Giveaway: Area rug from Flor

This just in: a set of Flor modular carpet squares is looking for a good home. Flor squares come in a huge variety of textures and colors that you can mix and match to fit any space—do a whole room, an area rug, or a runner. The squares are held together with adhesive stickers that let you pull them up later and move them to a new room or your neighbor's house while they're on vacation. And if you trip over your dog and spill your Coke, just grab the dirty square, wash it off in the sink, let it dry, and put it back.

Flor would like to give away a 5'x7' area rug to... you, perhaps? One winner will receive a set of carpet squares in your favorite color. Choose from three styles: the trim and textured Feelin' Groovy, the soft and plush Rake Me Over, or the hip and patterned Haute Stuff.

To enter the giveaway, check out the styles and leave a comment with the rug you think would look most fetching in your home. Be sure to include a link, email address, or other way of contacting you. The giveaway closes Friday, Feb. 4 at midnight CT. A winner will be randomly drawn and notified the next day.

Update: Giveaway is now closed. The random number generator chose Linda, comment #436, to win a new rug!

Car Lashes

Have you seen this? Lashes for your car. Not sure what they're supposed to do, but something about these doesn't seem quite right. Kinda seems like these would be illegal... but whatever.

If you wanna buy some, head over to www.carlashes.com and pick some up for $25.99. Although, I can't imagine why anyone would want to   o_O

A visit to our living room

We changed a few things in the living room this year, the most obvious being our new, humongous TV. This Christmas we upgraded our 20-something-inch box to a 47-inch flat screen. I must confess that all huge TVs look pretty much the same to me. 38, 45, 52, 69, whatever. But the point is that now we can watch actors whose heads appear four times larger than life, which is super important.



The new TV created a problem for us, though. It wouldn't fit in the cheap, ugly cabinet that housed our old TV along with a metric ton of board games and movies. Our requirements for a new entertainment center were: has storage, can stand in a corner, preferably no wider than the TV, looks at least somewhat modern, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. And that, my friends, is a challenge. After visiting four or five furniture stores with a tape measure and looking at every TV console on the internet, we ended up at trusty IKEA where we bought two pieces of furniture and stacked them: the Besta Boas and the Besta Adal. And then we attached a mounting bracket and slid the TV in with a shoehorn. I share all this in case you, too, are looking for entertainment center options. We love how this worked out.



Our other newish items include:

The Avenue Six Wall Street Coffee Table. Don't ever buy this. It took three tries to get a table shipped to us that didn't have damaged corners. And within weeks, the veneer started peeling off like a bad sunburn—whether you touched the table or not.



The Array bookcase in red from CB2, my favorite thing in the room when Alex is not present.



The Milliken Modern Times Uptown rug. Huge carpets usually cost a million dollars, give or take a few thousand, but we found this 8' x 11' rug when it was on sale for around $200. It comes in other colors, too.



Other cost-saving rug tips: Check out other styles by Milliken, including some solid options. Or stitch a few smaller rugs together like this. Or, enter a new giveaway I'm posting on Monday. Stay tuned!

Must see Etsy shops

Black Mirror Designs
 

Victorian Evening B&W Shrug

Aviator High Waist Skirt Dress

 Priscilla Dawn

Rockabilly Sweet Dress

Lolla Dreamsicle Dress

Asterisk heart garland template

Who says Valentine's Day has to be pink? I vote for orange.

To make your own Valentine garland, download my heart template PDF right here. You can print it on a sheet of cardstock* and cut out the inner shapes with a craft knife. I cheated and cut these directly from Adobe Illustrator using my Silhouette cutter, which took mere minutes. Delightful.

*This template only works with orange** paper. If you use another color, your project will fail.

**I am kidding, of course. As soon as I typed that, I realized from past experience that I would get a handful of emails from concerned crafters wondering if this is actually true. It's not.

I gave my computer a facelift

Yesterday I grabbed a couple new computer wallpaper freebies from Simple Desktops. Both with a bit of orange, of course. I love these for their flat fields of color that A) don't hurt my eyeballs and B) enable me to find my files. I chose Vinyl Record by Daniel Waldron and Orange Pencil by Jake Dugard.

Make a 3D paper owl

Do you like owls? Do you like paper? Do you have a stack of extra ink cartridges for your printer? Make yourself an owl army in thirteen different colors with printable templates from 3EyedBear.

DIY Hang Tags for Jewelry

Today I'm going to explain how to make your own hang tags at home without spending hundreds of dollars. The amount printing companies charge really is ridiculous, so i have taken it upon myself to save you some money. This is the method I use for my own business, sassyNpunk, so you know it's a good one ;)


The main ingredient to a good diy hang tag is some really good paper. Now depending on your budget, you can go with the kind i use which will save you a lot of time, or you can use the less expensive kind but waste a lot of time cutting. To save time, I use perforated business card paper. This is the easiest, fastest, and cleanest way to get a really affordable tag. Yes, it's true that it's expensive, but i'm a busy person, so the time it saves me is worth the extra cost. Where can you get this special paper, you ask? Well, I purchase mine from Office Depot, a pack of 200 cards (20sheets of paper) costs around $20. I buy the Avery brand cards, they have tons to choose from, so get whatever you like.

After you can go to the Avery brand website and download one of their business card templates. Based on what you buy, you can find the compatible template here. I use the 10 card per sheet template for Adobe Photoshop. Be sure to download the template that is compatible with whatever program you are going to be using to make your design. There is an ID number on the box that will correspond with each business card template.


Open you template and create your design. These are the tags i created. You'll want to keep in mind that you are going to be folding each card in half. So position your design accordingly. I rotated my template 90 degrees b/c i prefer a shorter tag.  Remember that the top half of the card with end up being the back, so anything in the top half portion will need to be flipped 180 degrees.

after you print out your design, fold each card in half, don't cut! Hang on top of your little jewelry bags. Then staple!

And now you have a hang tag for your jewelry bags! wuhuu!

 

Fun graphic mugs

Awhile back I jumped on a deal that Groupon was offering for Zazzle.com: pay $25 for $50 of credit toward any customized items at Zazzle. And it seemed imperative that I spend this on mugs. Because I like mugs. So I dusted off some designs I'd made ages ago and uploaded them to the site. I was concerned that the big white border Zazzle leaves around the print area might look goofy if I chose a rectangular design, so I kept these flower and city shapes on a white background. The cups arrived last week. Happiness!

I couldn't decide on a color for the city scene, so I did two: girly pink and allover orange.

Tarina Tarintino: the good, the bad, and the incredibly disturbing

It's probably no surprise that I am a Tarina Tarintino fan, duh. However, that doesn't mean i approve of everything she does. Nobody's perfect, right? It's time to take a look back at the highs and lows of her work thus far. 

First we have the good:
Tarina clearly likes to incorporate pop culture imagery into her work. Sometimes this can be a good thing, and sometimes it can be a baaaad thing. Here we have some of my favorite pieces by miss Tarintino, and what i think is her absolute best work. My theory is, if you are going to use a universal symbol or character in your work ... don't mess with the original design. She obviously got it down perfect with these few pieces. As you can see, they are all gorgeous.

 

Now let's move on to the bad:

As I was saying... if you're going to use a popular character in your work, best thing to do is leave the original design in tact and the way people love and remember it. Otherwise, you'll end up with something like the extremely unappealing pink haired Hello Kitty series.

 

When I think of Hello Kitty, I think of the cute little kitty that is the symbol of everything innocent and cuddly. Then i see this shit above and it just confuses the hell out of me. I'm sorry, but i just want to throw up when i see retarded shit like this. It's not cool, it's not original, it's just stupid. 

Another stupid move is thinking you can establish tiaras as normal. Seriously, who the hell would buy this, and where the hell are you supposed to wear this shit? If i saw someone wearing a tiara, i would think they had some serious mental problem. 

 

And finally, we have the incredibly disturbing. I don't think this picture requires any explanation.  Just one question... Why? 

Product Review from Hayley Brazier

Hey guys!
I thought I'd share my recent delights from sassyNpunk Boutique!
Firstly, how it arrived..............

How cute is this??? Rather than just 'bung' items into your usual Jiffy bag sassyNpunk's Leyla like's to give your items a little TLC.
Not to mention wrapping your items securely so they don't suffer a bashing in the post......

In my package where one necklace, a necklace charm and a hand mirror.

Now I have to mention that the doughnut mirror feels and SMELLS like a doughnut!!! My boyfriend actually asked me If he could have a 'bite'.(You can imagine how silly he felt after I told him ha ha!)
 

If you haven't had a chance to check out sassyNpunk's treasure trove of kawaii delights you can find them on their WEBSITE and/or their FACEBOOK


X Hayley X

You can check out Hayley's blog HERE

Darth Vader Hot Air Balloon

I wonder how long it took to make this!

Quiz: What's your interior design style?

Click on the pictures in this design quiz at Stylish Home to determine your decorating style. Brace yourself— the quiz promises to "delve into your design soul." The quiz "suspected" me to be Modern Eclectic, which apparently makes me soulmates with Andy Warhol, Scarlett Johannson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Okay.

How to make a fabric rose

It's the last stiffened fabric project and then I'm moving on! I wanted to try an oversized, realistic fabric rose just for fun.

Make a template with six petals. I traced around a dinner plate and a small bowl on the back of some ugly wrapping paper. (Tip: if the paper is too curly, iron it flat and your life will be better.) I've included my feet so you can admire my cute socks.

Prepare some stiffened fabric. See here for how I did this. My fabric pieces were too big to lay flat in my microwave this time, so I draped each piece over a couple drinking glasses and nuked them one by one. The fabric came out stiffened in a odd shape, of course, but ironed flat easily.

Using the template, cut three flower shapes from the prepared fabric. Grab a shape and fold it in half to make a crease between petals. Open, rotate the flower, and repeat twice more until six creases radiate from the center.

In the first flower, cut a slit along one of the fold lines to the center. In the second flower, cut out one petal segment. In the third flower, cut out a piece with two petal segments. Save these cutouts; they'll form the center of the rose.

On each flower, overlap the two petals adjacent to the slit and secure with a little glue. (I used Aleene's OK To Wash-It Fabric Glue.)

While they're drying, curl the double-petal and single-petal cutouts. Heat each petal with an iron and roll the rounded edge back with your fingers. When it cools, heat the triangular point of the petal and roll it into a cone shape that's rose-like. This part is tricky! I had to iron the petals flat and start over a few times until I had something reasonable. The one-petal piece should be able to fit inside the two-petal piece when you're done.

Heat the remaining flower petals one at a time with your iron and curl the edges back.

At this point I stacked the pieces to see if they looked nice. Yes! But I decided a flat bottom for this flower might be more useful.

So I cut off the point. (If you're going to do this, I'd suggest trimming when the pieces are still flat: fold them into a cone shape and snip off the points before you glue.)

I hot glued the petals together at the base, then added a felt circle to hide the trimmed ends. I could see these as DIY wedding decorations, attached to curtain tie backs, used in romantic centerpieces, or gathering dust in my box of finished projects I have no idea what to do with.

Designers & Artists I admire

Being an artist means you have to live up to certain expectations. If you all of a sudden fall off the wagon and start sucking, you will eventually fade from your fans' minds. We've seen it happen to the best of them, even Andy Warhol who is considered the most famous artist of the 21st century was falling down a spiral of shame. So what keeps me motivated to do my absolute best and not start sucking?... why other artists, of course! I have tons of women I look up to and admire. Their success helps me succeed, and I just wanted to share a few of them with you.

The first is designer Jessica Louise. Her pieces are fun, sophisticated, and really unique! Below are some of her clothing designs and are available on her website www.JessicaLouise.com and in store around the world.

Karyn Cantor, creator of Classic Hardware Jewelry. Her vintage inspired pieces radiate sophistication and wit, and she is most definitely my favorite jewelry designer at the moment. Just take a look at this Baby PEGACORN Ring... can you say CUUUTE!?

Internationally published portrait photographer Dangerously Dolly. I love the recognizable aesthetic of every one of her pictures. Her work is unforgettable, and I am hoping to work with her one day soon!