Creative Bits | 8: Handmade Paper Bows

This week's creative bit comes just in time for the gift-giving part of the Christmas season. If you're anything like me, you're a sucker for pretty gift packaging. i swoon over this stuff. Sometimes, creating the presentation is as much fun as giving the gift itself. So when I came across this tutorial on how to make a pretty paper bow, I instantly thought about how easy this would be to incorporate into my Christmas present-wrapping this year and how it would add that extra something to a gift. Take a look at the finished product...

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Let's all ooo and ahhh together, ok? The full tutorial can be found here. I've already pinned it so I can go back to it later :).

The creator behind this bow is a new-to-me designer named Meghan Hopkins Sokorai who does custom letterpress and graphic design work for weddings, events and individuals. From what I've seen, she creates beautiful, fun and visually-entertaining pieces! Check out her portfolio. Oh, and in case you're wondering, the gift tag/coaster you see is of her creation as well! You can buy them in her shop if you're interested.

Happy creating!

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Creative Bits is a semi-regular series here on May Richer Fuller Be where I share little tips, tricks and simple do-it-yourself projects from other creative bloggers' minds. I figure if it makes me say, "wow," it's worth passing along to you! And remember, if you want to pin any images that don't belong to me, please click through and pin from the original source!

Click the "Creative Bits Series" tab at the top of the page to see more posts like this.

That Time I Met John & Sherry From Young House Love

I'm still giddy and grinning from ear to ear after meeting John and Sherry from Young House Love last night at FLOR in DC (!!!). It's a little embarrassing how excited I was. I mean, we lived in the same {small} city for four years and  I always hoped to run into them, but it never happened, so you can understand how exciting it was to have a guarantee to meet and chat with them for a hot second.

Here's the play-by-play - mostly for my own posterity so that I can remember the details down the road - but I hope you'll enjoy hearing about it too! Bear with me as over-share.

4:30 - Promptly leave work on time and speed drive quickly home for a fast turnaround.

5:30 - Hop on the bus to Georgetown because parking is a bear down there.

5:40 - Look longingly into the new Jonathan Adler store that I have yet to visit and...WAIT. Is that? Oh my gosh, it is! John and Sherry are in the Jonathan Adler store! I almost yelled, "STOP THE BUS," but I restrained myself. They were meandering around the store and taking photos. Presumably for the blog. I'll keep my eye out for that post. I may or may not have mentioned later when I met them that I saw them in the store. Ok, I definitely did. Not creepy at all.

5:45 - Arrive at FLOR to see this line has already formed.

Don't worry, it got longer. I was about one-third of the way back in a line of probably 300 people. I asked the people at the front of the line how long they'd been there, and they said since 3:30! Now that's commitment. I thought I was doing well getting there 45 minutes early.

6:15 - The cookie truck that I've been eyeing for the past half hour announces that they're giving out free cookies and hot drinks to all the people in line (courtesy of FLOR). I immediately ask the people behind me to save my spot, and I indulge. Thanks Captain Cookie and the Milkman! My molasses cookie and hot apple cider were delicious. You made waiting outside much more bearable. Plus, I hadn't had dinner yet, so I was hungry. Nothing healthier than a cookie, right?

Bytheway, how cute is their truck? I am so impressed with the creativity. 

6:30 - Line starts moving.

6:45 - I can finally see the entrance to FLOR. Hope for thawing my frozen hands and feet is in sight! Another bonus - they're handing out popcorn as we get closer. My "dinner" keeps getting healthier :).

7:00 - Made it in the door. Yippee! Once there, I am greeted by a nice lady who offers me wine. I accept. I should mention that all the FLOR people did a fantastic job handling the enormous amount of people. They were great hosts and deserve lots of high-fives and pats on the back.

7:30 - Inching closer to the front of the line. Eventually I get close enough to take some creeper photos of John and Sherry as they're signing books. Hey, J&S, if you ever read this, I apologize if it looked like I was staring you down for like 15 straight minutes. Know it was out of love. I was just trying to take in every moment I could! I promise I'm a perfectly normal human (that is, until I get all giddy about meeting some of my favorite bloggers!). 

Sherry was hilarious, making jokes with people as she signed books. While I was waiting, she was talking about awesome band names that she'd come up with recently including "Pass the Mustard" - good one, yes? I loved seeing John and Sherry interact with each other, too. They have such an easy-going, down-to-earth attitude about this whole thing and are clearly having a blast.

7:45 - The moment arrived. I walked up to the table and they signed my book. Hooray! (Sherry even complimented my jacket on my way up...yessss.) They were super nice, and you could tell they really wanted to have a conversation with each person as they signed their books. It's not easy to be genuine with 300-plus people, but they managed to do it so well. I told them how I used to live in Richmond, and how I couldn't believe we hadn't run into each other since we frequented so many of the same places while I lived there. It took them coming to my new city to finally meet them!

And of course I couldn't leave without getting a picture with them. 

As I headed out, I kept thinking to myself, "Act cool," when I wanted to jump up and down and do a happy dance. I couldn't help but smile as I walked out the door to catch the bus home. It was a great evening. Thanks so much, John and Sherry, for your awesomeness. You made my month. Keep doing what you do. 

Favorite Blogs

As a new blogger, I am constantly looking to other blogs as examples and inspiration. I think it's super cool how much blogging has grown over the past few years from a foreign concept to completely mainstream. Some are even making a living from it. I mostly follow home/interior/graphic design blogs as my daily reads, and I try not to go too far down the rabbit hole from there - though that's hard not to do! These people are uber-creative and I love keeping up with them. They're almost - dare I say it - like my friends. Except, oh wait, they don't know me at all! It's a little weird right? These blogging relationships. And one thing I appreciate about my favorites is that they keep it real. They aren't afraid to show the good with the bad, the mistakes along with the amazing successes. This is important because it can be so easy to look at a blog with perfect photography, flawlessly styled accessories and happy families and say to yourself, "Man, what a perfect life. Why isn't mine like that?" Rather than applauding their creativity, you get bogged down in your discontentment with your own house/family/life. Let's avoid that sentiment, shall we?

Ok, enough rambling. What I really want to show you today are some of my absolute favorite blogs. You may have been to many of these sites, but I hope I'll be able to introduce you to at least one new one along the way. Let's take a journey down blog-header lane...click on it to go to the site! In alphabetical order...

Phew! I just sent you off on into a giant rabbit hole, didn't I? Oops. And it's only fitting that I end with Young House Love, because I'm going to their book signing tonight! (!!!) I can't wait to meet them. I'm going to be all awkward and silly, but I'm sure it will be great. I'll let you know how it goes!

Thanksgiving Rewind

We had a lovely, lovely time in Virginia with my in-laws for Thanksgiving. Being there was a breath of fresh air (literally and figuratively) away from hustle and bustle of center-of-the-city life. I wanted to share a few highlights of our time there before the freshness of our memories slips away and we're suddenly at a recap of Christmas!

We arrived late Wednesday night and enjoyed catching up with the fam before heading to bed. After a little extra sleep on Thursday morning, we headed out to enjoy some absolutely beautiful weather before settling in to a long food-filled-festival later that day.

We went on a hike at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, taking plenty of time to stop, explore and take in our surroundings.

We managed to grab a family photo mid-way through. Note the furry one's wet legs...someone couldn't muster enough patience to cross the streams on the rocks. The water was a much more direct route - no matter how cold!

Jackson had boundless energy. He may have enjoyed this outing most of all. Three of us took turns on leash duty because he pulled us all the way up and down the mountain!

Hike + beautiful weather + good company = great success.

We spent the rest of the day mostly doing one of three things: cooking, eating, and watching football (Go Skins and Pats!). All very satisfying. Around the dinner table, we each took a turn to catch each other up on our lives since half of us now live in different places. I am grateful for this extra family I gained through marriage. They're a blessing to me. 

Friday the boys went fishing while the girls headed south to Lynchburg to a mecca known as the J.Crew Warehouse Sale. Though we had to wait outside in a line for an hour and a half, inside we got to spend a couple of hours sifting through THIS:

Looks like fun, huh? Ok, not so much, but the prices are SO good, it's worth it. You just dig, dig, dig hoping to run across something in your size, color and fit. This isn't my first J.Crew Warehouse rodeo, so I've kinda got a strategy for how I go about digging through the hundreds of disorganized boxes. That's a post for another time. By the end of it, I spent about $100 for over $800 worth of merchandise. Amazing deals, people, amazing.

Saturday was more low-key, but it did include a stop at one of my most favorite fabric stores: U-Fab. It's a no-frills store full of discounted designer fabrics that are beau-ti-ful. I just love going in there to look at (and be tempted by) all of them. I managed to escape without buying anything, but did snap a few photos of my favorites.

Too bad I don't have a need to add any more fabric to my ever-growing stockpile.

We headed home Sunday morning, but not without a stop to pick up a very important item for the upcoming Christmas season...a tree! We stopped at Crazy Joe's Christmas Tree Farm to cut down our very own Norway Spruce. Here she is behind us before we took her home:

We promptly put her up when we got home, and I strung lights and tinsel garland, and carefully placed ornaments on her branches. Pictures to come. 

That brings us to the end of our Thanksgiving weekend. I hope you enjoyed my little recap! How was your weekend?

Christmas Decorating Inspiration

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I had a great time with my in-laws in Virginia - more to come on that in a future post. Today I want to share some of my inspiration for decorating for Christmas. Yes, it really is time to starting thinking about that! (Although, if you listen to retailers, they'd tell you you should have been thinking about this before Halloween, ha.) I try not to think about decorating for Christmas until after Thanksgiving, but I want to be done early enough in December to be able to enjoy it for a long period of time. Tis the season :).

This year I'm going to stick mostly to four colors: green, white, burlap and silver. Thankfully, most of the Christmas decorations I have are already that color, so it'll be a good starting point. I have a few simple DIY projects planned as well to add to my existing collection. I'll post about those as I finish them up.

To keep my decorating "on track" (so as not to have a disjointed Christmas explosion all over our apartment), I've collected a few images I love for inspiration.

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |

Hope y'all can use some of these images as jumping-off points for your own decorating. I'm off to make some progress myself tonight after work!

Happy Thanksgiving!

We're off spending Thanksgiving and the long weekend with my in-laws, so I just wanted to say...

I hope you have a wonderful day of thanks wherever you may be. I'm looking forward to eating lots of delicious food, spending time with family, watching football, enjoying the great outdoors, doing a little J.Crew warehouse shopping (full report to come when I get back!) and just relaxing.

I'm taking a little blogging break to enjoy this time away...see you next week!

I'm Thankful For...

Since it is Thanksgiving week, I think it's time to take a moment and acknowledge the many blessings I have in my life.

Things like family.

Including my wonderful husband, who I adore.

And even my dog. Ridiculous as he may be.

For friends - old any new - who I can depend on, have great conversations with, and just have plain ole fun with! {Too many for any photos to do them justice!}

For creative people who blog about their creativeness and inspire me. I'll be sharing a list soon of my favorites.

For the changing seasons and the beauty of fall that reminds me that God is the most creative of all.

For knowing that God is in control of my life, which takes away the pressure of me having to have it all figured out and helps me to remember to be joyful in the journey that is this life.

I think that's where I'll leave it for today. There are so many other things, but I'm keeping it simple for now.

What are you grateful for?

Creative Bits | 7: Fancy Duct Tape!?

As I was reading through Young House Love's latest post today, I saw something on their "We're Digging" sidebar that stopped me in my tracks: duct tape. You probably think I've fallen off my rocker, but this is no ordinary duct tape. It's designer duct tape. And it looks a little something like this:

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Ok, now do you think I'm a little less crazy for thinking this stuff is AWESOME? Just think of the many, many creative things you could do with this stuff. These Platypus people are. brilliant. High fives all around. I may have to get some and try it out.

Here are some other favorite patters:

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What do you think? What would you do with patterned duct tape?

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Creative Bits is a semi-regular series here on May Richer Fuller Be where I share little tips, tricks and simple do-it-yourself projects from other creative bloggers' minds. I figure if it makes me say, "wow," it's worth passing along to you! And remember, if you want to pin any images that don't belong to me, please click through and pin from the original source!

Click the "Creative Bits Series" tab at the top of the page to see more posts like this.

Weekend Craftivity: Burlap Wreath

I think I made up a new word in my title today - craftivity?! Craft + activity = craftivity. I think it's kinda snazzy. Kinda like Brad + Angelina = Brangelina, right? Yeah, I'm cool, I know.

Anyway.

This weekend I got the crafting itch, and I knew I wanted to make a fall wreath for our door. I reused a wreath form that I had from a previous year's wreath that I never really loved and covered it in burlap. Remember when I made my autumn bunting out of burlap and said I still had a whole roll to use up? Well, I at least got started on that with my fall wreath. Here it is!

I like how it's rustic and simple. I had the rosettes from another project, so I just reused them as well. This was definitely a "use whatcha got" project. I didn't buy a single thing. It's amazing how much stuff I have lying around just waiting to be used. {Good thing? Bad thing?}

I didn't do a tutorial because I truly just cut long strips of burlap, folded them in half so I'd have a clean edge, and wrapped them around the wreath form. I pinned the ends on the back using straight pins. Any one of you could do this.

The rosettes are made out of long grosgrain ribbons I saved from wedding gifts from Pottery Barn. Again, call me a hoarder, but ribbon is expensive! Why get rid of the nice stuff when you know you can reuse it? They were very easy to make as well. I loosely followed this tutorial when I made them, but all you need to make them is patience and a hot glue gun. Starting at one end, twist the ribbon like you'd twirl a piece of your hair (ok, that sounds a little weird, but the image helps) then start rolling it up like a cinnamon roll (another weird, but helpful image), gluing it together every now and then so it stays together. Does that make sense? If not, just follow the tutorial I linked to above. It has pictures :).

So that's my fall wreath. Did you do any craftivities this weekend?

2012 Christmas Card Designs! {and a fun story behind our family's Christmas card photo}

This year, my mom commissioned me to create our family Christmas card. She gave me free reign on the kind of design, and I knew I wanted to keep it simple, fun and modern. In the end, I came up with two options I thought would my parents would like:

As I've said before, I definitely don't claim to be any sort of professional graphic designer, but I'm pretty proud of these! They ended up going with option 2 if you're curious.

The photo we ended up using was from our trip to Italy this past summer. We were in Venice our last few days and as we were walking to dinner on our last night, we bribed an Italian man (well not bribed - asked very nicely) to take our picture. He was about as excited about doing that as he would have been if he had to get a root canal - it was so strange! But we made the most of it and are pretty happy with the result.

Now, are you wondering why we we're "dancing" randomly by the canals in Venice? There's a back story to that...and it comes from oh-so-long ago in 2010. It goes a little something like this: at my wedding, our photographer (who also happens to be my cousin) caught a photo of my brother, sister-in-law (then girlfriend), Charlie and me on the dance floor. We just froze, mid-dance move, and this candid photo is what came out.

It immediately became one of our absolute favorites from that day, so much so that we decided to recreate it at my brother's wedding the following year...

There's actually one of my whole family (including my parents), that I can't currently locate (arg), that we used as our Christmas card last year. As a result, we've sort of started a little tradition of doing that pose each year for our family Christmas card photo. Cute, huh?

So there's the story of my parents' Christmas card. Do you have any traditions for your family's card? Poses? Matching outfits? Do tell!

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P.S. Like I mentioned in an earlier post this week, if you like either of these designs and want to use one of them for your Christmas card this year, let me know, and we'll work it out. I can put them in my Etsy shop if there's some interest!

Creative Bits | 6

Happy Wednesday!

Have you ever bought an item just for the pretty container it came in? Or saved a container because you thought it would be useful some day? I totally have. In fact, I have two silver coffee canisters sitting on my kitchen counter just waiting for a new purpose (This kind of thing may or may not have happened a few times in the past - please don't tell hoarders about me! Ha.).

Well good ole Martha Stewart has found a great use for these kinds of re-purposed containers - refrigerator magnet catch-alls! Look how pretty they look here:

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Again, this is one of those things that anyone could do. Grab a container, stick a magnet (probably a pretty strong one) on it, and slap it on your fridge. Easy peasy.

And that's your creative bit for the day :).

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Creative Bits is a semi-regular series here on May Richer Fuller Be where I share little tips, tricks and simple do-it-yourself projects from other creative bloggers' minds. I figure if it makes me say, "wow," it's worth passing along to you! And remember, if you want to pin any images that don't belong to me, please click through and pin from the original source!

Click the "Creative Bits Series" tab at the top of the page to see more posts like this.

Favorite Fonts

Recently, I've had a blast designing some invitations, greeting cards, calendars and printables. I've shared some of these on the blog including my parents' Christmas party invitation, 2013 desk calendars (click the button on the right sidebar to see them in my Etsy shop), and Do.Buy.Eat. printables. Part of the fun of graphic design is finding new fonts/typefaces to use.

Side note: I'll just get on my soapbox for a moment here and say that - warning - there are some really bad fonts out there. {*ahem* comic sans - I'm talking about you.} Avoid them. I know you can do it. A good-looking font can make or break a project or design.

***Update! I ran across this post today on bad typefaces. It explains some of the reasoning behind those nevereverusethem typefaces. For your reading pleasure :).

Ok, back to the rest of the post...

I've always been a font lover, and have "collected" a few favorites in recent years. So today I thought I'd share those with you in case you, too, have a love for typography!

These are my twenty current faves:

If you like any of these, you can click on the individual font to go to the site where you can download it. Many (actually, maybe all?) are free! And In case you were wondering, I used Sketch Block and Freebooter in my parents' Christmas party invitation. I love mixing block- and script-style fonts together. Makes for a big impact. 

In the next few days, I'm going to be posting some Christmas photo cards I've designed. If you're interested in using any of my designs for your own cards this year, let me know, and I'm sure we can work something out! 

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P.S. A couple of other blogs have done a post or a series on fonts, namely, jones design company and the handmade home. Many thanks to them for their inspiration and for sharing some of these fonts with me and their many, many readers!