shiny suitcase

friday finds - vintage travel stickers

A few years ago I stumbled into a box of old suitcase stickers at a local antique store. I sorted through the bunch and chose the ones that spoke to me, thinking they'd make a great framed collection, or just be generally inspiring with their colors, fonts and compostision. They're still a favorite of mine.

Most of them are from Eastern Europe, specifically Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia and I'd guess they're from the 1960's.

This is one of my favorites. It reminds me of Hotel Citron in The Life Aquatic by Wes Anderson. I love the little "Inter Hotel" logo in the upper right and the simple color palette is perfect.

Who doesn't love gold, gray and pink? This sticker feels so "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to me.

This has the best mod leaf design. I love the offset printing where the light blue and the red mix. Then that little single dot of gold? Wow. It would make a great tea towel or serving tray.

This last one is a personal fave. Love the pink outline of the hotel and the vertical "Rosiza". The color palette with the robin's egg blue, electric pink and gold is right up my alley.

I hope you enjoyed this Friday Find!

kaleidoscopic color

I have a child's cheap tin kaleidoscope with plastic beads and little bits in the top section. I bought it a few months ago, meaning to use it for some color inspiration. I took it out today when the sun was out to see what kind of images I could snap of the patterns inside. I was pretty doubtful about my ability to really even see anything through the lens of the camera but these are some of the shots I got of the barrel of the kaleidoscope. They're blurry and a bit crude, but lovely and illuminated in a cathedral like way.

I just shook the toy a bit in between shots or twisted the barrel slightly and I was actually pretty happy with how they turned out.

I think I need to build some patterns and palettes based on this experiment and I'm hoping to post a few of them this week.

 

 

a new kind of calendar

I came across Pattern Matters via Paper Forest and was struck by these incredible colorful calendars. The design and ingenuity that went into each piece is so outstanding! I also love the colors and the creative, unique movement for each month. You have to jump over and check out their behind-the-scenes creation photos. A lot of thought went into these and it truly shows.

As we're nearing the end of 2011, I'm thinking about working on some calendar designs for 2012. I'm inspired by the 12 months in 2012 (double 12s!)  and finding inspirational artwork like this really gets my wheels turning.

project: easy halloween garland

I wanted something super easy but festive to hang up for Halloween decor. It also needed to be something that wouldn't take me very long to make. I decided to use colorful washi tape (available here), white string, and black sparly mini-poms (which I picked up at a craft supply store.) I threaded the string onto a thick sturdy needle. This part was a little tricky. Then I threaded on all my poms for the length of string that I had cut (about 6 feet.) Once the poms were strung, I could slide them on the string any distance apart from one another. When I was satisfied with the number of poms and their placement, I cut short lengths of the washi tape and taped it around the string and back onto itself wherever I thought I neeeded a flag. I varied the color and pattern of the tape I was using so each part had visual interest. Lastly, using a scissors, I trimmed the tape flags to a pretty point.

So friendly and Halloweenie!

 

a place I'd love to visit