Christmas has gone and the New Year is just beginning. Midwinter can be a bleak, slack time in the garden. If you're a tidy-minded gardener you'll have cut down the stems of perennial plants, swept up fallen leaves and mulched the borders leaving only the structural outlines of ornamental shrubs and evergreens for seasonal interest. Alternatively, you might be the sort of hopeless romantic who prefers to leave everything to overwinter in the hope that a sharp hoar-frost will delicately trace the outlines of tall grasses and seed heads. Either way you probably won't have a lot to do outside for the first few weeks of the new year. So, rather than stand with your nose pressed against a cold window pane wishing you could be outside, this is a great time to hunker down with a nice warm drink, a plateful of hot-buttered things and a crafty project to get you dreaming of spring plantings and summer crops.
As the new season's seed and bulb catalogues come plopping through the letter-box, don't throw out the old ones, you can recycle them instead into a plaited container for your seed packets or plant labels.
Colourful seed packets can be a wonderful source of inspiration - not only for planting schemes but for all manner of creative projects. This lattice display in a DIY store gave me the idea for a bias plait basket made from glossy plant catalogues that were just too sumptuous to put in the recycling bin.
Folding the paper length ways into strips makes for a sturdy long-lasting basket and the fold-down border accentuates the bias-checkweave design. It's a quick and simple re-cycling project for a cold and rainy day and just the thing to chase away the January blues. You'll find the full recipe in my forthcoming book 'Practical Basketry Techniques' published by A&C Black.
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