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.

Feeling the LOVE....

Feeling the Love today. 

You guys truly amaze us with your continued enthusiasm towards our work and for that we want to say a heartfelt thank you. 

xoxo Lianne & Paul

Love Young House Love!

I know this isn't a DIY blog, but boy do I love to follow DIY blogs. One of my all time favorites is Young House Love. I can't remember exactly how I came across it, but it has been at least a few years that I have been following the blogging husband and wife team, Sherry & John from Virginia. I just love reading about their DIY projects and being inspired to try a few of my own. Their following has grown and they recently published a book of DIY ideas to inspire others. If that wasn't enough, they are on a book tour! Paul and I were lucky enough to go to the book launch that our local West Elm was having. And yes, over the past year or so I've made Paul read many of YHL posts, and he's come to enjoy them as much as I have. So he was excited to meet them also. I was probably one of the few people who DIDN'T preorder the book, so I was looking forward to getting my hands on a copy.

And my mom was excited to come over and babysit the kids for us, so it was a WIN WIN situation -we couldn't pass up this chance.

The event was on Wednesday Nov. 7, and if you're from New England you know that we were in for a major Nor'Easter storm, and boy was it a doozy! We thought that it might be cancelled, but we called and thankfully it was still on. We made our way in to town for the event not knowing what to expect. The event was scheduled for 6-8. We arrived at 5 and there was already a huge line! Thankfully the line was inside because outside the storm bearing down on the city. The West Elm staff did a wonderful job of organizing this event. They had servers passing around hot cocoa and yummy cookies.

At around 6pm John and Sherry got to their seats and the line started to move, albeit very slowly. But we didn't mind, because we knew they were chatting it up with everyone and taking pictures. Earlier in the week we were tossing around the idea of bringing them some of our ornaments as a gift. Since we're so close to Thanksgiving, we thought our very popular Turkey ornaments would be perfect! We packaged them up carefully so it could make the trip back to Virginia with them.

By the time it was our turn to meet them it was almost 7:30. We were nervous, but they were so warm and personable. We got a picture with them and presented them with our gift... they were so thankful!

So despite the horrible New England snow storm, it was a great event and we love the book and we love Young House Love!! I would suggest to anyone wanting some great DIY inspiration to follow their blog and go out and get their book!


Disclosure: We weren't paid or asked to review or talk about the book, this is just something that we LOVE here at Swirly!

Things We LOVE: Part Deux

Well, we wanted to post this on Valentine's Day BUT life happened and we just never got around to it. Bad bloggers, we know! I didn't want to shelve this post until next year, so I thought why not post it just a little late - just think of February as the month of LOVE!

We hope everyone enjoyed the day and told the ones you love how much they mean to you. Whether it was a simple little note in your kids lunch bag or a quick call to your folks or a single flower in a vase on your night stand; it's the little things that make people happy. At least it is for us and that's the point of this post.

We've come up with a few more to add to our things we love post we did last year.
Just some silly little things that make us smile:)


• We LOVE our fans. Some of you have been following our journey since the beginning. You are the first to place orders for each and every collection we launch online. For that, we thank you and LOVE your support. (Is that enough kissing up for you?)

• We LOVE children's books. Especially holiday themed ones (big shocker). But taking a trip to the bookstore and scouting out any new holiday books is so fun! We'll read the stories to the kids during lunch and at night leading up to the big day and then we'll store the books away after each holiday, so each year it's a nice treat to revisit them all over again. The kids love it and we love it too! Here are a few of our favorite Valentine's books:
Love Ruby Valentine, Ruby Valentine Saves the Day, Mr. Prickles, The Night Before Valentine's Day & If You'll Be My Valentine.




• We LOVE letterpress cards. It's an art form that's been around forever and we hope it never leaves us. There is something so timeless about a beautifully hand pressed card. Every time we purchase them we say they are "too good to give away" we never want part with them. Here are some of our favorites L to R: Egg Press , Hello! Lucky, Night Owl Paper Goods



• We LOVE Paper Source. With a mission statement that is to inspire you to "do something creative every day" how you can you not love this place. Paper Source is a premier paperie and retail store. We are so fortunate to have five locations here in MA and visiting (we have hit 4 out of the 5 so far) visiting a location you can spend hours upon hours checking out the beautiful array of colored papers and seasonal gifts as well as spend some serious $$. Every time we visit we lose track of time and usually end up with a parking ticket because our 2 hour meter has expired. Hey, a small price to pay for so much inspiration.

If you don't have a Paper Source in your neck of the woods we would suggest at least signing up to request a catalog. That alone is almost as good as visiting.



• We LOVE Pinterest! We realize that this site has been around for a couple of years already, but we are just jumping on the bandwagon. I had been on it for about 6 months with a personal account, and loved how I could organize all my finds online in one place AND find inspiration from other people's boards. It took awhile for me to figure it out, but once I did, I got a few of my friends into it and then finally got Paul hooked. He thought this would be a great place for Swirly Designs to gather inspiration but also to showcase our designs! We are still tweaking things , but we are loving it so far.


• We LOVE the new show on ABC "Once Upon a Time". Well, I do anyways, Paul has only watched one episode. But I am officially obsessed! It's a great way to spend a Sunday night catching up with all your favorite fairy tale characters and what would happen if they lived in an ordinary town in present day.


• We LOVE music. Working in the studio long hours we listen to our fair share of music like classic rock, pop or a mix of children's music since the kiddos are usually nearby when we are working. We picked up these iPod shuffles for the kids to play lullaby music to fall asleep at night.... because who doesn't enjoy listening to music as they fall asleep?




Until next year! Hope your year is full of LOVE!

** Disclaimer: Everything we mention above in this post is Swirly Designs personal opinions; we were not paid or asked to promote any of these items/products we talked about. We just "love" them!

Things we LOVE! SUMMER edition

I'm sure you all can relate....Remember when you were kids and how long summer days felt? Hanging at the playground and swimming at the local pool all day. The months felt like forever back then.

Now two months seems like two weeks! We can't believe we are already planning back to school shopping for the kids. Everything is going by so fast. Even though here at the studio, its warm outside and we can smell the fresh cut grass... we are thinking of the coming holidays, crafts shows and winter months ahead.

So today got us thinking about things we love about these warm SUMMER days and how we should enjoy and appreciate them more. So we created another edition of Things we LOVE! Summer edition.


• We LOVE being able to work all day without shoes. We haven't seen socks all summer:)

• We LOVE the after dinner walks with the kids even though our two year old can't decide if she wants to walk, be carried, or ride in her wagon for our strolls.

• We LOVE going to the local farmers market and picking up fresh fruit and vegetables. We had the best sugar snap peas yesterday. Yummy!

• We LOVE exploring new museums, playgrounds and trips into Boston with the kids.

• We LOVE regrouping and planning new things for our second half of the year for Swirly Designs.

• We LOVE getting emails with new and exciting opportunities.

• We LOVE that our first Patriotic ornament collection was so well received even with all the website issues we had.

• We LOVE the mindless summer tv shows like Designs Star, The Next Food Network Star, Big Brother and Rosanne's Nuts.
** Disclaimer: Lianne wants to make it clear that she doesn't love the last two shows, those are Paul's guilty pleasures ;-))

Comment and share with us some of the things you LOVE about the simple things this summer.

And remember to stop and enjoy every moment this summer!

Things we LOVE! EASTER edition

With Easter only two weeks away the weather here is starting to get warmer and more springlike!!

We are planning a date to decorate our 4 dozen of eggs with the kids very soon!

With our Easter/Spring collection finally completed and online, we thought this would be the perfect time to share some of our favorite Easter treats we discovered this season..so we're calling it Things we LOVE! Easter edition.


We LOVE Paper
We enjoy playing with paper on our down time when we aren't using clay. Looking around the studio lately we have piles of cool scrapbook/color paper that just screams at us to create something. We created some fun paper eggs for one of our Easter trees. We added one of our Easter Greeting banner that was left over from our ornaments.



We LOVE other Crafters
Especially ones who create whimsical unique Easter designs. It's a little challenging finding interesting and different Easter designs but when we came across these fun characters from Vintage by Crystal we just had to adopt a few for our own collection. We have met Crystal at a few of the local craft shows we've been at over the years, and seeing her work in person and chatting with her you can tell she really enjoys what she does.



We LOVE Easter Decorations
Every holiday we always visit and checkout all the stores holiday merchandise to see what's new out there. The store we think that caters to seasonal/Holiday decor really well is HomeGoods . It is constantly changing merchandise and bringing in different items for every season. The trick is that every store is a little different so we will end up hitting 4 different HG stores to find something. This season we found this wooden Happy Easter sign and a bunny carrying a little bunny figurine that is white flocked glittered.


We LOVE Color
A Springtime color palette of pale blues, greens, pinks and yellows how always makes us smile. We purchased a new shelf unit for the studio for that exact reason! We wanted to display our paints in color groups to admire and get inspiration from.



We LOVE mini Trees
This is where we might be considered hoarders. But we can't resist a mini tree! So whenever we come across a new or unusual tree we can't help ourselves. Just looking around the studio right now we have 19 trees. Anyway, our latest find is a small white tree we found at Target for only $2.50. How could we have NOT picked one up...liked it so much we bought 2!
And it's not everyday you come across a purple glitter tree.


How fun is this little Lindts chocolate gold bunny car!

We LOVE Candy
What's Easter without some yummy candy. How cool are these vintage inspired foil bunnies look all decked out in their bunny suits. We make a special trip to our local chocolate shope each year to pick up these little guys based on the way theylook alone...the good thing is they taste as good as they look. Presentation is everything!



We LOVE Magazines
We have mentioned in many posts before how much we adore holiday magazines and even though we only came across a small handful this year, the ones we did find didn't disappoint. Each magazine if choc full of fun inspiring Easter and spring projects. If you enjoy ornaments as much as we do you might want to check out Celebrate 365 which is a quarterly magazine about about holiday ornaments. If you know of any other magazines we should check out email us and let us know.



We LOVE Easter Crafts
Papier mache eggs are a must for any craft studio. There so many things you can do with them! You can glitter, decoupage or paint them. You can create an Easter scene inside them. The ideas are endless. The dark paper eggs are from D. Blumchen & Company and the cream color are from Martha crafts which we can't seem to find anymore. Also from Martha crafts are the bunny paper punches.


We LOVE Easter Specials
If there is a show about Easter... were watching. It could be a food special or a classic old school kids special. We love it! So you can guess how egg-cited we were when we found out that this year we get to see two new specials to enjoy. A new Easter movie HOP and a new Martha Stewart eggcellent Easter special on the Hallmark channel this Sunday April 17th


Would you like to add to our list? Please Share your favorite thoughts of the Springtime season.
Happy Easter Everyone!


** Everything we mention above is Swirly Designs personal opinions; we were not paid or asked to promote any of these items/products we talked about.

Things we LOVE!

Hope everyone had an enjoyable Valentine's Day.

We didn't do anything for each other mainly because we have been celebrating, designing and thinking Valentine's for the past two months. So yesterday was all about the kids (when isn't it?). The whole day was full of things they love to do. So we played games, did crafts made brownies and cookies which we decorated after dinner and watched some Valentine's specials that we DVR'd.

Today got us thinking about things we love and we thought we would share some for today's post since February is the month of love. So here are a few things that make us swoon (of course we aren't going to list family or friends... that's a given!)

• We LOVE curling up in a big chair next to a window when the sunlight is pouring in.

• We LOVE visiting our favorite blogs to read their new posts of the day.

• We LOVE going to the bookstore and discovering new holiday themed magazines and books. Counting down the minutes to all the new Easter/Spring issues.

• We LOVE the feeling minutes after we send out our e~mailer announcing our new ornament collection is online.

• We LOVE reading and listening (podcasts) about other artists and crafters work and how they create. Here are a few of our top favorites:
Podcasts:
Escape from illustration Island and Ask Tara Reed
Blogs:
the creative mind of Holli Conger illustration tips series and Blu Penny Sketchbook stories

• We LOVE a clean and organized studio

• We LOVE getting mail and receiving packages. How exciting it is to get little (or sometime large: we are expecting our shipment of clay for the year any day now) gifts delivered right to our front door.

• We LOVE making lists and being able to cross off completed tasks when done....Like this weeks post which is our 200th!

Comment and share with us some of the things you LOVE about the simple things in life.
Enjoy the week:)