Mint

A peek of some recent projects, which I hope to fully photograph soon.

Hope you all have wonderful weekends, and thanks for reading Mint! Don’t forget that the Cabbages & Roses giveaway ends tonight.

The past few weeks have been a whirlwind! I’ve been knee-deep in some secret projects… well, Bella Figura isn’t so secret, is it? My 2012 collection is underway, along with the second secret project that really is secret. I’ll be able to share that one in a couple months!

Because things have been hopping, I haven’t had time to photograph work or even get organized enough for someone else to photograph my work. So for multiple reasons, you can imagine my surprise and delight when I opened up 100 Layer Cake last week, and saw Tim & Ellinor’s wedding featured! Ellinor, Downey Street Events, and I worked hard to create a custom suite of paper goods which was beautifully photographed by Annie McElwain.

Tim and Ellinor planned a California vineyard wedding on a budget (read some of their money-saving tips here) which meant including lots of DIY projects, like the wine cork table number holders, typewriter-printed invitation envelopes, and handmade soaps. Speaking of the soaps (top photo), Tim’s mom made them from scratch!

A big congrats and thank you to Tim and Ellinor, and big thank yous to Downey Street Events (who was wonderful to work with) and Annie McElwain for beautifully capturing the paper goods!

Photography: Annie McElwain / Event design & coordination: Emily de Ayora, Downey Street Events / Floral design: Baylor Chapman, Lila B. Designs / Paper Goods: Hello Tenfold

John Papagianopoulos is a Sydney-based graphic designer and artist, who draws tribal and Aztec inspired designs onto t-shirts using permanent fabric markers. In browsing his work I also found some street art, murals, and all around good stuff:

photo by Lukas Wierzbowski

a skateboard design for ThisWorld

For more, visit the Folklands site or flickr.

Cabbages & Roses is a renowned fashion and housewares brand out of England, and they recently launched the Northcote Range of quilting fabrics with MODA. It’s a beautiful vintage floral collection, with bold stripes and motifs thrown into the mix, and it’s the first time the fabric will be available in the U.S. Order reservations can be made through The Fat Quarter Shop.

Christina Strutt, owner of Cabbages & Roses, has shared her Fabric-Covered box tutorial (below), which is from her book Home-Made Vintage. To see the full DIY instructions, you can download the tutorial here.

Cabbages & Roses is also offering a giveaway of the three fabrics below to one lucky reader! To enter, leave a comment on this post by Friday, telling us what you’d like to make. Good luck!

Another delicious, summery treat! Mini Blueberry Pies photo & full recipe at Crepes of Wrath.

In a time when many graphic designers are heading toward freelance (either because they want to, or because design jobs are just scarce), handbooks like this one become invaluable. Especially, I think, for recent grads hoping to take on projects while they look for full time employment. A Print Handbook was written by The Media Collective, and covers topics like Pantone versus CMYK, paper sizes, overprinting, trapping, different kinds of folds, and more, to take you from an on-screen project to printed piece. Says The Media Collective: “We really wanted something that was compact and included a lot of the questions we had about printing. There’s a lot of advice around about different areas of printing, but we wanted to see it in the flesh. For example, we had questions like ‘we know using a rich black with 40% cyan is often recommended by printers, but does this give you a black that is too cool in colour?’. So in the handbook we’ve got some examples for comparison.”

You can read more about it or pick up a copy right here.

Thanks TMC!

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Howdy Do It came from “how do you do It,” the question Ellie & Margot found themselves asking about their freelance lifestyles, and so Howdy Do It was born, a column about the things we do to keep ourselves organized, inspired and on track.

I’m usually not big on things like bath salts, but this picture alone might make me convert! Organic bath salts in test tubes by Truly Aesthetic.