Handmade Soirees

It's gift-giving time and I'd like to share with you a beautiful book that I gave to a friend; 'French General: Handmade Soirees: Simple Projects for Special Occasions' by Kaari Meng. It's filled with elegant entertaining and decorating ideas. Not only is the styling beautiful, but the book itself is printed on lovely, heavy matte stock giving it a charming vintage feel.

I put together this collage of some of my favourite pages. (How good are hot chips wrapped in paper)? Find more details at the French General website. While you're there take a look at their French antique-style graphic design.

Something Splendid

While looking for fluro interiors and party decorations I stumbled across an absolutely stunning dessert table designed by Susana of Simplesmente Branco and Ana of Pinga Amor for Somewhere Splendid.
This would be great for a non-kitschy Christmas party (note the cute deer), or a 21st birthday party. The decorations are hand made; very inspring!

For more photos see the Somewhere Splendid blog post.

Have yourself a merry neon Christmas

Inspired by my last post about neon in interiors, I decided to make some fluro Christmas cards and gift tags. I've posted some awesome photos showing how you can use fluro colours for your non-kitschy Christmas.

1) Martha Stewart spruces up some brown wrapping paper with touches of fluro.

2) Gorgeous ceramic, almost-knee-high deer from Venucci.

3) Birch timber blocks with geometric patterns hand made by Sketch.Inc at Etsy.

4) Ridiculously amazing gift cards hand painted by Sania Pell.

5) I made these gift tags by printing messages onto brown paper and cutting out gift tag shapes. I used a hole punch for both the tags and fluro paper, which I cut circles out of. These created reinforcements and added a bit of a change from the regular Christmasy red and green.

6) I Need Nice Things offer a change from the standard pine Christmas tree.

7) A fun DIY Christmas wreath from Real Living using pom poms.

8) A clever way to recycle scraps of paper by Mini-eco.

9) To make these Christmas cards I simply cut out silhouettes from fluro paper and stuck them onto black cardboard. The snowflake was particularly intricate!