the arrangement however you want.”
Wallace added that your design doesn’t actually have to be symmetrical; it just should feel right to you.
Once you’re happy with what you’ve made, you could, like Wallace, document it with a photograph. You might reproduce the image on a wall hanging or a coffee mug, or simply admire it in your digital archive.
Penny Hewitt of Stannard is the owner of Lazy Mill Treecraft. Her reason for learning to make things with found objects was eminently practical. “It was an extension of my homesteading life, the desire to know where stuff comes from and what the consequences of the materials are,” she explained. “I needed baskets, so I started making baskets. Needed shoes. Made shoes.”
One of Hewitt’s upcoming projects will be creating a birch-bark wallet, she said.
During the years when she was homeschooling her two sons and many of their lessons took place outdoors, Hewitt began gathering materials that she found appealing, then figuring out ways to transform them into useful home goods. “That’s a cool crook of a branch; I could make a good spoon out of that,” she recalled thinking.
Now, with decades of experience, Hewitt tends to go in search of the items she requires to make the specific things she wants and needs.
As a starting point for fabricating household items out of wood, branches and bark, Hewitt recommended getting out into the forest, “playing around with things” and seeing what you notice about different materials. “Anything that you can wrap around your wrist and it doesn’t break, that’s weavable,” she advised. Notice the grain patterns of different types of wood, and consider which might be good for carving.
Hewitt teaches workshops at her home — she’s launching a traditional skills school there called Lazy Mill Living Arts — as well as at craft schools around the country and at skill-focused get-togethers, such as the annual Roots Rendezvous at the Roots School in Bradford, which takes place in September. “These skill shares, these gatherings [are] a good place to get your feet wet,” she said. “They’re incredibly inclusive and beginner friendly.”
Even better, she said, she’s made lifelong friends of all ages through shared interests in crafting and sustainability.
I met Hewitt two winters ago at one of her classes, in which we bent and folded slender strips of birch bark into the shapes of birds and comets, then strung them up to serve as festive holiday décor. We also learned how to sustainably harvest the bark. As someone who often feels a bit clumsy, I was astounded to find delicate ornaments taking shape beneath my fingers.
Can’t get to a workshop? Hewitt said excellent books are available on making baskets, carving kitchen tools and learning other craft techniques from around the world. She also suggested YouTube as a useful — if less communal — way to learn.
It’s really important to use your hands to make stuff; it’s what we were designed to do.
Penny Hewitt
“I love that there’s interest in this,” she mused. “It’s really important to use your hands to make stuff; it’s what we were designed to do. We’re not just consumers.”
East Montpelier resident Mary Admasian is a marketing consultant, curator and fine artist who also uses items from nature. Her sculptures demonstrate that not all handcrafted objects need to have practical uses.
Admasian said she notices an “explosion of connections” when she lays out bits and pieces of material she’s gathered and begins assembling them with glue, nails and wire. “What’s so wonderful about that is the discovery,” she said. She often combines natural materials such as butterfly wings, river stones, bird nests and insect hives with found, human-made materials, including rusty flakes of metal and barbed wire.
“I could base my entire career on barbed wire,” Admasian quipped. “That’s an endless narrative.” To her, the scraps of fencing represent “confinement, boundaries, metaphorical concepts around social norms and tensions in our inner lives.” Like Wallace with her mandalas, Admasian juxtaposes colors, shapes and items that elicit a particular emotion, spark connections and, ideally, lead to a deeper understanding of herself.
Her advice to beginners is similar to Hewitt’s: “Train your eye to look at things that are interesting to you.” Making collages, tucking natural objects into embroidery or knitting, and building small sculptures are good ways to explore your artistic interests and become a visual storyteller.
“Don’t think, I’m going to make a piece of art,” Admasian recommended. “Collect stuff that floats your boat, and give yourself the mental space to play.”
Her words about playfulness resonated, and I began thinking about items I might wish to gather. Then it struck me: Growing vegetables and preparing them is one of the driving forces in my life, and in my collection of seeds saved from my garden — dried and neatly labeled — there was plenty to inspire me.
Starting with a collage I’d already begun, which included images from seed catalogs, I began adding another dimension. I sorted through dozens of varieties of dried heirloom beans, zucchini seeds and kernels of pastel glass gem corn to find the prettiest examples and glued them to the page. The result is a bit too on the nose to count as fine art, but the idea of using garden seeds as a medium will stick with me.
As far as actual sticks are concerned, Hewitt’s influence sent me to the firewood pile to hunt for attractive hunks of maple, ash and birch. From a spalted piece I carved a small scoop, which I use to spoon up flour or grains when I’m baking. Imperfect it may be, but it’s functional.
The elements of the mandala I created on Wallace’s porch have decomposed in my garden, but the idea of creating evanescent works of art with flower petals, leaves, sprigs of herbs and other tidbits is now rooted in my mind. And I imagine it’s a practice I’ll return to again and again. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Natural Attraction: How to gather and create foraged home décor”
This article appears in Nest • Spring 2026.
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