There were a couple items on my Christmas list I'd been hoping to receive. Score! After using these for a couple months, I have to post a report.
The red Tokyo Dreamer camera strap is fab. The strap that came with my Canon Rebel XSi is wide, black, emblazoned with Canon all over the place, and let's face it: not cute. My new strap is narrower (3 cm) with a soft, suede lining and a bright leather exterior. Er, not quite; it's actually made from "vegan leather" which is perhaps a code word for vinyl. But whatever it is, it looks just like leather. The strap is sturdy and flexible with a funny Japanese-ish phrase printed at one end. If I were a serious photographer, I suppose I would scoff at someone who cared about the color of their camera strap. Good thing I'm not a serious photographer.
And please check out my new Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home camera bag. My old bag would hold only the camera but no extra lenses. So when I went to shoot photos for a client last time, I wrapped up my extra lens in a fluffy hand towel and stuffed it in my purse. Never again! This bag has removable dividers and amazing amounts of storage, but it's not bulky. Lots of room for future purchases, and the quality is top notch. Did I mention the inside is lime green? Fun.
Do you find the act of clicking tiny radio buttons oddly satisfying? The 2011 Bloggies are in full swing, and How About Orange is a finalist for "Best Art, Craft, or Design Weblog." This blog is also on the shortlist for "Favorite Blog with a Handmaking Focus" over at the Handmade Olympics. Vote for your favorite blogs and find some great new ones to browse. Thanks for the nominations, everyone. I'm honored!
Happy Valentine's Day! In honor of the occasion, download Alexander Girard's iconic love design in the form of desktop wallpaper at Lagom (via Draw! Pilgrim). Girard, a 20th century artist and modern design master, headed up Herman Miller's fabric and textile division from 1952 to 1975.
Monday is Valentine's Day. If you haven't given it a thought, there's still time to get festive. Check out these completely awesome cup wrappers from Eat Drink Chic.
Spotted at Creature Comforts: a link to Valentine e-cards at Kate Spade. Choose from approximately one zillion different designs.
Get a PDF with four different printable Valentine cards, compliments of Fellow Creatives.
And if you're simply not an effusive, sentimental sap like the rest of us, download the valentine schmalentine from Mmmcrafts.
These projects make me smile. Maybe you know a kid's room that needs something here:
Owl stuffies at Hammer and Thread
Funny coat hooks by Giddy Giddy
Toadstool seat by Tao of Craft
Fox lamp at Matsutake
Inspired by the frozen boulders the city snowplow piled up along our street, I made a scarf.
To make this, you'll need: fabric, freezer paper, scissors, iron, pencil, craft knife, cutting mat, fabric paint, and a foam brush. I used a length of jersey from the fabric store—you know, T-shirt material. Soft and comfy, and doesn't fray around the edges. 
I sketched an abstract design onto the uncoated side of the freezer paper. These were just messy hexagons and pentagons that got gradually smaller. A pattern of all straight lines is much quicker to cut than curves. Since I wanted the graphic at both ends of the scarf, I traced the original design onto a second piece of freezer paper. 
With an X-acto knife, I cut out the shapes. Each piece took about 20 minutes—though I was watching HGTV at the same time, so you might be more productive and less likely to cut off a limb if you pay closer attention to what you're doing.
I ironed the stencil shiny-side down onto the fabric. The freezer paper sticks like magic. 
Using a foam brush, I painted in the shapes. Be sure to place a garbage bag or something protective under the fabric just in case a little paint soaks through. I used Pebeo Setacolor fabric paint, but I wasn't thrilled with the coverage. That stuff is washable after you set it with an iron, which is great. But I wanted a more opaque white, so I brushed on a second coat of white acrylic paint. Will it wash off? Probably not. Do I care, because I ever wash scarves? Probably not. 
I let the paint dry and tore off the paper stencil.
All done.
Fossil's website is currently a wonderland of goodies, including desktop, iPad, and iPhone wallpapers made by their design team. How come everything Fossil creates is cool? What's in the water over there? If they sold bottles of it, I'd buy some.
The Academy Awards draw nigh! Due to popular demand, I've updated Oscar Bingo for 2011. Download and print twelve different bingo cards. Give one to each of your party guests and race to see who can mark off five squares in a row on February 27. The annual disclaimer still applies: My psychic powers are weak, so I have no idea if it will be possible to win ten minutes into the telecast, or if there will be a winner at all. Good night, and good luck.
Check out the teensy origami box I attempted. Success! But I think I muttered, "Wait. What?" about sixteen times while making it. I ignored the recommendation to start with a large sheet of paper and went for the 3 cm box, following this instructional video by Sara Adams. She demonstrates a design by Dave Brill—which must be short for brilliant, because who in the world figures out how to fold a box with a hinged lid from one sheet of paper?
Happy Folding is a fun site with lots of other how-to origami videos. For example, maybe you need a Valentine origami ring to put in that box.
Fonts in Use is a site that catalogs "type at work in the real world." See examples of dozens of typefaces put to good use and get inspiration for your next project. Via Coudal.
Lovedrops is a nutty little font composed of heart-shaped letterforms. If you like hearts, this might be just the thing for Valentine's Day—used in very small doses. If you have a vendetta against Valentine's Day and/or blob-like typefaces, steer clear of this one. Available here, free for personal use, at Font Space.
Happy February, everyone. Check out these cute, printable classroom Valentine freebies at One Charming Party. Send them with your child to school or hide one in your sweetie's sock drawer.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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