If your name appears below, you’ve won the Fabulous Stationery contest! Congrats! I’ll be in touch with you today for your mailing address so I can send along your tote bag. Fabulous Stationery will email your $50 gift certificate within the next few days.
Thanks again to all that entered, it was fun to see all of the entries and the amount of talented readers out there. You are all closet designers, aren’t you!? We’ll have one more contest this year (mid Sept), and then I’ll line up some more for 2008, one per quarter.
#95 Abbey Dawn, Australia.
#106 Dhruti Dogra, India.
Entry #2 Carlene Vitali, Illinois.
Entry #9 Silvia Amtmann, Washington.I’m a bit under the weather today so I’m going to chill out and do nothing all day. I guess this is the joy of freelance, being able to drop everything now and then. But I’ll be back tomorrow, so see you then everyone!
(image from holly becker for decor8)
Remember… There’s still time to cast your vote and find our 4 winners.
You have until midnight tonight EST to vote, winners will be announced here on decor8 tomorrow, Thursday, August 16th.
I found a beautiful blog today written by Kathleen Rossi-Howell called Senseless Acts of Beauty, she also runs Liquid Sky Arts (what a gorgeous shop this is!). Remember the Papaya stationery that I blogged earlier? Some of their designs are from the very talented Kathleen. I am in love with the fish design with their adorable swishy tails. So now I’m off to read her blog and learn more about her process. Want to come along with me?
Psst: She has another blog with some of her favorite photos and she’s on flickr too. Wow, what a talented lady!
(image from liquid sky arts)
To continue my earlier post on the new Shabby Chic collections, I thought I’d share some news that came to me via Rachel’s in-house PR person (Renee). I was on a call with her yesterday so I have the scoop straight from the source for all you RA fans!
Their goal is to open 50 new Shabby Chic stores by 2010, with a few opening soon, Shabby Chic in Natick, MA (at the Natick Collection 9/7), and another in Lenox Square, Atlanta (during the second week of October). Rachel is working on another book and her website is soon to re-launch, too. And remember those episodes I told you about when she had her own show? They’ll soon be available on DVD in stores. Looks like we’ll be seeing a lot more of Rachel Ashwell. Here are a few more images that Renee sent over for you to enjoy.
Renee is working with Rachel to see if I can interview her for decor8, so if you have any questions that you’d like for me to ask, please let me know. It will not be a podcast, but a telephone interview that I’ll turn into a blog post. All questions will be considered, so fire away!
(images from shabby chic)
I heard about Papaya via Yvonne and fell in love with the imagery and colors used in this stationery line. Some of these cards would be so pretty framed, others to give (of course), and still others to incorporate into your collage art, decoupage projects, or simply to tack on your inspiration board. I say this all the time, but use things like fabrics and greeting cards to create a palette for a room you want to redux. Why stress out over pulling together the perfect colors when you can look at your favorite pattern and pull the colors from there?
For instance, if you love a card, take it with you to the paint store and match paint chips to the colors in the card. Match them as perfectly as you can. Then bring them home and lay them out on a pure white surface next to the card. Having the colors in solid squares helps you determine where you’d like the color in your room and how much of it. Look at the card design to determine how much of each color was used in the design.
Let’s say you like this card. Here you see vibrant turquoise and pinks, tempered by gray (the card border), black (in her hat), brown (in the wings), olive and other tones of green, etc. Then there’s this tiny hint of mustard. So I’m thinking that if you build a room around this card, you can either use mustard as gold (hardware), or mustard can be part of a textile you find. The brown can be your wood tones. You may even decide that you’d like to translate the colors a little differently, maybe less pink and more mustard. Bring pink in with flowers or a ceramic bowl for your keys.
Get inside the mind of a graphic designer for a minute as you lay out your colors and inspiration before you. If you have magazine clippings of the sofa you want, the chair you’ve been drooling over, pull these in too. Determine where you want your colors. Do you want color on the wall? Or just the soft furnishings? Do you want to paint your walls white and paint only the moldings in color, perhaps in a pale turquoise? There are so many options when it comes to decorating, and for those who find themselves color confused, taking inspiration from textiles, cards, etc. is a great way to get your creative wheels turning. You can start by looking for your inspiration right here.
(images from papaya)
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