House & Home

y friend just moved into her new condo this month (btw, the photo above isn't her new place) and she asked me for décor help. She had initially asked me to help her pick out furniture for her new place back in January, but we never had a chance to meet. Well, turns out that she picked out a couch that she hates and she can't return it. She said the colour clashes with her wall colour and she's in a dilemma on what to do with it. I'm supposed to meet up with her on Thursday to check out her new place, and I've been thinking about ways to make the couch work. By no means am I an interior design guru, but I've always had an affinity to interior design and my friend seems to like how I decorated my house. I had suggested to her to possibly add a throw and decorative pillows to break up the colour of the couch and somehow tie the colour to her wall colour... Or she could try slip-covering the couch with a more complimentary shade. I guess I won't really know what to suggest to her until I see her place in person.

I think the best way to decorate a house is to decorate it little-by-little. I know with my house it took a while to finish each room. I'm still not finished, but by doing this it gives you a chance to feel out your space and figure out what makes sense for that room. Plus, it gives a house a more home-y look that isn't so matchy matchy. My friend was in a such rush to have her space all put together when she moved in that she bought her couch without bringing her wall paint colour chip with her to the furniture store.

Just today, while I was at a photoshoot I saw these pillows that were at the photographer's studio to shoot for House & Home Magazine. I was immediately drawn to the beautiful pillows because the colours were so vibrant. They were by Adam & Viktoria. What great accents these would make to a boring couch! Too bad they are a fortune at $265 each...

Inspiration

orking in the creative industry can be challenging. The reason being is that you constantly have to come up with ideas. And no matter how creative you are sometimes, you get stuck.

That's why I believe that everyone (not even creative individuals) should have an inspiration binder. Actually it doesn't have to be in the form of a binder. It could be an inspiration board/folder/etc. I have a binder at work where I keep hard copies of tears that I find in magazines, books, prints. Then at home I have an inspiration bulletin board and I even have a folder in my computer where I keep inspiration shots of food, photography, décor, packaging, fashion, props, covers from magazines, typography, beauty, and anything that comes to mind that could be in a category. Every time I'm in a creative rut I go through these inspiration folders/binders and then I immediately come up with an idea. Sometimes it doesn't come right away, but when I'm lying in bed. So I challenge all of you to do the same and start an inspiration folder/book/board/binder!

I thought I would share a snippet of an example of this for something I did at work. The story was a story on spring jackets. We had just finished our winter issue where we covered a story on winter coats. I didn't want it to look like the same as the winter coats feature, but I also didn't want to shoot the spring jackets on white with copy explaining where the jacket was from below. I wanted it to look pretty and feel spring-like. So I went searching in my inspiration binder...

I had a shot of men's coats hanging on a clothing rack in my inspiration binder. I thought that I could use the same idea to execute the spring jackets story for my magazine. The spring jackets story was a 2-page story so I thought we could shoot the jackets as a DPS (double page spread) and put the copy directly on the image below the jackets. Once I decided to go this route I immediately thought of wallpapers and props that we could use in the shot to evoke the feeling of springtime.

I contacted Farrow & Ball, which is a high-end wallpaper company based in the UK, and they sent me 5 rolls to use in our shot. We chose this squiggly pattern because it looked really bright and cheery. Can you believe the patterns are hand painted???

And this is our final shot with the real copy. I also called in the baseboards and rod from Home Depot to create this shot and the prop stylist sourced the umbrella, the umbrella stand, and Hunter boots. Of course, I gave him direction on what to source. My colleague sourced all the jackets. Because my colleague knew what my idea was it was really easy for her to find colours of jackets that would go well together. We all worked together to make my vision become a reality.

And to think it all started with the inspiration binder...

Gift guide

ne thing that I truly enjoy working on every year is the gift guide. I know I love looking at beautifully produced gift guides myself so I wanted to make sure we did exactly that for our magazine. Our Editors called in the products for each section based on the price point and how interesting it was. I made sure that we chose products that were beautiful and the colours worked together. I also brought more items that we needed to the shoot just in case some items didn't work together on the composed shots. We have 4 sections in our magazine- Look Great (Beauty), Get Healthy (Health), Eat Well (Food), and Embrace Life (Lifestyle). We divided the gift guides into the 4 sections and made the background colour to match the colour tabs of each section. Our amazing prop stylist, Daniel Onori, did an amazing job taking my concept to reality. He purchased metal ceiling tiles from Home Depot and painted it to match the section of our magazine. That was for the hero image background (the left-hand page). The right-hand page had a lighter/darker background than the left-hand page that we painted on a plain surface. The right-hand page had a composed shot that offset the hero image on the left.

Look Great

- My idea was to put a gift tag on the hero image to make it more gift-like. You can see that idea on the other 3 spreads.

Get Healthy

- Doesn't the blue background behind the skates look like ice? It's weird how it turned out that way...

Eat Well

- I love how this spread looks. I think it's my favourite out of the 4. I like how it has less items than the others and most of the items are graphic. I can spend all day just looking at all the things on the page... but that's just me. :-)

Embrace Life

- Do you notice a certain someone on the page? That's my son, baby A, on the Kodak digital picture frame!

Photography by Luis Albuquerque

I love...

'm currently going through a nail polish phase. I normally don't spend money on nail polishes, but when I heard about Chanel's Le Vernis Nail Colour in 509 Paradoxal I knew I had to have it. It was quite a quest to get it because when I went to the Chanel counter at Holts they were all sold out and I had to put my name on a waiting list. I didn't have the patience to wait (the list was 2 pages long!) so I went to a Chanel store nearby and luckily they had it in the makeup counter. I guess not a lot of people knew that the Chanel store had a makeup counter in the store so they didn't check there...

Anyways, it was a small fortune to buy it (almost $30 CAD with tax!), but it was well worth it. The colour is just gorgeous- an eggplant purple that changes colour in different lighting. It looks grayish taupe in the shade and then a shimmery purple in sunlight. I only need 2 coats and it dries super quick. I definitely want to check out other Chanel nail polishes in the future. My next quest is to track down Deborah Lippmann's Waking Up In Vegas* nail polish. That was sold out everywhere too. Lady Gaga was wearing that colour in the September '10 cover of Vanity Fair.

* I recently bought Waking Up In Vegas at Donato Salon. It's not as light as in the Vanity Fair cover, but still is a beautiful colour.



The perfect top coat that I found recently was Seche Vite's Dry Fast Top Coat. It dries instantly and it makes my Chanel nail polish last and last. If you don't have this already you MUST pick it up. I swear by it.

Covet Garden Magazine

ovet Garden Magazine is an on-line shelter magazine that focuses each issue on one couple and their home. It doesn't try too hard because it's not ultra-styled like some shelter magazines you see on newsstands. Currently it produced 2 issues, but I'm loving everything about it. Although it's a small issue I spend time on each page because there's so much to look at. I'm just lucky that I had the opportunity to work with the contributors of this magazine- Jodi and Tracy. They are super talented and such a pleasure to work with.

I was so sad when Blueprint Magazine folded in 2008, but I'm glad that there's this great magazine to replace it. If you haven't checked it out yet, please do so. It's free and you won't regret it! Here's a sneak peek at issue 2.

had the wonderful opportunity to work with a great stylist in the city, Daniel Onori. I have great respect for off-figure stylists as they have to deal with making products look good. It's not as easy as it looks. Trust me, I've done low-budget photo shoot where I had to style products myself and it is HARD! If you are styling multiple products you have to make sure that they work well visually through a camera lens. You have to prop the products in different planes so that visually it looks good.
One of my favourite spreads that he worked on was the Where Christmas gift guide issue. I forgot what year it was for, but I just loved what he did with it. Basically the criteria of the feature was to focus on different Toronto neighbourhoods and choose gift ideas that are characterized by those neighbourhoods.


This is the cover of the issue. You can see that Daniel styled the products in the shape of a Christmas tree. Brilliant, no?


This is the opening page of the gift guide feature. It starts off with Toronto's posh Bloor Street. This is where all the high-end fashion stores are located. Sort of like New York's 5th Avenue. You can see that for this feature he used a map pattern on the background to tie the whole feature together.


Bayview Avenue is where all the 'yuppies' and yummy mummies live.


Bay Street is Toronto version of Wall Street. I love the brown colour scheme that he used. It's amazing how colours invoke a certain style.


Queen Street is the funky, shopping district. Lots of chic boutiques and bohemian styles.


King Street is where all the modern furniture stores and new high-rise condos are.


College Street is where all the funky musicians hang.

But what you don't see is the amazing collaboration between the Art Director & Editor of the magazine, plus the photographer, and the off-figure stylist that had to take place for this to be possible. Kudos to the team at Where!

Gift guide

I came across this gift guide I art directed and helped produce while I was at my previous job. It was for the Winter 2007 gift guide for Canadian Family Magazine.
Now that I'm expecting a boy I'm paying more attention to anything child-related. It was so awesome working on this gift guide and I'm really proud of how it turned out.

Oh Gwyneth

House & Garden magazine is featuring the lovely Gwyneth Paltrow's Hampton pad on their current issue (November 2007). After seeing these photos I am utterly green with envy. Her house looks modern without looking austere. Every single room in the house has character.

See more of the house below:

Mini planters

Went to TeatrO VerdE today and bought some cute mini planters for my washroom.
I also bought a really nice silver vase. I'm planning to put some pink peonies or roses in them. Sort of what I saw in Domino Magazine.

Coincidence?

I received my book orders from Amazon last Thursday. I happened to get the new Blueprint on the same day.
I was admiring Lotta Jansdotter's Simple Sewing book and happened to look through the new Blueprint at the same time. What do I come across? A feature on Lotta Jansdotter's home in Blueprint! Weird.
The funny thing is this happened to me on the last issue too. I had been admiring and reading the Purl Bee blog and she was featured in the last Blueprint.
Coincidence? I think not!
Here is the other book I purchased on Amazon, Sew U by Wendy Mullin with Eviana Hartman: