Tailgate party free printable invitation

Compliments of the team at Ellinée, get a free printable PDF you can customize with your own information, inviting your buddies to a tailgate party.

Useful book: Sew Up a Home Makeover

I just got ahold of a copy of the new Lexie Barnes book, Sew Up a Home Makeover: 50 Simple Sewing Projects to Transform Your Space. It was fun to see my fabrics featured on a few items, including this cute butterfly chair and pillow. The book is full of instructions for customizing everything with fabric: a roller shade, sofa slipcover, upholstered headboard, duvet cover, reversible placemats, marshmallow floor pouf, switch plate cover, window curtains... and a mere 42 other things. It's really too bad Lexie was running low on ideas.

Rex Ray wall decals at Blik

Friends, humans, countrymen, lend me your eyes! My friend Susie just sent over a link to these new wall decals at Blik, saying "You like Rex Ray, right?" Heck yes I do. While I feverishly try to think of a place to put these, you should go have a look if you like playful, retro graphics.

Every few months I hear someone say that wall decals aren't in anymore. Nonsense. What better way to put a cool image on your blank wall, for relatively little cash, that won't harm your paint job? Long live wall decals!

Giveaway: The Key to Taking Pictures Like a Professional Photographer

Maybe you splurged on a digital SLR camera, imagining yourself taking dreamy photos like a pro. Except that you haven't quite gotten around to learning how, so your camera is permanently stuck on the auto setting. You know you can do better... but how? If that's you, Katie Evans' new e-book, The Key to Taking Pictures Like a Professional Photographer, will help you show that camera who's boss.

Katie writes in a conversational style that's friendly and accessible, and won't make you throw yourself off a bridge when you read about f-stops and shutter speeds. Topics include types of lenses, exposure, settings, lighting, how to get subjects to relax and act like normal people, composing pictures, and fixing up your photos using software. Some of my favorite tips are:
• How to get your subject's eyes to look sparkly instead of dull
• How to make a DIY clip for your camera's flash to minimize the harsh edges you usually get
• How to make a so-so photo great with a few editing tricks

Win a free copy
Katie is giving away five free e-books, each a $35 value. Want one? Leave a comment here with your email address or other way of contacting you. And mention something interesting you'd like to photograph. (I'm betting 70% of the answers will be kids, but we'll see.) Five winners will be selected, contacted, and announced in this post. Giveaway closes at midnight CT on Friday, Sept. 30th.

Get a discount
Interested in purchasing a book? Enter the code ORANGE at checkout and get $5 off the e-book, now through Oct. 7th.

Update: The giveaway is now closed. Congrats to lucky random winners Robyn, Britt, Jolkipalki, Rachel, and Jessica! They've been contacted and will be soon be taking better pictures.

Metallic oil-based Sharpies = nice

I bought a couple of oil-based Sharpies at Michael's recently—the package says they'll write on metal, pottery, wood, rubber, glass, plastic, and more. I chose a two-pack with gold and silver pens and tried one out on this ceramic cup. Nifty! The paint is opaque and shiny and didn't bead up. Now I'm plotting what else needs gold and silverizing. I'm like Midas with markers.

Make your own wall art

Folks planning to spruce up the house might enjoy these budget-friendly DIY wall art projects. Some cool ideas for sad and naked walls:
Woodgrain contact paper stripes from Maude at Apartment Therapy
Trendy pinwheel painting by Elise Blaha Cripe
A canvas full of words from Alisa Burke
Log wall display by Liv and Jeff McMillan at Curbly

As for me, I've got another chair makeover planned for the weekend. If it's a success, I'll show you next week. If it flops, just pretend I never mentioned it.

Free printable cards and illustrations

Find a pile of charming illustrations you can print out at The Handmade Home, including a set of retro automobiles. You can also download an alphabet for the nursery, kitchen utensils, campers, and more. Use them as postcards, gift tags, framed art, you name it. See all the free printables here. Also: it would be kind of awesome if I drove an orange station wagon.

Quiz: Typography terms

Are you interested in typography? Fontroduction is a little website that teaches you basic terms and classifications. Test yourself with a quiz at the end. A note: Music plays when you complete the quiz, so if you're sneakily using this as a diversion at work, turn your sound off first!

Reupholstered Steelcase chair project

I paid my first visit to Jubilee Furniture a couple weeks ago and returned with a car full of projects. Jubilee is a giant furniture resale shop in Carol Stream, a Chicago suburb. You'll find mid-century goodies mixed with more contemporary pieces—a whole lot of awesome combined with some things that look like hopeless cases to my non-expert decorator eyeballs. It's a treasure hunt. And somehow Jubilee has assembled a staff made up of the nicest people on the planet, so go visit them! Highlights from new inventory are posted regularly on their blog.

But anyway. While I was there, I came upon two 1982 Steelcase task chairs begging with sad puppy eyes to be rescued. They could replace the not-very-comfy wooden dining chairs Alex and I use at our desks. The challenge was figuring out how to get them apart and re-cover them, because the stained, scratchy burlap-like upholstery had to go. After studying them in the store it was still a conundrum, but Susan the manager cheered us on. (Hi Susan!) So into the car they went.

And we conquered! Say hello to our refurbished woodgrain office chairs. We're in love. In case you, too, ever encounter a Steelcase task chair begging for a re-do, read on to see what we did.

Continue reading »

Make simple tote bags with The Purl Bee

Outside Oslo, the fabric line I designed for The Needle Shop, is now stocked at Purl Soho. A beautiful store in New York City, Purl Soho has an equally lovely blog that showcases projects made from the goodies they sell. Check out these Oslo tote bags that take just twenty minutes to whip up. Find a link to the instructions in The Purl Bee post right here.

Free vector ornaments and frames

The other night I was designing something for a friend's wedding and needed some fancy curlicues. I could make some—but I'm lazy. I opted for a quick internet search for free vector graphics and found lots of useful goodies.

If you have a vector editing program like Adobe Illustrator, you might be interested in these from the Vector Graphics Blog:
Ornate design elements
Vintage decorative elements
Vintage decorative frames
Vintage ornate frames

Plus lots more where those came from. A word of caution: you'll need to navigate through a minefield of advertising links to get these, so be careful what you click. Skip the Google ads and click "Download link" midway down the page. When directed to MediaFire, ignore all the large flashing buttons! Look for the name of the .zip file and directly underneath, choose "Click here to start download from MediaFire."

My new favorite magazine

Can the Danish magazine BoligLiv be my new favorite magazine, even though I can't read a word of it? Awhile back they contacted me for permission to use a small photo of my DIY bunting birthday card, offering to send over a magazine when the September issue was printed.

Guys, it's so lovely and full of products I'm coveting. Sofas! Bookshelves! Pillows! I want to make all the recipes and live in all the beautifully photographed homes. Apparently in Denmark, everything is spare and modern with a dose of quirkiness to keep it fun.

Google suggests that BoligLiv means "housing life." If that's a weird translation, maybe a Danish reader can help me out. Visit BoligLiv's site right here, translated into English. Be sure to check out the Creative Ideas section. Some project highlights:

A customized roller shade with instructions right here. (Or rather, "A drop down with a personal aside," as Google helpfully informs us.)

A mismatched mosaic tile backsplash, right here. Enjoy browsing!

How to make wall art from wood scraps

Janine at Salvage Love has posted a tutorial for the DIY wall art she made for her living room. She snatched up a pile of leftover wood scraps from her dad and transformed them into this! Learn how right here. You don't have to paint yours orange, but I highly recommend it.

(Photos by Claire Ferrante)

Giveaway: Jo Totes camera bags

It's giveaway central around here! Anyone who entered last month's camera bag giveaway might be pleased to get another shot at a gorgeous bag built for cameras. Jo Totes, specializing in "camera bags for ladies," is giving away two bags to How About Orange readers. Winners can pick any style and color they want from the Jo Totes site. Those of you outside the U.S. are included, too, so don't be shy.

Every bag is padded and features repositionable dividers so you can customize the interior for the number of lenses and amount of gear you're toting. Each bag also has extra pockets, a top-zippered closure, a comfy shoulder strap, and a removable cross-body strap.

I have the Betsy bag (pictured below) in Chocolate, and I love it. Even the flap is a zippered pocket. Pretty sweet. It's also equipped with a small fan that causes one's hair to blow photogenically in the breeze. You'll look really good while carrying it.

So I lied about the fan. Whatever. You'll still look good carrying it.

Want to win a bag? Just leave a comment on this post with your favorite style and color. Make sure you leave your email address, a link, or other way of contacting you. The giveaway closes Friday, Sept. 16 at midnight CT. Winners will be randomly drawn, contacted, and announced in this post.

Update: Giveaway is now closed. Congrats to winners Natalie, comment #1455, and Krista, comment #606!

Adventures in canning + printable jar labels

The folks at SweetPreservation.com are aiming to make canning cool for a new generation. They invited me to be a "canbassador" again this year, sending over a generous box of Washington state stone fruits. After my first low-budget but highly-successful canning effort last year, I was happy to try again. Though I still refuse to buy a giant pot and special tongs. And I couldn't find any pectin at the grocery store, so I went for recipes that use just fruit and sugar.

This year I made plum jam using this easy recipe, altered to a 1:1 ratio of plums and sugar as suggested in the comments. I chopped the plums up with a kitchen knife. The resulting jam is a little runnier than I'd have liked, but very yummy. The only mishap occurred when my back was turned and the pot of plums boiled over, creating a delicious lake of plum syrup on my stovetop. Oh well. I needed to clean it anyway.

I made peach butter, too, with this crock pot method. The house smelled like a country gift shop all day. I halved the recipe to fit in my pot and omitted the cloves, but the peach butter is still a little too spiced for my taste. Next time I'm ditching the allspice, too. The consistency turned out perfectly, and the method for skinning the peaches worked like a charm.

I also whipped up a printable freebie for some jar labels. The circles are 2" in diameter when printed at 100%, sized to fit on the lids of small jam jars. You can also punch a hole in the top and tie them to a jar with baker's twine. Download a PDF right here, then print out the page and write on the labels.

Check out SweetPreservation.com for more free printables and recipes!

Play with silk online

A little fun for Friday. Via Jeannie Jeannie, I bumped into Silk, a site where you create artwork that resembles silk blowing in the breeze. Just click your mouse and drag. While you're over there, scroll down the page a bit and grab a set of four desktop wallpapers.

Styled magazine: free DIY ideas, recipes, and printables

The second issue of Styled magazine hit the internet yesterday, and it's lovely! Full of beautiful photos, recipes, DIY ideas, and entertaining tips, this issue's theme is autumn merry-making.

My favorites were the DIY gilded bottle project and Melissa Esplin and Jill De Haan's pretty six-piece printable party stationery set. The best thing about online mags are the clickable links, so don't miss a single free download, product source, or project tutorial.

Flip through the entire magazine online, read the PDF on your iPad, or buy a printed copy right here.

How to "wallpaper" using fabric

I couldn't stand our boring white door anymore. Something had to be done. So over the weekend, we wallpapered it with a big, fun piece of fabric. I love it. And it's useful, too. There are four white doors in this corner of the apartment—bedroom, bathroom, coat closet, and outer door—and sometimes departing guests get confused about which one they came through. Now we'll just tell them to exit through the village.

This fabric is fairly thin cotton from IKEA. It's called Britten Hus and designed by someone named Emma Jones. No relation that I know of, but clearly someone I would like. She's also got this handwriting print which I adore. Someone should use it! Bed sheets would work really well for this project, too.

For this DIY fabric wallpaper project, you'll need water, cornstarch, a big brush (or a paint roller if you want to do a larger wall), scissors, and a craft knife if you have obstacles like we did.

First mix up your paste, since it will need time to cool. I made way too much, but better safe than sorry. I don't think I even used half of it, so you might want to cut this recipe down. I adjusted a bit to get a nice consistency that's thickened, but pourable. Like really thick gravy.

Boil 4 cups of water in a pot. Mix about 3/8 cup cornstarch with a little water in a small bowl until the powder is dissolved. Add the cornstarch mixture to the water slowly while stirring. Boil until thickened and then let it cool.

In the meantime, measure the area you want to wallpaper and cut your fabric to size. I just made a small cut in the edge of my fabric and tore each side, since I knew it would make a straighter line than I could cut. I trusted that the design was printed to be aligned with the grain.

Brush the entire door with paste, then begin applying fabric from the top down, adjusting and smoothing as you go. The paste is very forgiving and will allow you to smooth out wrinkles or peel a section back off and reposition it. If you need more paste in dry spots, just brush more on. It doesn't change the color of the fabric when it's dry.


Use a scissors or Xacto knife to cut around any obstacles. We made a few quick slits where the lock and doorknob were, just to get the fabric fitted over them so we could continue smoothing out the rest of the door. Then we went back and trimmed carefully around the hardware with a knife. We applied more paste to stick down the raw edges.

Finally, we went back around the sides of the door and brushed on a little extra paste to smooth down any loose threads and keep the raw ends from fraying. If you like, you can brush another coat of paste over the entire door, decoupage style. Our fabric was stuck down well enough and I liked the soft fabric texture, so I opted not to. If you use thicker fabric, it might be a good idea to glue it down a little better with a top coat, though.

Our end result was smooth and perfectly wrinkle free. Love it!

Here's the doorknob with still-damp fabric around it.

When you're tired of the fabric, just pull it off and your paint job is unharmed. You may need to use a damp sponge to wipe off any clear paste residue or thread stragglers. I'd also suggest machine washing brightly colored fabric first to make sure the dyes don't bleed when the fabric is moistened with paste—do a small test first.

Update: To show how the fabric peels off, I pasted another chunk onto my hallway wall, then pulled it off.

The fabric peeled off easily. In this case, the edge of the glued area showed slightly. After taking this photo, I went over it with a damp sponge to see if I could erase it, but that just made the faintly darker area larger. The slight discoloration is the result of getting the wall damp. The walls in my hallway have flat paint, which doesn't like wetness—it always shows every water drip and isn't very wipeable. I don't mind, since this part of the hallway is dim and it doesn't show. Or I can always wipe the whole wall with a moist sponge and it will all match, ha! I suspect if your paint finish is satin or semi-gloss, which are more wipeable, you won't have any issues at all.

So if your wall or door has flat paint, you might want to cover the entire surface with fabric so you don't see any discolored edges where the fabric starts and stops.

6/14/13 Update, two years later: I pulled all the fabric off the door. Super easy, and no need to repaint. Here's an action photo.

Giveaway: Outside Oslo fabric yardage

Greetings, everyone. To kick off this post-Labor Day week, how about a little fabric giveaway? No, scratch that. How about a big fabric giveaway, totaling nearly $500? With not one, but ten winners!

The Needle Shop, manufacturer of the latest textile line I designed, would like to put some Outside Oslo fabric into your hands. This retro-inspired collection is 54" wide, home dec-weight cotton canvas. It's perfect for making bags, purses, curtains, tablecloths, pillows, furniture, you name it. (Or begging your mom to make those items for you; that's usually what I do. It's much easier.)

Here are a few of the awesome projects from the Outside Oslo Flickr group, where everyone is invited to add photos of their finished work:

Check out the box pouches from Belly of a Whale, or Little Ticket's sweet Ingrid dress. And the jacket by Dashasel is amazing! Inspired yet?

The prizes
Ten randomly selected winners will receive their choice of any three yards of fabric from the Outside Oslo collection. You can get continuous yardage of one design, or mix and match prints (pieces must be at least 1/2 yard). Choose from six different designs in two colorways, Dawn and Dusk. For a two-page PDF that shows the choices, click here.

Above is the Dawn colorway, and below is the Dusk colorway.

How to enter
To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this post. Be sure to include a link, email address, or other way of contacting you. And if you've got a favorite fabric store or a manufacturer of cool products that might be interested in some Oslo, mention that, too. The Needle Shop would be happy to send them a bit of info about the line.

The giveaway closes Friday, Sept. 9 at midnight CT. Winners will be randomly drawn, contacted by The Needle Shop, and announced here the following week. International readers are welcome to enter, too.

If you're a fan of The Needle Shop, follow them on Facebook or Twitter. And if you need to purchase more Outside Oslo for yourself, visit their online shop any time. Good luck, everyone!

Update: Giveaway is now closed. Ten lucky winners have been contacted. Congratulations to Jane, Melissa, Anne-Laure, Lamina, Jessica, Katie, Mette, Mandi, Andrea, and Danielle!

For folks who didn't win but would like to grab some Oslo, check out the list of stockists.

DIY chair makeover tutorials

With a long weekend ahead of us, my thoughts turn to home projects. A conversation about seating last night has prompted this post: a smattering of ideas for transforming chairs. My favorite? The DIY herringbone tutorial from Martha Stewart, above.

For more inspiration, also check out:
Maya Made's freezer paper stenciled chair
Love.Life.Larson's simple striped chair
Ana White's pleated slipcover
How Joyful's office chair reupholstery project

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone!

Vintage-inspired desktop wallpapers at Fossil

The graphics gurus at Fossil have released another set of wallpapers for your computer, smart phone, or tablet. Choose from eight designs. To grab them, visit Fossil Life Style, select "Love our Graphics" from the category drop-down menu, and click on Wallpapers: Favorite Fall Graphics.