Archive for August, 2006

Inspiration | Change of scenery

Tuesday, August 29th, 2006

Every once in a while I get bored with the look of my desktop. Whenever this happens, I end up going over to Pixel Girl Presents and seeing what sort of sexy new wallpapers she’s got up. Yup, this is the same Pixel Girl (aka Shanalyn Victor) who runs the Pixel Girl Shop — where along with many cool things are some Blend Creations products. :)

Pixel Girl Presents is a great place to find things like icon sets:

and Illustrator tutorials while you’re at it.

But mostly I just go for the pretty pictures done by some pretty talented illustrators:

“Organic” by Tomek Ferenc

“What makes you happy” by Megan Hopkins

“Kumori” by David Hoe

There are well over 1000 different desktops to choose from, so good luck finding the perfect one for your compy. :)

Inspirations | Downsizing – who needs a mansion anyway?

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

I’m not a big fan of water, but I love the work that goes into designing boat interiors because of how efficiently a space can be used. Along the same lines, I’ve always loved floorplans and seeing how spaces are used — especially small ones. I don’t mean the “under 2000 sq. ft.” homes that some of these Home / Interior magazines think of when they say “small”. I mean truly tiny.

The Tumbleweed Tiny House Company has mastered the utilization of small spaces, ranging in size from 40 sq. ft. up to a ‘whopping’ 500 sq. ft. All of the houses are designed by Jay Shafer, who actually lives in a 100 sq foot home that he designed himself. Below are a couple of examples of some of these tiny houses.

The Eepoo house is ~100 sq. ft (and it’s portable).

The Greg is smaller at 60 sq. ft., but has an upper sleeping loft.


You can buy full drawing sets of the Tumbleweed houses ($850US) so you can build your own, or you can even buy ready-made models starting from ~$30k. In so many ways I’d love to be so minimalistic that we could live in such a small space. Realistically though, the tiny houses probably aren’t meant for family living :)

Inspiration | Play with your furniture

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

We found Movisi‘s modular storage/shelving system, PLAY, via DesignSpotter. In many ways PLAY is like lego for grown-ups except that it allows you to make your own furniture.


There are 3 basic elements to the PLAY system and together they let you create a variety of configurations. Movisi sells PLAY kits starting at €30.00 for a one-cube kit.

Seems both fun and practical to me. Fun since you can reconfigure your shelf whenever you like and practical since the pieces are made with a lightweight closed-cell foam that’s friendly to hardwood floors and walls and easy to clean.

Mention | Sweet sweet candy

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Blend Creations’ Washi pendants were featured in this lovely editorial write-up in Daily Candy, today! So a big ‘hello’ to everyone who’s found our blog via DC :)

It’s been a pretty good week so far, for only being Tuesday! Yesterday we were sitting at #1 for the most popular bookmark on Stylehive, (I believe we’ve currently been bumped to #2) and the StylehiveBlog did a nice post about us too.

Toot. Toot. That’s me tooting our own horn. I’m done now ;)

Inspiration | Better than a Chia Pet

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

The Organic Pet Plant site out of Australia has what they’ve dubbed “Living Miniature Tomagochi” — tiny trees and plants that are encased in a little terrarium that measure 1.5 cm (~0.5″) wide and 2.8 cm (~1″) in height.

Like any plant, you do have to care for it by watering the little capsule and exposing it to light. If all goes well, then your plant will thrive and grow, and it’ll take between 3-6 months to outgrow its little capsule.

Right now, it looks like these little babies go for about $10 AU (or about $9 CAD/$8 US), but it seems they’re only selling through ebay. So cute. A good way to pass on the gift of green. :)

Inspirations | Retro cool for the kitchen

Monday, August 14th, 2006

I found the site, Vintage Stoves by Stevan Thomas after browsing through some Stylehive links. This company takes old stoves from the late 1940s-50s and fully restores them to beyond their original glory by not only making the appliance functional again, but also giving them a spiffy new paint job.

If we lived in a 1950s-era bungalow and drank martinis after work and had money to extravagantly spend on a stove, I’d be all over one of these. Currently available restored stoves run between $4200 US to almost $9000 US (not including shipping).

Check out their gallery of recently sold stoves here, and others in their new homes here. These are a few of my favourites:

Their limited edition Satsuma Orange 36″ Wedgewood

A 1951 Western Holly Continental 37

A 1951 O’Keefe and Merritt 850-G:

These stoves just seem to have so much more of a presence than our 1990s era Kenmore. ;)

Mention | Stylehive

Friday, August 11th, 2006

I’ve just noticed that the Blend Creations washi pendants been amongst the top 10 popular bookmarks at Stylehive over the last couple of days. And hey, that’s pretty cool :)

Stylehive is a social bookmarking site that lets you bookmark all things fashion, style and product related. It’s a good way to find some neat things you might not have otherwise found.

In case you didn’t know, we’re offering 15% off all our washi pendants this month. But — in order to know that and the corresponding discount code, you’d have to be a newsletter subscriber.

So, in case you missed out, you can still take advantage of the offer by first joining the newsletter and then letting us know you did so. We’ll forward you the latest issue and then you too will know what the discount code is. :)

Inspiration | Photorealistic illustrations

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Both Eric and I read BoingBoing on a regular basis. It’s a “directory of wonderful things” aka a mishmash of cool things on the interweb, design stuff, tech stuff, and generally a really good daily read.

Recently they featured this link to The World’s Most Photorealistic Vector Art. It’s truly amazing to me that someone has this much control over gradients in Illustrator.


This isn’t a photo of Keira Knightley, but rather an illustration done by Paul Bush.

This one’s an illustration by Halim Ghodbane:

Check out the gallery of other vector illustrations at the bottom of the post. Make sure to hit the “Outline” button to see the mesh used for the gradients. Wow.

Inspiration | Architectural detail by faeries

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

Yesterday was a Civic holiday here in Ontario and/or some sort of holiday in most of Canada. So we’re mostly recovering from a bit too much sun and a lot of good food and now I suppose it’s on to the regular work week.

We’ll start this week off with the faerie doors of Ann Arbor, Michigan — I’d found this link not too long ago, but unfortunately, I can’t remember exactly where. Apparently there’s a few of these doors all over the city of Ann Arbor and because they’re so wee, you might not necessarily notice them at first glance.

This one is at the “Red Shoes” store:

I love that the detailing of the tiny door and the fact that there’s an inner door that opens.

Here’s another little door at the Sweet Waters Cafe:

Apparently the faeries appreciate architectural detail and moulding on the door actually mimicks some of the moulding on the building exterior.

The Urban Faeries site is a fun little read, and it’s run by illustrator/Faerie door hunter Jonathan Wright. He’s got a Faerie door poster for sale on his site, along with info about his upcoming book about Faeries and their doors.