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Duh, Pinning

Written on June 27, 2011 at 10:58 am
By Julianne Hilmes

Have you heard of the website Pintrest.com yet? If not, you should check it out!

It’s a relatively new website to which you either have to request an invitation or be invited. Once you’re a member, you can peruse all the images on the homepage, or you can filter them out by category: home & furniture, gifts, food & drink, travel, art & architecture, design, DIY, prints, products, fashion and a slew of other categories. It’s like tearing great ideas out of a magazine and putting them in a folder to remember them, only it’s online and much easier to see all at once.

The idea is that you have your own “boards” on your Pintrest profile. When you see an image you like you can “re-pin” it to the board you deem fitting. You can create your own fashion inspiration board, home ideas board, inspirational quotes board or beautiful photos board. You can have as many or as few boards as you like.

On the homepage, you can see the things that have been pinned and re-pinned by all Pintrest users, or you can simplify to just the pinboards that you follow (this could be your friends or favorite trendsetters), and draw inspiration from them!

There’s even a nifty application that can go in your web browser toolbar. With the “pin it” application, no matter what website you are on, if you see something you like, you simply click “pin it” on the toolbar. The application will ask which board you would like the image to be pinned to and then pin it there.

Another great thing about Pintrest, is that you can see the origin of the pin. By just clicking through on an image you will be taken to the original website where, perhaps, you just may find a number of other items to suit your fancy.

www.pintrest.com

Follow my pin boards on Pintrest @ Julianne Hilmes

beyond the red kettle

Written on November 17, 2010 at 4:24 pm
By Amy Bleier Long

One of the things I’m already trying to instill in my daughter is an understanding of how blessed we are to have everything we need and quite a few of the things we want, but that this isn’t the case for everyone.

A favorite childhood memory of time spent with my family is of a Salvation Army volunteer day we all participated in together, though my sister and I were quite young. There were hundreds of boxes and cans of food set up like a makeshift grocery store in the meeting hall of an electricians’ union. We just went around and around the hall with a wagon, filling up bags for needy families until all the food was allocated. That’s actually my earliest memory of volunteering and giving back in any small way I could, and looking for opportunities like that is something I continue to do with my own little family.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned in this first year of motherhood, it’s that sleep truly is a gift. And perhaps a privilege I seem to have not yet earned back. So to further build good karma, I want to share with you Stearns & Foster’s Gift of Sleep program.

Between this coming Monday, November 22, and January 3, 2011, for every Stearns & Foster mattress set purchased at a participating retailer, the company will donate $100—up to $1 million—toward new mattresses designed specifically for The Salvation Army for their residential facilities. And some retailers are even planning to match the gift, so if you’re in the market for a new mattress, try your local Stearns & Foster retailer.

Because ’tis the season, and isn’t giving and receiving at the same time the best of both worlds?

eye on the tiger – behind the scenes at Shaw

Written on June 10, 2010 at 3:50 pm
By Amy Bleier Long

I’m kind of a geek, so I was very into the heavy-on-the-science tour of the Shaw headquarters. It was cool to see the process from start to finish, and it really illustrated the advantages of Tigressá SoftStyle carpet.

We started where most things do: inspiration. We briefly discussed the colors, research, home and fashion trends, and qualities (strength, beauty, protection) that influenced the Shaw designers. Regional inspiration boards and displays showing national and regional sales of existing products by color were interesting to study.

The group was paired off to create our own inspiration boards. The Shaw team wanted to see what we were inspired by and what we were seeing in the market. I worked with the fabulous Carmen Natschke from The Decorating Diva. Here’s our board (including some pieces you may already recognize from past TH issues):

If you want to hear me discuss our board, here’s a video. More of what I’ve been seeing in the market will be in our pages soon!

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eye on the tiger – Tigressá SoftStyle

Written on May 22, 2010 at 5:19 pm
By Amy Bleier Long

 
In the market for new carpet? I just got back from a slightly whirlwind trip to Dalton, GA, for a press event hosted by Shaw, the world’s largest carpet manufacturer, and CCA Global Partners, where I toured Shaw’s corporate headquarters and had an exclusive preview of their brand new line coming out this weekend.
 

Tigressá SoftStyle is an innovative line of nylon carpet, but it’s also the culmination of a lengthy development process, one I learned a great deal about over two days. Shaw let us (9 bloggers, 3 trade editors, and me!) see the evolution of Tigressá by literally opening their doors so we could examine each step in the production cycle. Read more

The P-r-r-r-fect Home: How Catty Are You?

Written on January 18, 2010 at 10:11 am
By Candace Ord Manroe

So I’ve been reading the TH blogs and slide shows written by my colleagues and realize just how dog-driven a culture we, the TH editors and readers, are. And I have to wonder: What about the cats?

I grew up a dog person, remain one today. Jack, 10-year-old golden retriever, and Nellie, ??-year-old rescued yellow lab, are proof. (As is my newly destroyed sofa, after Jack and Nellie were egged on, I suspect, by my handsome, adorable two-year-old grand-dog, golden doodle Danny, when I dog-sat over Christmas and was gone too long for his liking one day. Such fluff! Such madness! Who knew a single sofa cushion could hold so much
fill?)

But years ago, as a newlywed, I discovered myself hitched to a cat man. Because he was feline-friendly, we did not have a fenced yard for a dog, and I desperately wanted a pet, I followed an ad in the Dallas Morning News leading me to the mixed breed litter of a full-Persian momma cat.

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