Type Depot is offering their delicate Matilde typeface at a cost of zero dollars. She's available in two styles, along with decorative frames and patterns. Download her here. (This font is obviously a she.) For help using the patterns, click here.
I sewed these pacifier clips for a baby shower this weekend. I'd noticed solid-color clips in the store while wandering the aisles, and I wanted to include something handmade in my gift. These seemed easier to make than a stroller. 
Here's my little tutorial. You'll need ribbon, suspender clips (available at fabric stores), Fray Check (optional), and velcro.
1. Cut a 24" length of ribbon. (This ribbon is 7/8" wide.)
2. Apply Fray Check to each end to prevent unraveling.
3. Fold the ribbon in half, leaving a little extra at one end to fold over the other unfinished end to hide it.
4. Stitch around the edges of the doubled ribbon , trying desperately not to run off the edge. Squeaking "Eeek!" helps a little when you get close. Just a tip.
5. Sew velcro pieces onto the folded end about 2" apart.
6. Thread the opposite end through a suspender clip and sew it down.
The very same Kayanna Nelson of June Craft from yesterday's post has generously provided awesome downloadable goodies on her blog. Get the printable bird card right here. Or hunt through her posts to find all the free desktop wallpapers sprinkled about. Most are calendar desktops, but I was dying to use them immediately so I Photoshopped over the calendar areas to make them useful for posterity. I've got that bird on my monitor right this minute. Thank you, Kayanna!
I experimented with transferring an image onto fabric the other day. For my test, I used this completely adorable dachshund drawing by Kayanna Nelson of June Craft. The little fellow is downloadable for personal use at Bloesem Kids.
To try an image transfer, you'll need:
Acrylic gel medium, available at art stores
Fabric
A laser printed image (not inkjet!)
With your finger—or a brush, but I prefer to feel what I'm doing—spread gel medium onto your fabric in the area where you want your image. Not too thin, not too thick; just a nice even layer.
Place your image printed side down onto the sticky fabric and press firmly. Burnish the paper with your thumbnail a bit to be sure the image makes good contact with the fabric. Let it dry completely. 
Dampen the paper with water, then gently rub the paper away from the image with your finger.
The resulting fabric will be a bit stiffer where the gel medium was applied, and you'll be able to see it faintly. I sewed my print into a mini drawstring doggie bag, sized so the area with gel ends near the seams. This way the entire front of the bag is the same stiffness. It's quite cute!
For a good drawstring bag tutorial, check out this one at Skip To My Lou. Since my bag is tiny, I laid the baker's twine inside the top channel before stitching it down, rather than threading it through later.
A collection of coaster projects, nice for keeping or handmade gift giving.
Punched coasters by Mackenzie Sasser
Modern number coasters by Mod Cottage
Stitched cork coasters at Crafting a Green World
Maple leaf coasters at The Long Thread
DIY photo coasters at Phototiller
Tree limb coasters by Mod Home Ec Teacher
Just for fun I've made you a template for a personal calling card. Apparently social calling cards are making a comeback, so you might want to print up a few to hand out at parties, moms' play groups, to new neighbors, or tuck them into your Christmas cards if you've updated your contact info.
In case you don't like orange because there's something wrong with you, there are two other colors to choose from.
Download orange cards, blue cards, or burgundy cards.
Each design is a PDF file with editable fields for typing. After saving the file to your computer, open the PDF in Adobe Reader (free right here if you don't already have it), type in your information, and print at 100% on a sheet of white cardstock. Trim with an X-acto knife or scissors, using the crop marks as guides. The font used in the name field is Euphorigenic, a free download at MyFonts.com. If you don't feel like going to the trouble of fetching it and installing it on your machine, your computer will substitute a font that might be tolerable to you.
(These cards are for personal use only; please don't try to sell the design, decorate your website with it, etc.) Enjoy!
Real Simple magazine offers an assortment of free invitations to download and print. Mom, I'll be waiting for one of those Thanksgiving invitations in the mail. With a ribbon, please.
Let's call this stationery week at How About Orange. Friends inexplicably keep marrying and having babies, so here are some shower invitations I made with a pal last week.
The mom-to-be registered for purple butterfly things, so I had to hold off on the orange cheetah-themed shower that could have been awesome. I think this one might be more tasteful. I made the design in Adobe Illustrator, then cut the cards out with the Silhouette machine. The party information is printed on an interior sheet. It's stapled inside the card along the spine to form a mini booklet. Chartreuse envelopes from Papersource plus these stamps finished it off.
You can download the butterfly template as a PDF file, a zipped Studio file for Silhouette users, or a zipped SVG file for Cricut users. And folks without a digital cutter will have to make do with an X-acto knife. Eek, that's a little bit daunting.
In keeping with yesterday's stationery post, here's a little wedding invitation I did for a friend. I hope she won't mind, but I have to tell you her story. Valerie and her future husband were college acquaintances in Taiwan. Ten years later, they bumped into each other in front of a Starbucks in San Francisco. Both had moved to the US for grad school, then relocated to California on the exact same day many months before the fated Starbucks meeting. Pretty great, right? 
Here are other designs that were part of the process. Congratulations, Valerie!
Tiny Prints is an online stationery company with gazillions of design options, from party and wedding invitations to birth announcements, thank you notes, and address labels. To kick off their brand new holiday greeting card line, Tiny Prints is offering a $50 gift certificate to two How About Orange readers. Spend it on Christmas cards or anything else you like on their site! International readers are invited to participate, too.
How to win a $50 gift certificate:
By Friday, Nov. 5 at midnight CDT, leave a comment on this post mentioning a stationery item from Tiny Prints that caught your eye. Be sure to include a link or other way to contact you. Two winners will be randomly drawn, contacted, and announced right here.
Update: The giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to Xana, commenter 599 and Lexie, commenter 151!
It's Friday, so let's bring your productivity to a screeching halt with Help I Need Help. Along with pharmaceutical remedies in innovative packaging, they also provide hilarious help for your non-physical ailments. Last week I mentioned the site on Twitter, and the kind folks of @HelpRemedies immediately asked whether I suffered from any maladies they hadn't already addressed. I fear confrontation, I truthfully replied. So they created this exercise to fix me. The more you click, the harder you'll laugh. I'm now happy to report that I no longer dread run-ins with animated, shirtless men.
An easy glass etching project on a cheap vase from IKEA.
On a piece of self-adhesive contact paper, punch holes in columns. Then with a scissors, cut out little lines to connect them.
Pull the backing off the contact paper and stick the design to the vase. (No transfer paper needed for this one, unlike my other ill-fated project.) Then glop on some glass etching cream. I used Armour Etch, available at most craft stores.
Let the vase sit for the time recommended on the bottle, about 5 minutes. Then rinse off the cream and remove the stencil. Your vase will now be fancy.
The League of Moveable Type has made League Script #1 available as a free download. I think my early cursive penmanship looked very much like this before it all went to pot.
What are you doing this weekend? Cleaning your bathroom? You'd better cancel those plans and try one of these tutorials for making something pretty with fabric.
Apron tutorial by the ladies of Ink & Spindle, featured on The Crafts Dept.
Blossom bag pattern from Amy Butler's Style Stitches book, provided by Sew Mama Sew
Fabric tape tutorial by Simply Modern Mom
Diaper bag instructions at Warehouse Fabrics
Still experimenting with my Silhouette digital cutter, I tried out some heat transfer material that came with the machine. The result is this tote. I cut my own design from Adobe Illustrator, which went beautifully.
When it came to ironing the pieces onto the bag, I had a little trouble. Though you can't see it in the photo, some little bits of the black shapes aren't quite stuck down all the way on the tote. Maybe I can go back and fix that somehow, but I'm not optimistic. It was a big struggle to get them to adhere to such coarse canvas, so I'd recommend ironing this stuff onto something smoother. I had a wrestling match with my iron and the tote bag. We had to roll around on the ground in a fist fight with some sweating and cursing, but I won. Mostly.
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