Category: Art + Craft

Inspiration: Color

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screenshot from design-seeds.com

Obviously the best inspiration for all your color decisions is your own backyard, a forest trail, flower market, local yarn store or city block. But let’s face it, most times you’re stuck in a tall building, nose pressed against a monitor, with little chance of being transported to any of these places anytime soon. Sometimes I “shop” my Instagram for  vintage signs and packaging color ideas. Most often I browse through the well curated color palettes created by Jessica Colaluca of Design Seeds. I find this site an invaluable tool when stumped, and sometimes send links or screenshots of these palettes to clients. It’s much easier to convey color visually than with descriptive words. Whodathunk?

Friday Favorites

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Whew! It’s Friday. Been a long week at work. Ready to unwind. Hubby has a road trip to New Mexico planned for next week, so I am looking forward to spending time with him this weekend. I believe he already got the dreaded never-ending mowing done, so perhaps a less chore filled weekend is at hand. I’m totally craving waffles, the yummy malty tasting ones like at Waffle House. Just so you know.

I arrived ready for a long day, then all meetings and lunch plans I had for today have just been cancelled. Woot!

A few things that are totally floating my boat this week:

The image above makes me very happy. Image found on Pinterest here.

Excited to cast on for Lady Fern tonight.

I know it’s so nineties, but I have recently realized that I miss using my Filofax, I do.

I just can’t seem to fully embrace using the calendar on my phone. I always have so many notes and to do lists for each entry that it becomes a pain, and really I want all that info at first glance, in different colors. I am also a doodler, so hard to doodle a swirl or a tree in my calendar on my phone.

Do you use your phone/tablet/desktop calendar exclusively?

And, Ohmygoodness. Melamine dishes in candy colors would make eating any boring old sandwich outside a whole lot better. I just may cave in and buy these. Blogger Michele Wooderson has such a sweet colorful blog.

Inspiration: New Packaging

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POTLUCK labels

I recently renamed and designed new packaging for my stamped silverware pieces. The new name Potluck, embodies kitcshy, homey, small town, fish fry, church basements and so on. It’s also a nod to the fact that each set is a potluck of patterns, since I never know what I’ll find scouring Ebay and estate sales.

I’ll share a little bit with you about my inspiration for the label art. 

The Spring issue of Gravy featured a story of artist Cedric Smith. I was so drawn to his work. I totally fell in love with his use of color and vintage black & white images. They immediately made me think of cake mix box labels and seed packs. I was especially drawn to this piece.

Fresh-Baked

I knew immediately that I wanted to use this as inspiration for my packaging. I decided on a less distressed appearance, but still wanted a much less than perfect finished look. I created a watercolor background for the type to further convey the made by hand quality of my silverware. While I have been trying my hand at hand-drawn type, I decided I needed these sooner than later, so searched for the right hand-drawn typeface. I just love the thick & thin marker look of these.

The cute pup is actually from a painting my husband did years ago. It’s always been one of my favorite images. I scanned it and created a poster-like black and white version in Illustrator. I’ve been using it as a profile pic and Gravatar off and on for years. The original hangs on my wall at work. “Hi!”

workwall

The flowers were borrowed from one of my favorite dish towels.

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Read more about Cedric Smith here. And if you haven’t ever, please do spend a little time to peek around on Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s a wonderful organization.