Time wasters: Oscars edition

Thank goodness it's Friday. If you need to kill a little time waiting for the weekend to get started, try these Oscar-related quizzes:

Guess the dress: Identify the actress wearing each gown.

What's Your Red-Carpet Style Personality: Find out which celebrity is a match for you. Apparently I am "Jennifer Lawrence aka The Sexpot Next Door." Yep, that's me.

Test your Oscar knowledge: The Chicago Tribune's annual trivia quiz.

Which 2014 Best Picture Nominee Are You: A crowd pleaser or an indie darling? I got Her. "At your best, you’re quirky and charming. At your worst, you’re a real downer to be around." Fabulous.

The Oscars: Can You Complete the Speech? Fill in the missing words.

And don't forget to download your printable ballot and bingo game for Sunday's telecast. Have a fun weekend!

A website that teaches you how to knit

Sheep & Stitch is a freshly-launched website that teaches you how to knit using video tutorials and simple patterns. I don't know how to knit, but if I wanted to learn, I think I'd start here. The site is clean and pretty with lovely, cohesive photography and a simple layout. Follow the knitting map to go from a person who knows nothing (me) to a person who can make a sweater. More patterns, videos, and goodies are coming soon, so sign up for the newsletter if you want to be alerted. I love how-to sites, and this looks like it'll be a good one.

Free font: Akura Popo

I've gotten a few requests for the name of the main typeface I used on yesterday's Oscar bingo cards. It's Brothers Regular, available from myfonts.com for $49. If you're looking for something free that has similar 19th century squared-off properties, try Akura Popo by Twicolabs Design. It's fair game for personal and commercial use. Akura Popo is more condensed and you'll have to do some manual kerning, but it might come in handy for your craft beer and banjo night invitations. Get it here.

P.S. I almost hit the publish button without noticing I'd made an unfortunate typographical error on "Popo." I have corrected it.

2014 printable Oscar bingo and ballot

[To join the bingo mailing list for future years, sign up here].

My 2014 Oscar ballot and bingo game are done! Get set to enjoy Sunday's Academy Awards with friends. It doesn't matter if they watch movies or know who the actors are; anyone can play bingo and it's a good excuse for a party.

Download the Oscar ballot PDF
Download the Oscar bingo PDF

Save the PDFs to your computer, open them in Adobe Reader, and print.


To use the ballot: print one for each guest and have them mark their predictions before the show starts. The person with the most correct guesses wins.

To use the bingo cards: 20 different game cards are included in the PDF. Print out the number of pages you need for your guests. Then fan out the sheets, close your eyes, wave your hands over them, and put your finger on a card. This one is meant to be yours. Your party guests can fight over the rest of the sheets, but they're not going to win. You are. As you all watch the telecast, the first person to mark off five squares in a line wins. It could be a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line. (This year I removed the center "free" space to make you work a little harder.)

Movie theater gift cards, boxes of popcorn, candy, or little Oscar statuettes from a party store make good prizes.

Has anybody tried to play with friends long distance? You could each claim a page number to print out and then text or tweet each other when you get a bingo.

Like every year, a disclaimer: Maybe someone will get a bingo ten minutes into the telecast, or maybe your group won't have a winner at all because my psychic powers have failed this year. Best of luck!

Easy woven origami bookmarks

I made these simple little woven bookmarks during my lunch break. Follow the directions at make-origami.com. I cut two 3/4" wide strips from a piece of 8 1/4" double-sided square origami paper and taped the short ends together to make a long, skinny strip. Then I followed the directions.


Easy and cute.

Stocksy: better stock photos?

Designers and bloggers in need of realistic stock images, have you checked out Stocksy yet? I looked it up after seeing an ad in HOW. I use Getty and iStockPhoto (owned by Getty) constantly as sources of images for clients, but finding realistic-looking photos can be a challenge. Plus they're criticized for paying photographers next to nothing. Stocksy apparently pays 50% of the purchase price back to the artist who made the photo— an improvement, offers relatively inexpensive pricing to those of us buying, and the images seem much more authentic. I suppose they'll have their share of women laughing alone with salad, but maybe the women are more likely to look like your neighbor or the owner of the hipster knitting shop down the street instead of a phony model.* The search function isn't as sophisticated as the Getty sites and the image library is smaller, but I'm going to start shopping here.

*Getty's Lean In collection is a huge leap forward in depicting women; check that out, too.

Tricky trompe l'oeil pillows

These photo-realistic throw pillows are whimsical and fun. I'd be curious to see how the three dimensional illusions hold up in person, but they look very cool in photos. Maybe we should try a DIY version– take a photo, print it on transfer paper, and iron it onto fabric. Or for higher quality, print the fabric at Spoonflower and sew it into cushions.

1. Succulent by Plantillo.
2. Chesterfield sofa by Morondanga
3. Oak tree by Nicklas Gustafsson
4. Geogami by Snurk
5. Art deco detail by Tammy Winand
6. Pug by Benwinewin
7. Leaf by Plantillo

We gift wrapped the dining room

The dining room wallpaper is finished. It almost killed us, but we prevailed. Remember when my plan was to do just an accent wall? After living with it for a couple weeks, we decided the rest of the room looked too stark and incomplete. So we bought more.

We painted the white ceiling light gray and added paper to the other walls. It took two Saturdays and a couple late nights after work to do the remaining three walls, because we are possibly the slowest wallpaper hangers in history. And one of us is an annoying perfectionist. This room has two windows, a fireplace, and five doors to maneuver around, with rosette blocks that stick out on the corners just to add some extra pain and suffering.


Painting the ceiling was a challenge since we didn't want to get paint on the wall that was already done. I had nightmarish visions of turning it into a Jackson Pollack mural, so we tried to tape a plastic sheet over it. The painter's tape wouldn't stick on the painted walls, however; the plastic was too heavy. Alex had a roll of plastic film from work, so we decided to try that, thinking that taping up strips would be easier since they'd be lighter. To our amazement, the stuff clung to the wall with static electricity alone. This discovery was the greatest moment in our entire project. We couldn't stop high-fiving. It was how Ben Franklin must have felt.

With a tiny brush I carefully painted the ceiling along the edge of the wallpaper, and then the rest of the painting was easy. We didn't spill a drop on the plastic. Figures.

Then came the marathon wallpaper application, and here we have it:


It's cozy and pretty and dramatic. I love it. I'm more of a minimal girl at heart, but in a Victorian house, you have to have some fun.

For Valentine's Day Alex bought me flowers that match the paper. That might seem like no big deal, but God and I both know how much he detested doing this project with me. Trust me: that gift was an amazing act of self-sacrifice.

A more modern light fixture is in the works, along with some artwork and a painted dresser. We're coming down the home stretch in here!

P.S. The paper is Sophie Conran's Balustrade in Claret. It was on sale when I bought the second batch, so if you need to have some, maybe a discount will come along.