These new watermelon pincushions will traveling along with me to the Brooklyn Flea this weekend. I will be selling a few of them along with some other fun new stuff at the New New Etsy team booth. Please stop by and say hi if you’re in the neighborhood.
Also: this is a little far off but I am please as punch to be selling my wares at Renegade San Francisco with Siri of Treehouse. I can’t wait!

I am just over the moon about these beautiful prints from Mociun ’s fall line. I’ve been wanting to splurge on one of her trademark tie front dresses but I might have a to wait it out for a few month until this one here hits the stores.

One of my favorite parts of the Providence trip was the RISD alumni sale. There are so many craft sales now so it’s hard to have any expectations going in, but this sale had some really special things.

I particularly loved Ann P. Smith’s robots, made from discarded electronics and broken machine parts. I like that you can visually identify some of the pieces: a watch gear here, a metal spring there.

Smith’s robots are sold in boutiques, displayed in galleries and used as illustrations in magazines and advertisements. For more info on her and some really cool animation of a few of the robots, check out her site.

I love this collage of piles and piles of hand dyed paper garlands by designer Sophie Cuvelier.

They reminded me of an image I have had in my “archives” for a long time and sent me running for my old inspiration books.

So cool right? I especially like the messiness of the red string.

You can purchase some of Sophie’s garlands in the Selvedge shop.

Oh, I wish I had known about this last week!

The World Beach Project is a collaborative art project concepted and organized by artist Sue Lawty and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sue’s idea was to have people all over the globe submit drawings and sculptures they have made with stones on the beach.

photo submitted by Peter, Clare, Liz, Matt, Jack, Dan, Katie, Jess James, Sue Lawty & friends in Porth Ysgo, Wales

From Sue’s blog: “World Beach was conceived as a global drawing project; a stone drawing project that would speak about time, place, geology and the base instinct of touch. Drawings made on shorelines all over the world, which although erased by the next tide or rains, would be collected within the V&A to become a permanent record of the individual human desire to make pattern.”

photo submitted by Alex Whittlesea of Minnis Bay, Birchington, Kent

“To pick up a rock, is to touch base. Touching stones gives us a primal, spiritual connection with the earth. When we handle a stone, we hold in our hands a small drawing, a tiny piece of the map; we are holding time.”

photo submitted by Chris Dunseath of Appledore, Devon

To find out more about this project and how to send in photos of your own stone patterns, click here.

…craftydabbler
Congrats, you are the winner of The Pillow Book!
For the record, I have five pillows: two sets of standard pillows and one cute little decorative one.

Last weekend, Mr. Loveforever and I celebrated our 2 year wedding anniversary by getting out of town for a little weekend trip to Rhode Island. We spent 2 days in the lovely city of Providence (totally number one on our list of places to move when we get out of New York) and one last wonderful afternoon driving down the coast.

I spent most of my childhood summers on the various beaches of Rhode Island. Most of us Nutmeggers (yes, that’s what we call people from Connecticut, don’t laugh), even ones like me who grew up on the coast, like to leave the Sound for the real ocean in the summer. It was so fun to take Mr. Loveforever to my coast (he’s from the west one) and show him parts of my childhood: the beach where I wiped out on an inner-tube and broke one of my teeth, the hippie stores in Charleston where I bought incense and cheap jewelry and the tacky mini-golf place that we begged to go to each year. We gorged ourselves on clam cakes and chowder and walked down the beach, picking up impossibly round rocks and dodging the tide. It was absolutely perfect.

Hello there!

I’ve been wanting to try out a new design for a while so here it is. Mr. Loveforever and I are working out a few kinks still but I hope you like it.

Nathalie Lété is an artist and designer who has lent her creative hand to everything from hand-tufted rugs to chocolates. I love the collaged, painterly quality that runs through all of her work regardless of the medium.

Lete’s most recent collaboration with Anthropologie yields bedding covered in birds and branches and ceramic knobs chaped like flowers. She is also showing some of her work in the gallery at the Rockefeller Center store.

Two great new books have recently landed in my mailbox and I wanted to share them with you.

Apartment Therapy Presents is the new book by Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, the man behind the ever-popular AT blog. It’s a compendium of fantastic homes and design solutions for people who don’t have millions of dollars to drop on decor. Part glossy coffee table book, part how-to tome, each home profile includes floor plans, resource lists and candid interviews with the inhabitants on “how they did it”.

A few of my favorites were:

The modern and slightly kitchy woodsy decor of Jane and Darko’s “Cozy Thicket”

The colorful, industrial chic of Shannon and Emmet’s “From Factory to Family”

Yoktan’s clever use of salvaged materials (like the vintage freezer door “wall art” on the right!) in his “Tenement of the Found”

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has more creativity than cash and is looking to do a little (or big) redecorating project.

The second book is The Pillow Book by Shannon Okey. Speaking of more creativity than cash, pillows are a really easy way to change the look of a room or add some color.

The Pillow Book features 25 patterns for all sorts of pillows from bolsters to chair pads to ottomans and shows you how to add a flange, ruffles or trim to a basic throw pillow.

So, here’s the fun part: Just tell me how many pillows you think should be on a perfectly made bed in the comments by Friday at 8 pm est and I will randomly pick a person to receive this great book!