Our Swirly Crush

If you know anything about Swirly is that we love, love, love, our magazines. See here, here & here. We especially love the Holiday themed issues. With fewer magazines being produced we feel the need to spread the word when we find ones that shine.

Fresh Style simple ideas for creative living….. does just that! It shines brightly in our book! 

The courtship....

We first came across this back in 2012 when we gathered all the Holiday issues we can find at our local bookseller etc. We prefer magazines that have a heavier focus on creative projects, holiday décor ideas and projects versus cooking and recipes.  With a quick glance through the pages, and seeing the inspiring creative projects, the beautiful photography, and artist profiles, we knew this was one for the Swirly library.  

We’re dating….

Then the 2013 Holiday issue came out and we knew this was something special. The lovely smooth quality of the cover paper stock alone is worth picking us up an issue. It feels like “buttah”.

We are In Love….

Now we are in 2014, and we found that we were picking up every issue, not just Holiday based…that’s big. The most recent issue is chock-full of design eye candy with simple ideas, creative living ideas and inspiring spaces. We highly recommend that you check out this magazine (for anyone who still misses and craves the Mary Engelbriet Home Companion content, we think this will fill that void). We, for one, are excited to see where Fresh Style magazine goes from here. 

 

Fyi

We are not affiliated or have been paid by the editors of Fresh Style to promote this magazine.  Would we love to see a marriage (story) between Swirly Designs & Fresh Style in a future holiday issue of the magazine? YES!! Of course:)  But honestly we really just want to share with you all things that we like about it and maybe you will enjoy it as well.

Share your thoughts… We would love to hear if you are crushing on this magazine too.

Crafts n' Things Magazine

 Here is a fun holiday how-to project we created for the December 2012 issue of Crafts n' things magazine. We supplied them the step-by-step text and the finished snowmen magnet pieces so the magazine could photograph them.  Here is how the how-to looked in the issue.

These pictures below are shots that we took ourselves to submit the how-to project for consideration in the holiday issue.  The idea behind this project came to us when our son would keep ripping out pictures and writing down all the new toys he wanted for Christmas and sticking them all over the house. With these wish list magnets it could help us organize all his requests in one spot. 

Happy Holidays!

Stitch Craft CREATE magazine feature...

WOW! This year sure did fly by quickly. We never had a chance to tell you about our Creative Business profile we did for this wonderful inspirational magazine; stitch | craft | create; that was on newsstands this Christmas. I believe you can still order a back issue online here.

Working with Shannon the editor and Jennifer who interview us for the story couldn't have been an easier process. We were able to supply all our own photos and we think the piece came out very nice. 

Shannon told us she was thrilled to profile polymer clay artist since they haven't had clay artist in the magazine before. 

Here is a our two two page spread profile:

 

How cute is the fun graphic of our name for the headline of the story.

If you haven't seen this magazine before, be sure to check out an issue next time you are at a book store.  This seasonal magazine is a fun, whimsical, beautifully designed inspirational read.

Sharing the Love!

 

Everyday here at the studio we are either working or celebrating some holiday and today is no different. Today we are celebrating Valentine's Day! Yes you heard us right! We know it's September, but we are so excited to see our Valentine's designs in the pages of:

We have been a fan of this wonderful magazine since 2008 and it is the only magazines out there that we know of, that showcases all the holidays in one issue. So for us to be a part of the new 2012 issue of Somerset Holidays & Celebrations well all we can say is... 

we are tickled pink!

 

The project that we contributed to the issue is titled: Sweet Mini Valentine's Ornaments. We have a how-to for five of our Swirly Valentine's designs. We updated our popular Swirly Cupids from our Valentine's collection this year to fit more with the look and style of the magazine (if you ever have seen the magazine you can quickly get a feeling of the style of artists that are in the magazine.) We added text to the body of one of the cupid designs and the other cupid we added a heart charm and sliver tinsel glitter. We then did a dry brushing of gold to create more of an aged look.
So get your craft on and make your own version of these sweet swirlies and be sure to send us pictures of your work, we'd love to see it. Look for a copy at your bookstore or you can order a copy here.


Here are a few more shots (not in the issue) that we took here at the studio before we sent them to the magazine.

Swirly in the Sweet Life

Looking for some sweet holiday inspiration? Then be sure to visit Simply the Sweet Life and check out their FREE online 2011 Holiday magazine .
It's full of wonderful holiday ideas and delicious recipes and Swirly:)
Yes our new mini woodland winter set graces the pages (page 32_33) of this whimsical issue .


Image above is from Simply the Sweet Life Magazine Holiday issue



Image above is from Simply the Sweet Life Magazine Holiday issue

Check out the eZine and tell them Swirly said hi!
Below area few more close up shots we took of this
7 piece Woodland Winter set.

Mushroom, Little Owl and snowy pine cone


snowflake and candy cane

glittery star and starry night

There is still a few of these sets available so be sure to pick up yours today.
Have a Sweet and Swirly Holiday! SORRY SOLD OUT!

In the Studio: Painting away...

Happy November everyone!

The October snow is finally melting away but the chilly air is here to stay. But it makes for a perfect setting to be painting away in the studio on our new Holiday collection for all of you to see very soon. We are planning to launch the collection soon after Thanksgiving.
Be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get your reminder emails.

And for anyone who lives in the area and wants to check out the collection early, we will be doing the first Holiday craft show of the season, on Saturday November 19th at the Wellesley Marketplace, here in MA.

Here is a little peek into a few designs we are working on....

Here we are in the very early painting stages of a jolly St. Nick design.


These fun cookie-inspired designs are new for us. We created a few for a cover of a Holiday magazine that we will share with you next week.

Have a great weekend!

Stocking up on magazines!

For us, Halloween is more then just buying and eating candy all month long. At least that is what Lianne keeps telling me. So besides picking up those yummy treats every time I head to the store I also indulge another sweet tooth of both of ours and that is the search for the NEW Halloween Magazines. You know that the fall season is coming when these magazines start arriving in the bookstores towards the end of summer.

If you visit us frequently here on the swirly blog you know our love for Holiday themed magazines and books runs deep. Here are a few past posts about our addiction here and here and what we do with all this beautiful eye candy inspirations here.

Like our little chipmunk friend who was visiting our yard earlier this week (see funny photo at top), stuffing his cheeks and stocking up for the winter season, we do the same with magazines (without the sticking them in our mouths part, that would just be weird). We gather and collect them up during these months and then when the Holiday craziness is over, like early January, we'll snuggle in a warm cozy chair and enjoy.


Here is this years new stash of goodies! It so nice to see a good size collection of new and original Halloween inspired issues each and ever year.
Our little display in this picture was something we found on the side of the road over the summer. Works perfectly to display the issues in the studio don't you think?

Women's Day Specials Halloween was one of the first Halloween issue that I picked up. The deep blue color of this cover is very striking and really jumps out on the newsstands, but I had to do a double take, because it looked eerily similar to last years issue. They must have realized the color combo worked well enough to bring it back this year.


Of course you must have heard about this great new online order only bookazine from Matthew Mead titled Autumn with Matthew Mead. If not... I would recommend checking out his site. It's full of beautiful holiday inspiration imagery. Swirly was featured in his 2010 Holiday issue.


Phyllis Hoffman Celebrate is turning into one of our new favorites. Even though it is more food focused than we would prefer, we are always so charmed by it's beauty that we can't pass it up. We did notice with this Halloween issue that they included a special trends section that profiled our fellow Halloween folk artists friend Johanna Parker.

Happy haunted reading! Be sure to stock up on these inspirational issues before they disappear!

Studio clean up continues... Holiday idea binders

There is something about the last week of the year that we really get hit with the organizing and cleaning bug.

We are still waiting for the quote to come back for the shelving in the studio closet, which will be a much larger project, so in the meantime we have been taking on smaller projects like organizing our holiday inspirational binders.

We love having a place where we can flip through pages of inspiring images of holiday "stuff" like interesting tree displays, ornaments, color trends and articles. Anything that inspires us to get our creative juices flowing

So we needed to come up with a system to gather all our holiday images/articles etc we acquire through the years.

As you know we love collecting holidays magazines. Our rule of thumb is, if the magazine has at least 75% of it's content dedicated to the holiday we'll keep it whole, but all the other the magazines that only have a few pages of holiday images are perfect for the binders.


A few years ago we stocked up on these Russell Hazel binders to hold our holiday inspirations. The white binder is everything Christmas and the green has Valentine's , Easter, Halloween and other holidays.


We picked up a box of clear sheet protectors (we got this box at staples 200 sheets for $10.00) and if we wanted more sections in our binder we can add dividers.


a label maker makes everything look neat and professional




Tip: for all your small pictures or swatches use a 8.5 x 11 white copy paper and tape your images to so they don't slid in the protectors. Kinda of like a scrapbook but with a whole lot less planning and layout.


Yes we are already thinking of Valentine's and a few flips through this section helps us feel the love and to get our minds thinking Valentine's. These pages have catalog images, paint swatches, ads, stickers etc.


here is a sample of our Easter section


Halloween: we have everything from treat bags to scrapbook paper any items that are 3D we store in another bin that we blogged about here.


Here are some of the Christmas pages






I hope that we have inspired you to create inspirational binders of your own!

Happy New Year!