Seaweed
WINNER OF THE BEST MIXED MEDIA BOOK AWARD AT THE CREATIVE BOOK AWARDS 2024
A gorgeous guide to foraging, pressing and using seaweeds for a wealth of home creative projects. Both aspirational and inspirational, this guide to bringing the outdoors inside is quite unlike anything on the market and will inspire all readers to begin their beach foraging journey.
A beautifully packaged, comprehensive visual guide to seaweed by design company Molesworth & Bird. Seaweed will inspire readers to look beyond the tangled piles of seaweed washed up at high tide, to discover its exceptional beauty and appreciate its many uses. The book celebrates the unique appeal of the plants and showcases the myriad ways to bring their beauty indoors, with the authors providing step-by-step activities so you can create your own prints at home. Whether pressing a deep khaki green Peacock’s Tail seaweed or creating a stunning cyanotype with Eelgrass, the possibilities are endless with this seashore bounty.
The book is packed with glorious photography of the UK coastlines where the seaweeds can be foraged, alongside stylish interiors, and scenes of beach cook-outs and wild swimming spots. It also includes a library of pressed seaweeds presented in colour categories, with notes for identification and use. There is expert guidance on collecting seaweeds, and it will show how foraged seaweeds can be used at home for cooking, dyeing and printing fabrics, and as part of your skincare routine. It explores the fascinating history of seaweed collecting and investigates its potential as a healthy food source and sustainable material, whether foraged or farmed.
Melanie Molesworth and Julia Bird met in London while both working as interiors stylists. They share a love of the sea and eventually moved to Dorset and Cornwall, respectively, on the south coast of England. This life change led them to the forgotten art of seaweed pressing and as their skills improved, the design company Molesworth & Bird was born. Today their art prints, cards, calendars, enamelware and tea towels are sold around the world. They run a successful online store, a small retail shop in Lyme Regis and a studio workshop in Cornwall.