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

.

*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.

.

i saw design: the wild flowers of studio choo

The other day, I had an impromptu lunch with three of my “tru_prends”, Shar, Mabel, and Rachel, who were all working in the Ortigas area. The topic of conversation? Life. Hahaha! Maybe this is what they call quarter life crisis???

One interesting question (I think c/o mabel) that came up during lunch was about what our dream job or career would be. I couldn’t think of anything that time except being a housewife/stay-at-home mom in the future (haha, really). But after stumbling upon a feature on the girls of Studio Choo this morning, I think I know what my dream job would be—a florist (while being a stay-at-home mom)! But I’m not talking about your typical Holland Tulips type of florist. Like Studio Choo, I want my flowers to have a hand-picked look, arranged in unconventional re-used containers like tin cans, jam jars, broken cups and old water glasses. It would also be nice if I could pick from my own little garden full of flowers like in one of those Batibot episodes. Ok, the garden part would really be a dream unless I decide to move and live in Baguio or Davao!-ardel

*all photos via studio choo

.

objects of design: x-ray art

I really admire British photographer Nick Veasey’s works. There are a few other artists who also excel in X-ray photography but no one brings out the inner beauty of the familiar like he does. In his own words, at his official site, he explains how he counters our society’s obsession with superficiality by “highlighting the, often surprising, inner beauty.” I especially like his X-ray photos of plants and flowers which we’re sharing with you here. But he has more wonderful projects like X-ray images of people, animals, toys, machines and even Jimmy Choo shoes at www.nickveasey.com.

Watch out for our exciting posts next week on this year’s winners of Metrobank Art and Design Excellence (MADE), interior design category. Have a great weekend!

diy crafts: flower power

Every May, Filipinos hold a Catholic tradition called Flores de Mayo (“Flowers of May”) in honor of the Virgin Mary. During the month-long celebration, young girls would offer flowers in their respective parishes.

So before we end this month of summer blooms, here’s a parade of flower crafts and projects which you might find interesting:

Flower wreaths (top and above) made of assorted paper by Dana Barbieri.

Hand carved woodland block print set and amapola print via Geninne’s Etsy Shop here and here. (Maybe I’ll ask my dad to teach me how to make the block prints. He’s a better sculptor than me! I just hope his carving tools are still in good condition. Haven’t seen them since elementary.)

Simple flower arrangements using empty glass jars and bottles via penwren.

Have a blooming weekend!

we’re back!

 ”bird on the wing”

Happy Easter everyone!

Green Guide and I just got back from Sagada early this morning. It was a physically challenging trip to say the least (especially for someone like me who doesn’t do a lot of physical activity).

Sagada is beautiful! Plus, the Igorot culture is so interesting. I’ll be sharing pictures of the trip later this week. For now, I’d like to have a lingering moment with nature through these pretty photos from english apple‘s “the secret life of plants” set:

“gently enveloped”

“moss eye drops”

“hope”

“lollipops”

Check out the rest of the set here.

Have a happy week!

*All photos via english apple’s Flickr photostream

diy project: garden-fresh flowers

You don’t need to spend so much on flowers to remember our loved ones this All Souls’ Day. If you have a garden at home, you’ll definitiely find something that can be used for a decent arrangement. For instance, birds of paradise are common in our gardens and they make good cut flowers because they last for a long time (at least a week).

I made this one earlier for our altar–a combination of birds of paradise flowers and a bird’s nest fern leaf.

1. First, I lined the clear vase with a large birds of paradise leaf.
2. Instead of using a floral foam, I just rolled sectioned leaves of the plant and stuff them into the vase until it is filled. These will support the vertical position of the flowers.
3. I then arranged the five flowers in varying heights and stuck a bird’s nest leaf on one side.

If this is too much of a challenge for you, you can just cut ten to fifteen stems of birds of paradise flowers in the same length, remove their leaves, and put them in a nice vase. It’s that simple, but equally charming.