Happy Monday! We hope you had a fantastic weekend! I seem to have come down with the flu and Joey has been super dad to Atlas as I try and recover from the insanity of being sick. It stinks to feel like crap-o when the weather is so nice too! Despite being under the weather, we still headed to Peddler’s Village for the annual Strawberry Festival and it was a lot of fun! We took a lot of photos and that inspired todays post. We are kind of addicted to Phoster, Afterlight, PicFX and Pic Collage right now, so let’s talk our top photo apps!

Before we get into the details of  photo apps, we wanted to share a place we rely on and may be addicted to. Being full fledged insta-addicts (be our friends!) we have a fondness of making those pictures take physical form so we can see them beyond a chin-down posture while phone viewing and up on our walls and tables. We made a few posts, here and here about what we do with our pics you can check out if you missed. This place we are excited we found is a place that prints 5X5 square prints (!!) and feeds right from instagram! Picplum has made it WAY WAY WAY too easy to go a little nuts with photos. They haven’t paid us or given us samples (nor has anyone in this post), we just like them a lot and it’s a really easy way to share pictures with family and get  those square prints.

We even have a list of people saved in our account so we can send them over pictures of Atlas. I am actually surprised how many people call asking for pictures!

Now, some fun stuff we use on our phones! I recently started getting a little more confident with playing around with photo apps and am so excited there are people out there that have made great apps for people like me who have such a hard time with photoshop. Joey seems to just intuitively know what to do, where I am always like “doh!”.

Phoster is pretty simple to use. It’s sometimes difficult to to move the words around, but all in all it’s a pretty great app for $1.99.

Here are some examples of how we have used it to promote our instagram vintage sale (may 15th! 7pm! follow for deets!)

I dig it, and will use it until instagram becomes over-saturated with it. I also like to layer other apps with it, like in the second image.

Afterlight is $.99 and worth it just for the heart, circle, and letter cut out. I try not to over do it because you see it everywhere, but I do play with it personally, even if I don’t share it on instagram too much.

PicFX is $1.99 and may not be worth it if you aren’t into effects and textures. I am cheesy so I am obsessed with the galaxy effect and I dig the orbs as well (pic of Atlas above, and crab pic are two examples + a layer of phoster + a layer of  Afterlight on the Atlas pic).

Last, but not least is Pic Collage. It’s free, which is awesome and  has a bunch of features we skip over. Basically we like it for the “cut out” feature it has.

You can cut out images and collage them instead of just placing photos in a pre-templated collage.

You can see the owl is “cut out”. You use your finger, or I suppose you can use a stylus if you have one.

So, those are our top picks for photo apps. Do you use any great ones you are willing to share? We are always excited to try a new one.

Don’t forget to be our instafriend! We certainly want to be yours! xxoo

I decided to poke around the internet to find some tools to make my posts more interesting. I have always loved the way handwriting looks on photos, but feel silly using “handwritten” fonts that aren’t my own writing! I found a super easy program that is not only cheap, is super quick to use on both PC and Macs. It took about 10 minutes total from printing the sheet, to writing the fonts, scanning, and uploading! I will be the first to admit Joey and I are both not pro’s at photoshop. I just learned to make an animated .gif earlier this week and tested it out yesterday. Defiantly not a strong point of ours when it comes to blogging. We will spend 10 hours researching an oven, and skip the techy stuff!

I am so excited to see my silly handwriting as a font! I also subbed out some of the traditional QWERTY symbols for something more fun!

I don’t see myself or Joey using the font to actually write blog posts, but it is super fun to use oh photos, and I love the idea you can make whatever symbol you want for symbols you won’t really use! Also, you can do a cute signature!

*both products above from dwellstudio

Happy Monday! Did you get hit with the snow storm this weekend? It was a weird relief to finely get some seasonally appropriate action. It snowed here before Thanksgiving, then nothing! We didn’t mind it so much. So today I am doing a little post about what I have learned so far, from working with Miss Emily Henderson. Ya know, HGTV Design star Winner? Host of Secrets from a Stylist, your favorite HGTV show. Personally I think she’s the most relevant design on TV. She gets it. She knows how to make a room look like a million bucks, while looking lived in, while not breaking the bank. So what have I picked up in the 7 months I have been on board? 

1. Sometimes a turban and a Red Bull is all you need. This pic was taken after a Fashion Week Party. I learned something this past September while working with Emily. This girl wakes up early and stays up late in order to get things done, and she’s always doing it in style. I once heard “We as people are only good at either fashion or interiors, never both”. Emily is defiantly the exception to this rule. Cram as much as you can into a day, you’ll be surprised what you can get done. 

2. Options. When we get a new client, it’s all about sourcing options. I know it’s easy to think designers know exactly what the room will look like as soon as they set eyes on it. I kinda did, but in reality that doesn’t make any sense. I have learned that sourcing options is probably the most crucial thing you can do in the whole design process. You may know a perfect couch for the living room, but that couch can be 10K! Knowing how to source and having enough options something similar is way more important than I thought!

3. Ugly can be pretty. You know when you shop junk or vintage you pass by 99% of stuff and think “no way!”? Emily has defiantly taught me to look more deeply at objects. Shape, quality, scale. It can be transformed into something beautiful that works. Finding unique spots beyond the big box stores, and knowing how to find a gem has been so much fun!

4. You don’t have to be one thing. People often compartmentalize themselves into a specific style, and it’s OK to be attracted to two, three, or even four styles at the same time. We have a client that’s Lake House with Japanese flair, in an un kitchy way – and one would think that’s strange – but it’s looking insanely amazing. 

5. Mixing is vital. Yes, we buy stuff from West Elm, CB2, and Room and Board like the best of them, but the majoity of styling is done with way off the beaten track items. This is where Emily sets herself apart. She takes the extra step to find those unique items the clients totally connect with and is a master at grouping them.

Sometimes you don’t get it right on the first try. If you watched Design Star when Emily is on it, you remember this:

So don’t beat yourself up. Try, try again. It’s been a blast so far, and I am so excited to share finished projects. Emily and Orlando have been doing the majority of the designing (I don’t want any confusion!), but just being around them is so inspiring. 

Ah, the moose head… Let me tell you a bit about how it took a year of waiting for the right deal, a few months of waiting for it to arrive, and then finally another year before we could find a suitable
place to hang his shiny head.

Lana had her eye on this guy for quite a while. Periodically reminding me how much she loved him and knew exactly where he was going to live in our home. I agreed, we probably needed a stately white moose head. So, Lana kept watch from her shopping blind, waiting patiently to pull the trigger. Then, one day, without warning, she announced he was ours.

We unwrapped our newest prize to find… a broken antler. Oh joy of joys!

Luckily, we had ordered some weirdo, fix all, putty off the TV. I mashed it together with a rubber mallet, (I didn’t feel like my hands were mashing adequately) and jammed it into and around the offending antler. 60 minutes or so later, a little light sanding and a quick pass with some glossy white spray paint, and our moose was worthy of a place in ol’ Teddy Roosevelt’s collection!

But where to put him. We had recently done a little work on our mud room, and with the cedar interior, we thought it would make a fitting home. So, I took some measurements, decided he wasn’t going to fit, and proceeded to try and hang him anyway. After exhausting myself and drilling 4 unnecessary holes in our wall, I took him upstairs, removed his antlers and placed him gently in a wicker basket full of sheets.

And there he lay until a few days ago when we sat up in our chairs and declared that we would not be beaten by a lacquer moose head!

Lana and I made a decision that right above our fireplace, on our newly painted wall would be a perfect place to display our once again beloved friend. So I got my drill and some screws that I very scientifically tested in the hanging brackets on the back of his head.

And then I hit a snag.

On my first attempt hanging him up I just did some guess work on where the holes needed to be drilled into the wall. Hence I ended up with twice as many holes as mounting brackets. I needed to find a way to mark where the mounting brackets fell on the wall without x-ray vision.

And believe me I tried a few ridiculous things (like cramming a pencil in the bracket and pretending it would stay level and true while I marked the position).

I ended up getting some painters tape and laying one strip the full length of his neck and another one right over the mounting brackets. I poked some holes where the screws would eventually need to land, removed the tape, and placed it on the wall carefully remembering to check my placement with a level. The tape very kindly told me where to drill and I only ended up with two holes in the wall and a level moose!

And yes, I know that anyone with any experience (or keeps instruction booklets) would probably have a better/quicker/less contrived way of marking the wall, but this made my day.

And I wish to pass it on to you, dear reader, to use as you see fit.