I continue to get over excited about stationery. Look at these beauties from Arminho. So simple and smart but softened by the lovely textured, recycled board. Such a striking colour palette to top it off. I never realised I enjoyed rusts and teals this much!
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label design. Show all posts
for your scribbles
I continue to get over excited about stationery. Look at these beauties from Arminho. So simple and smart but softened by the lovely textured, recycled board. Such a striking colour palette to top it off. I never realised I enjoyed rusts and teals this much!
cut & stick
Oooo I do love these cards by by Fair Morning Blue. They have an Aztec feel about them but look as if they were created in some kind of exciting cutting and pasting craft session. I’m such a colour geek and these colour combinations really excite me! Check out the Etsy shop here for more lovely cards for your peepers to feast on.handmade with love
Today the spotlight falls on my good friend Lora, who has recently launched her own accessory business called Lora Dora. It’s early days but her Etsy shop is up and running and full of gorgeous bags in all sorts of colours and patterns. She has been working as a fashion designer since graduating but has chosen to specialise in accessories for her own venture.
Lora and I go way back to the teeny age of 7 and most of our friendship has revolved around art and design. Back in year 3 we would spend ‘wet play’ drawing side by side and funnily enough producing spookily similar pictures. Our secondary school French lessons were less about French and more about doodling cartoons to pass back and forth to each other. Come our BTEC National diploma we were desk buddies, covered in paint and buried under a pile of material and masking tape. Lora moved to London just a few months after we did and is set to give Lora Dora a shot. She has always been a very skilled maker and has tons of drive when it comes to design. Check out her Etsy shop here. She commissioned me to do some branding for Lora and Dora and I happily obliged. It’s very different designing for a fellow creative. She knew exactly what she was after and even gave me a mood board and colour palette which made it a whole lot easier. What a pro!
spring clean
Well once again, 6 months on I'm re-designing The Lovely Drawer again. It's turning out to be a bi-annual occasion, although not intentionally. This time I can conveniently blame it on the season and call it a 'Spring clean'. The good and bad thing about being a designer is your style is constantly evolving as you work and so things that please your eyes one month, may not the next. I guess that's what keeps designing exciting and stops us from becoming stagnant. Any way it's not ground breakingly different but I hope you enjoy the clean up and new colour palette.happy birthday
The Lovely Drawer....
Wow! A whole year of blogging! It seems to have flown by. I started this blog with no real clue about blogging, no big idea and no real direction. All I knew was that I wanted a place to put all my creative endeavors, as well as all the things that inspire me. I was going through a bit of a creative draught, wanting to do more of my own design work but feeling dispondent and uninspired. I then discovered the exciting world of design blogs and started to feel my enthusiasm increase and ideas start flowing. Nick kept on telling me to start a blog of my own, to catalogue all the little projects I did and thought it might motivate me to get more creative. It's pretty handy that where I'm clueless Nick seems to have a bank of knowledge and if not, he'll learn what's needed super quick. He gave me a list of things I needed, I designed and he put the layout together and made it happen. He linked me up with social media, which I wouldn't have really given a second thought to, something I find pretty funny now. Without him this blog may well have been a stack of labelled drawings and diagrams that were never realised.
Someone recently emailed to ask why I chose the name ‘The Lovely Drawer’ and I have to admit I hadn’t really thought about it since choosing way back then. I’d grown up with a Mum that couldn't bare to throw anything away, holding out hope that some day, some how, it might be used for something. She had an ability to see projects and uses in the simplist of things and so, much to my Dad's dismay each last bit was hoarded in various boxes and drawers in our loft. I remember excitedly rifling through this treasure trove, wondering what inspiring gems were lurking inside. I wanted my blog to be like that...an unexpected treat, a feast of colour and fun and hopefully something that might inspire other designers. I also had to slip the word 'lovely' into the name as it's perhaps one of my most used words. I'm reasonably convinced I overuse this little adjective but it's my default describer.
I very quickly realised how much I enjoyed blogging and it certainly has focused my creativity and woven design opportunities into more and more everyday situations. I’ve also learnt a lot! It’s been a constant source of development for all my design skills, which has been brilliant. I can look back at my beginning posts and cringe a little because I’ve progressed since then and I’m sure I’ll say the same in another years time because I know I have so much to learn! But really none of these skills or gifts are mine to celebrate. Any gifting I have comes direct from God and should bring glory to him. I love that I can express my creativity and hope that it shows just a tiny fragment of God’s awesome and far superior creativity. He made the whole Earth; vast mountains, deep oceans, artistic sunsets, colourful seasons, weird and wonderful animals and complex human beings. Everything hangs together as it should because God is a creator and he’s made us to reflect something of who he is. Unsurprisingly, that’s why no matter what our skills, hobby or vocation, so often we end up using our gifts to create and cultivate. This mirrors something far bigger and greater than ourselves! I'm so glad it does, otherwise what's the point?
jewell bright afternoon tea
I’ve recently become very interested and hugely inspired by event styling. America are way ahead of us Brits on this front! The idea of combining two things I love, hospitality and design seems like a perfect idea. Here’s my bright and bold afternoon tea that I arranged for 7 of my friends. I had a lot of fun designing, making and cooking up a storm in the kitchen. The only complaints afterwards were of a few sugar headaches. I’m very excited to get stuck into some more small scale events!
Tissue pom poms are a bit of a ‘thing’ at the moment, I found a tutorial for how to make them yourself!
My advice would be to have a go at baking the Oreo cupcakes above, they were very tasty indeed!
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