Sunday, February 11, 2018
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Basket Cases: 5 Clever Ways to Repurpose Gift Baskets
If you were a lucky boy or girl at Christmas, you'll have gift baskets just begging to be repurposed. Try these 5 ideas for storage and decoration.
If you were a lucky boy or girl over the Christmas period, you may now have attractive gift baskets and hampers lying around just begging to be reused and repurposed. Whether you've received traditional woven wicker baskets, faux leather hampers or shabby chic wooden crates, don't let these beautiful items go to waste.
To breathe fresh life into your old hampers and empty gift baskets, we've curated 5 fabulous "basket cases" to provide a little design inspiration.
1. Hanging baskets
If you're green fingered, why not fill your empty wicker baskets with flowers and foliage? This is a wonderful project which is very easy to put together at home. Perfect for bringing a little colour and rustic charm to exteriors and outdoor spaces.
Simply string up your empty wicker gift baskets, fill them with compost, plant your favourite flowers then hang them up to beautify outdoors areas. We particularly like the addition of a trailing creeper in the lower basket to add pretty fronds and greenery to your creation.
Stacked baskets full of your favourite herbs also work wonderfully, great for cooking and wonderful for adding scent to a kitchen garden or patio.
2. Stencilled storage
If you're a hoarder of clothes, shoes, records, perfumes or DVDs, larger gift baskets and hampers make brilliant, tucked away storage, which look pretty on the outside, while keeping clutter safely on the inside.
If you have larger wooden chests or baskets left over from bigger gifts, why not turn them in to beautiful and practical storage? You could even stencil them with their contents (we particularly like French versions: "Chaussures" for a touch of romance and culture). For sturdier chests, pop a couple of pretty cushions on top to provide extra seating.
3. Bathroom baskets
We're in love with these innovative bathroom baskets. Simply hung from towel rails, these are laid-back, repurposed
storage of the most inspiring type.
Customise to taste with your chosen rails and hangers and use to hold all of those bathroom essentials, without clutter. Perfect for those of you who dream of an elegant, minimal bathroom with plenty of charm.
4. Basket bookcase
For avid readers, these basket bookcases are a gorgeous way to store, organise and showcase your favourite books. We love the customised labels, although we think alphabetical baskets would be even better. If you are particularly keen on a couple of authors, they could be given pretty labelled baskets all of their very own.
5. Spice baskets
A well stocked spice collection is essential for any self-respecting home gourmet - and airtight, former gift baskets look so much more beautiful than plastic or supermarket-bought alternatives. We especially like the look of this small, rustic wooden chest, wonderful for laid-back kitchens with a warm, vintage style.
To keep your herbs and spices fresh, make sure you use baskets with lids, or pick up some Tupperware which fits your baskets perfectly. You can even subdivide larger baskets to fit all of your flavours simultaneously. Delicious!
Monday, January 20, 2014
3 essential home design trends for 2014
Welcome in the new year with a revamp for your interiors. If you're searching for a little inspiration, look no further. Here are 3 trends to look out for.
New year, new start - if you're ready to welcome in 2014 with fresh interior design, we've compiled a handful of our favourite influences to keep you on trend. From copper accents to a powerful blue colour palette, we've scoured far and wide to bring you some of the most versatile, beautiful and inspiring interior design ideas set to be big over the coming year.
Decadent kitchens
Once a space for minimalist design, cool modern metal and bright simplicity, the style-conscious kitchen is set to become a more indulgent space in 2014. Forget clean lines, pared back appliances, medical metals, light woods and bright whites, this year the kitchen is given a touch of glamour.
Think rich, dark woods, art deco embellishments and deep hues. Where better to cook up something delectable than in a beautiful kitchen space, after all? We have warm, dark green paired with dark wood surfaces and a beautiful, feature piece of lighting as a key kitchen look in our 2014 scrapbooks this season.
Saturated turquoise
Banish beige and forget neutral shades, this year warm and bold blues are proving popular. Traditionally a cooler colour, there's a hot side to this shade which has made one of the most popular shades for 2014, alongside the recently announced Pantone Radiant Orchid colour of the year.
When it comes to the blues, however, there is a whole colour wheel of choice out there; from rich navy tones to beautiful ultramarine colour pops. Mixing and matching shades is a popular look, but it is a bright, saturated turquoise which is proving to be the favourite blue this year.
Don't go for feature walls, instead introduce turquoise to all corners of your room, accompany this bright, bold colour with tiled or medium-to-light wood flooring and decorate with mixed textures and materials to create a light, eclectic and naturally beautiful look.
Copper highlights
Copper is the interior designer's metallic inspiration of choice this year. The warm glowing metal makes a refreshing change from more clinical chrome and showy gold highlights. It has a homely, ethnic feel which adds a touch of brightness, without seeming cold or pretentious. Copper works wonderfully with bold patterns of all shapes and sizes, from chintzy vintage designs to bold, modern floral patterns and monochrome geometric designs. Use in moderation to add highlights to a strong decor.
What's your design inspiration this year? Are you introducing any of our favourite looks into your home? We'd love to hear what's influencing your decor in 2014, let us know with a comment below, or drop us an email at info@bluemahogany.com.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Looks like we're trending!
Thursday, December 5, 2013
Friday, September 27, 2013
Are you creative?
http://www.fastcompany.com/3016689/leadership-now/10-paradoxical-traits-of-c
reative-people?goback=.gde_103871_member_274067768#!
10 Paradoxical Traits Of Creative People
Creative people are humble and proud. Creative people tend to be both
extroverted and introverted. Creative people are rebellious and
conservative. How creative are you?
By: Faisal Hoque <http://www.fastcompany.com/user/faisal-hoque>
_____
I frequently find myself thinking about whether I am an artist or an
entrepreneur <http://www.faisalhoque.com> .
It is safe to say that more and more entrepreneurs are artists, and artists
of all kinds are entrepreneurs. And the trend is only on the rise as all
things (art, science, technology, business, culture, spirituality) are
increasingly converging.
Creativity is the common theme that drives both entrepreneurs and artists
alike. But creative people are often also paradoxical.
In the words of distinguished professor of psychology and management Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi:
"I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work,
to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up
with new ideas and new things. If I had to express in one word what makes
their personalities different from others, it's complexity. They show
tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They
contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an individual, each of them
is a multitude."
Mihaly describes ten traits often contradictory in nature
<http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/199607/the-creative-personality> ,
that are frequently present in creative people. In Creativity, Mihaly
outlines these:
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they're also
often quiet and at rest.
They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of
freshness and enthusiasm.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
"It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas;
flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and
originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the
dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most
workshops try to enhance."
3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and
irresponsibility.
But this playfulness doesn't go very far without its antithesis, a quality
of doggedness, endurance, and perseverance.
"Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them
work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.
Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working
out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night,
muttering to himself: "What a beautiful thing is this perspective!" while
his wife called him back to bed with no success."
4.Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted
sense of reality.
Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that
is different from the present.
5. Creative people tend to be both extroverted and introverted.
We're usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of
crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show. Creative
individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.
6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or
supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead.
7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
When tests of masculinity and femininity are given to young people, over and
over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough
than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive
than their male peers.
8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of
culture. So it's difficult to see how a person can be creative without being
both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and
iconoclastic.
9.Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be
extremely objective about it as well.
Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without
being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility.
Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it:
"I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you
write, so that you can't be so identified with your work that you can't
accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much
affect as I do. But I am aware of that and of when I think it is
particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is
something where age really does help."
10. Creative people's openness and sensitivity often exposes them to
suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
"Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently
present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of
creation for its own sake. Without this trait, poets would give up striving
for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for
banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at
universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join
industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations
more predictable."
Paradoxical or not, what I have learned most is that there is no formula for
individual creation. As Mihay says, "creative individuals are remarkable for
their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with whatever
is at hand to reach their goals." So, more than anything else, what it takes
to be creative is resourcefulness and the courage not to give up.