Design Folder: Your Online Design and Decorating Resource

diy: crepe-paper flowers

Crepe-paper flowers are among my favorite craft projects back in grade school! Martha Stewart Weddings has a nice tutorial on how to make them in two ways: single-petal and continuous-petal methods. If you plan to give something to your friends and loved ones on Valentine’s Day, these flowers make easy and very pretty tokens.

Start making them over the weekend so you have enough to give away on the 14th! -ardel

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*images via Martha Stewart Weddings

diy: instant christmas decors

Suddenly it’s Christmas at home!

As usual, I have no plans of decorating the house for Christmas. After spending the first couple of weeks of December making Christmas decorations for clients, I have no energy left to decorate our home. But because of the red flowers that I brought from my brother’s wedding over the weekend, the house got an instant Christmas makeover!

Inspired by the decorations I made for a Petron station, I made three additional tabletop Christmas trees from old magazines, spray painted them in red and gold, and finished them off with a sprinkle of gold glitters. You can find a video tutorial from Martha Stewart here. The project is quite time consuming, but you can easily make them while watching tv.

Above is a variation of the magazine Christmas tree. By alternately gluing (or stapling) three points of the folds together, you can create an accordion pattern for your tree to make it look more fancy.

To  give my trees a bit of height, I simply placed them on top of my ceramic candle holders which functioned as a base.

Total cost: P0.00

I just hope the flowers will last until the 25th.

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conscious living: from rags to rugs

I stumbled upon these fabric shag rugs from Urban Outfitters over the weekend. Made from multicolored strips of cotton and polyester, these rugs look pretty fancy, but, mind you, they’re not so difficult to make. Additionally, the design allows you to use scrap fabrics and even old cotton shirts as alternative raw materials. That’s very environmentally friendly!

Above is a “spaghetti shag rug” from Thailand made from unused, reclaimed t-shirt manufacturing remnants. The fabrics were cut into thin strips and hand-hooked into a shag rug.

The same technique was used by Elle of Xoelle when she made this plush gray rug. Because she also used old cotton t-shirts, the rug is soft, comfy and safe for her little one to play on. Her blog post here offers a step-by-step guide  on how to make this project.

Instead of latch hooking the strips of fabric, Stefanie of A Common Thread hand-knitted the fabric strips into a fine-looking bath rug. You can find her tutorial here.

If an area rug is just too big of a project for you to handle, you can start small by making a pillow case/cushion cover. V and Co has a tutorial on how to make one. This, however, requires you to stitch the pieces on a fabric backing using a sewing machine.

Great recycling projects, right?! Your old shirts and bed sheets can now have a better, brighter second life!

diy: paper pumpkins in 5 ways

(Above) Papier-mâché pumpkin from At the Picket Fence

I was inspired to make a Halloween post after I saw a picture of a paper pumpkin from a twitter contact. For the past few years, Halloween suddenly became an official “holiday” here in Manila, with several households already starting a tradition of decorating their homes accordingly. So, for additional ideas, here’s a roundup of the paper pumpkins tutorials that I found online.

Take your pick!

Pumpkin from a book from Sagebrush Ridge

Easy paper pumpkin from about.com

Paper pumpkin lanterns from Elise Blaha

Layered paper pumpkin using printed craft paper from Prairie Story

d.i.y.: contemporary crochet projects

I was giddy with excitement when I stumbled upon this Japanese website over the weekend. It carries all sorts of crochet patterns, from home goods and accessories, clothes, bags, kids’ apparel, and even amigurumi toys. What’s great is that most of the projects feature contemporary design (compared to the outdated crochet patterns that our mothers and grandmothers used to make).

The projects come with downloadable crochet diagram in pdf (so no need to learn Japanese). In 7th grade, we were taught how to crochet and read crochet symbols.  I’m thankful that I still remember how to read these crochet pattern diagrams! For a crash course on basic crochet symbols, you can refer to this site.

I can’t wait to get started!!! I just have to look for nice yarns though.

d.i.y.: crochet x stones

I’m loving the delicate look of these crochet-covered stone paperweights by textile artist Margaret Oomen. They look like sea urchins!

Learn how to make these through The Purl Bee’s a tutorial here.

diy toys!

We recently got an email about a local line of DIY toys called Positive Toys (POTO) designed by composer and soundtrack producer Geri Gatchalian. Being a fan of crafts and DIY projects, I was excited about the idea of making your own toy.

The concept behind POTO is to have kids develop their creativity by sewing their own stuffed dolls and allowing them to put their own stamp of artistry on the toys. Although the dolls already have a design, kids can further dress them up with glittered fabric paints, beads, sequins, and embroidered details. Also, instead of the usual back stitch or running stitch, older kids can use the blanket stitch to sew the fabrics together.

“By profession, my husband and I are musicians. We have two daughters, Una (13) and Tala (11). When they were younger, my husband and I already started to encourage them to be creative through diy projects and art activities. We especially loved working with materials like paper, cloth, wood and other found objects.  Now that they’re bigger, I decided to start a DIY toy line inspired by the crafts we used to do with them when they were little,” Geri shares.

POTO currently has the Kokeshi Friends toy kits (above), which they first released on Christmas 2010. They are now working on wooden toys which they aim to release this coming Christmas season (2011), hopefully alongside more cloth and paper kits.

The Kokeshi Friends DIY Kits will soon be available in Vinyl on Vinyl at The Collective, Malugay Street, Makati. For inquiries, you can email Geri Gatchalian at potopositivetoys@gmail.com. {Thanks Geri!}

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hello! + flowers from the garden

Sorry, it’s been pretty quiet here in Design Folder for the past weeks. Work has been so overwhelming lately. To make up for our absence, we’re sharing with you some eye candies from our Tagaytay trip three weekends ago and pick up where we left off.

In our last post, I mentioned that we wanted to have a nicely done table for one of our meals during our vacation. Guess what? Didn’t happen. However, the flowers in our hosts’ garden were irresistible, so before we left, we managed to make a quick flower arrangement using the flowers and colorful leaves around.

Based on the plants there, Lilli and I decided on a vibrant yellow, pink and purple color scheme. We don’t know the names of these flowers/plants but I’m sure you can recognize many of them because they’re quite common.

For our vase, we used the empty jar of the tomato sauce that we used for our ravioli dish the day before. After removing the label, we found out that it was actually a mason jar. This gave our arrangement a sort of vintage twist.

When putting a variety of flowers together in a vase, one easy trick to get that perfectly imperfect look is to group like flowers and leaves together. This will give your arrangement some sort of order without making it look too structured.

For the final setup, Ana suggested to include two of our favorite foodstuff from the trip: sparkling iced tea and pretzel crisps (really good with cream cheese!).

This impromptu photo shoot wouldn’t be possible without the help of our talented and ever reliable photographer friend Ian Santos!!! {thanks Ian for the lovely pictures } -ardel

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no flowers?

Then decorate with leaves!

In the photo above, a single leaf from the humble bird of paradise plant gives this bedside table a fresh tropical look.

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d.i.y.: stained bottles

Speaking of handmade, here’s one easy craft project to up-cycle your empty glass jars and bottles into decorative vases.

MATERIALS

1. Empty glass bottle/s (make sure it’s clean and free from grease/oil)

2. Vitrail glass paint (P99 in National Bookstore; available in several colors)

3. Acetone or nail polish remover (used as a thinner for the paint)

DIRECTIONS

1. Combine glass paint with a small amount of acetone (just enough to partially thin down the paint’s consistency) in the bottle.

2. Mix them together. Slowly swirl the paint mixture until the entire interior of the glass is coated with paint.

3. Don’t worry if the paint looks cloudy. It will eventually become translucent with a glass-like finish as it dries. Let the paint dry completely for a couple of days before you put water in it and use as a flower vase.

Fuchsia looks great with turquoise, so I went out and cut some bougainvillea flowers. I never knew these flowers would look great in a vase! I’ll let you know how long they’ll last. (UPDATE: The bougainvillea flowers lasted for five days! Not bad.)

If you have a lot of bottles, you can stain/paint all off them in the same color and display them together near a window like some sort of vintage glass collection. They also make great containers if you want to give small flower bouquets as gifts. df