Bamboo placemat and votive light

Our neighbours planted bamboo.
It grows quickly and makes a nice fence between them and us, which is something I highly appreciate - I like my privacy, too.

Bamboo, however, tends to spread, which leads to many little bamboo saplings in our garden.
This weekend, I chopped them off, so they wouldn´t spread too much - but I really liked the bamboo.
I liked the look and the texture and the almost artificial feel of this, and my mind immediatly turned it into craftable material, so I came up with these two projects:

The votive light

I found an old glass amongst my many treasures, cut the saplings into little pieces...

...and simply glued them around the glass with a hot glue gun.

The placemat

For the placemat I also cut the bamboo into pieces of roughly equal length, and then wove them together, in four places, with some scraps of raffia-band I still had around here. Very easy, and took about 30 minutes maximum.

It now looks really sweet on our garden table, but what I like even more about it is how something that could have been troublesome (spreading bamboo) into treasures that look like stuff from an expensive design store. I´m actually looking forward to more bamboo growing into our garden :)

Music:

Have some Mumford :)