Let's Catch Those Dreams

[ keep it cool ]

I have always been drawn to these bedroom commodities for as long as I can remember. When I bought my first dream catcher I didn't know much about where they were from or what they were about. I have always just found them to be beautiful and calming. While I can see how some people may find them to be offensive because of their cultural appropriation, I find them to be a dreamy marriage of natural elements and structural form. They may not be every bodies cup of tea, but there sure are a lot of great ways to style them into everyday spaces. 

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I Wanna See Your Peacock

[ tone it down ]

Originally imported from East Asia, these outdoor statement pieces were inspired by the splendid peacock throne originally designed for Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Peacock chairs were ever present in the 60's until the 70's when they became an outdated commodity. In the last five years or so they have been creeping up in major furniture lines accompanied with an indulgent price tag.So your best bet would be to source a second hand number and make a weekend project out of it. 

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An Illustration / Trainee Mama

[ check out Trainee Mama for full design ]

I'm really excited to share my most recent illustration that I've been working on this past week for a new blog, Trainee Mama. Peta, who ordinarily blogs over at The Sea & Me Change, has started a sassy new side blog about her transition into motherhood. If you're a first time mum, or a mum to be, join Peta as she shares her "experiences, triumphs, catastrophe's and life". I've really enjoyed what I've read so far, and as a first time mum myself am looking forward to reading along with her experiences. 

Wedding Invitations

Today most of my family is in Bali for my cousin Mandy's wedding. Earlier in the year I mentioned that I was working on some wedding invitations that I never got around to sharing. These invitations were a lot of fun to design, and were not usually my 'style' of designing so they were also a real challenge. Mandy is an effortless creative with really fantastic ideas (if she had her own blog it would be an overnight hit), and her 'travel' themed wedding is going to be amazing. Mandy & her partner Ben travel a lot, and Ben is a pilot - hence their theme. The wedding invitation was inspired by the Australian passport with the identification page displaying all the official details of the wedding. Their wedding logo is two lady beetles that is explained on the second page of the invite with a cutesy poem which Mandy's sister Sophie wrote. She also wrote a couple of other little poems to dress up your standard information. Mandy wanted the passport invitation to be a keep sake and have an accompanying form of invite that you could rsvp with. For this part of the invite a boarding pass was the inspiration - which I thought was absolutely brilliant! Another really neat aspect to this wedding package was the little business card which you could hand to your taxi driver and it has the wedding venues directions on the back in Balinese. I'm really excited to see photos from the wedding as Luke & I weren't able to go as Romy's due date was the 21st of May. As sad as I am that I can't be there today, it's nothing a big bear hug from my daughter won't fix!

My Illustrations Elsewhere

Silhouetted

A couple of months ago Rose Eva, who blogs over at Silhouetted, commissioned four custom illustrations from me. Rose Eva was an absolute delight to work with and being a designer herself, was quite specific with what she wanted for her illustrations. And while it is fun to be given free range when creating custom portraits and illustrations, I found it to be just as nice to have clear-cut boundaries. You can find all four of the illustrations on her blog navigation pages. Go check them out! And if you would like something similar for your blog, send me an email.

Do Something Awesome

Everybody Needs Mustache Font

[Click Here, Feel Happy]

Earlier this year I bought a new iMac, and I still have all my music, photos, drawings, designs, documents and fonts on my MacBook. Starting with the funnest thing to update, this evening I started to work my way through fonts. During the five glorious years I had my MacBook I acquired quite the collection of lovely fonts, and some not so delightful ones that I kept in my font book anyway. Rather than just transfer them over because I like to do things the hard way, I spent the better part of my evening looking at my favourite typornography site - DaFont. I found some stellar new fonts, and my absolutely new favourite thing ever - Sanchez Mustache Font!

Paint Chip Wall Art

Last week my sister sent me a couple of really neat links to some DIY projects, and last Friday I crossed 'How To Make Easy Paint Chip Wall Art' posted on How About Orange, off of my list of things to do. I really enjoyed making this even though mine is really rough and not as neat as it could have been. I plan on having another go at this DIY because it was so easy, enjoyable, and most of all cheap! I bought this frame for $5 at Big W and picked up the paint chips from the hardware store. The colour possibilities are endless and although the colours in mine aren't visually offensive, I think it is a little too busy. Next time I'm going to try it with a contrasting palette. Click here for the full tutorial.

Read Your Book In Bed/Easy Photo Editing

For a while now I've been lusting after a wooden tea tray, and at the start of this week I found one I liked enough to introduce to my tea drinking paraphernalia. It was broken in quite purposefully today, which was an especially cold and reading-a-book-in-bed afternoon. 

One of my goals this year was to make more of an effort/spark my interest with photoshop, so I tried out a super duper easy photo editing tutorial to give your photos a vintage feel. 

1. Open your desired photo in photoshop
2. Set colour palette foreground colour # value to ff0000, and background colour # value to 00ff00
3. Duplicate layer
4. Select new layer, & select Gradient Map in Images>Adjustments
5. Select layer>Layer Style>Blending Options. In pop up box set blend mode to colour and opacity to 50%
6. Flatten image
7. Add noise filter by selecting Filter>Noise>Add Noise, set amount to 2%, select distribution as Gaussian & tick the monochromatic box
8. Done!

I played around and adjusted the tone and contrast levels on my image afterwards. For a more detailed step by step explanation click here. Alternatively, you could just use instagram!

Lovely Blog Headers

I'm not going to lie, I'm a bit of a sucker for a neat blog header. Its usually the first thing I see on a blog, and I have in the past followed blogs purely because they have been well designed. When I see neat designs I like, I keep them in folders on my iMac for design inspiration for when I'm doing posters, invitations or illustrations. I have a blog header folder because I come across so so many lovely headers all the time. I'm still in the process of transferring all my files from my Macbook onto my iMac, and while I was doing so I saw the blog header folder and thought I'd put them to use and share a couple of headers I like.