West Elm is offering a set a of DIY downloads for Christmas gift labels, menus, recipe cards, name tags, and more. Choose from four different suites and print away.
Vintage coffee set by Follyandglee
Creative Zone by Superflash Photography
Happy Thanksgiving, all! You might enjoy this printable illustration from Draw Pilgrim in Australia—a conciliatory gesture for Americans arriving at her website after searching the internet for how to draw pilgrims. Funny. Pilgrim suggests posting it on your door to welcome guests or laminating it for placemats. 
A handful of sweet items to sew or craft:
Happy Monday, all! I'm delighted to announce a new giveaway: two readers can win a framed art print of their choice from the new and improved Thumbtack Press! Thumbtack offers a curated collection of work from over 100 artists and illustrators. When I say I'm delighted, it's not blogger hyperbole, either. I've ordered from Thumbtack Press myself and can verify that their prints are terrific. Their paper stock is really heavy, and their inks are archival and stated to be fade resistant for 100 years, which ought to be just about long enough. Prices are super affordable.
How to win a framed print
The owl craze is still going strong. For those who can't get enough of them, I present to you the Owl Lover 2011 printable calendar by My Owl Barn. Customize your calendar online by choosing from 30 different owl illustrations. Then generate a high res PDF, download, and print. Nifty!
New jacquard ribbons I designed for J Caroline arrived on my doorstep yesterday. It's always exciting (and scary) to see the finished product since I never know if the colors will turn out as expected. And flat Illustrator files always look cuter with real life texture than they do on my monitor, so I eagerly await these samples.
Everybody else got dumped onto a piece of foamboard. Here are all three colorways.
Sewing ribbon warranted a few props since it was easier to find a spool of thread than recruit some squirrels to pose with their ribbon. 
These are now available at J Caroline Creative in 25-yard rolls and at Banberry Place (check pages 3 or 4) by the yard. Coming soon to other retailers!
If you want to get a jump on printing out Christmas goodies, here's a hand-drawn holiday card, compliments of Mufn Inc. 
Possibly my Christmas shopping would be more inspired if I wrote ideas on special stationery. Download a printable shopping list from Atypical Type A.
Type Depot is offering their delicate Matilde typeface at a cost of zero dollars. She's available in two styles, along with decorative frames and patterns. Download her here. (This font is obviously a she.) For help using the patterns, click here.
I sewed these pacifier clips for a baby shower this weekend. I'd noticed solid-color clips in the store while wandering the aisles, and I wanted to include something handmade in my gift. These seemed easier to make than a stroller. 
Here's my little tutorial. You'll need ribbon, suspender clips (available at fabric stores), Fray Check (optional), and velcro.
5. Sew velcro pieces onto the folded end about 2" apart.
Themeleon by COLOURlovers is a tool for customizing your Twitter background. Try out different color palettes and themes, or choose from over 2,000 patterned backgrounds. Many of them are kind of hideous to my eyeballs, but hunting around a bit can yield some keepers.
The very same Kayanna Nelson of June Craft from yesterday's post has generously provided awesome downloadable goodies on her blog. Get the printable bird card right here. Or hunt through her posts to find all the free desktop wallpapers sprinkled about. Most are calendar desktops, but I was dying to use them immediately so I Photoshopped over the calendar areas to make them useful for posterity. I've got that bird on my monitor right this minute. Thank you, Kayanna!
I experimented with transferring an image onto fabric the other day. For my test, I used this completely adorable dachshund drawing by Kayanna Nelson of June Craft. The little fellow is downloadable for personal use at Bloesem Kids. 
Dampen the paper with water, then gently rub the paper away from the image with your finger.
The resulting fabric will be a bit stiffer where the gel medium was applied, and you'll be able to see it faintly. I sewed my print into a mini drawstring doggie bag, sized so the area with gel ends near the seams. This way the entire front of the bag is the same stiffness. It's quite cute!
For a good drawstring bag tutorial, check out this one at Skip To My Lou. Since my bag is tiny, I laid the baker's twine inside the top channel before stitching it down, rather than threading it through later.
Have you been over to Poolga yet? My iPad really likes their growing set of wallpapers by fabulous designers and illustrators. Maybe your phone would like them, too.
A collection of coaster projects, nice for keeping or handmade gift giving.
Just for fun I've made you a template for a personal calling card. Apparently social calling cards are making a comeback, so you might want to print up a few to hand out at parties, moms' play groups, to new neighbors, or tuck them into your Christmas cards if you've updated your contact info.
Download orange cards, blue cards, or burgundy cards.
Real Simple magazine offers an assortment of free invitations to download and print. Mom, I'll be waiting for one of those Thanksgiving invitations in the mail. With a ribbon, please.
Let's call this stationery week at How About Orange. Friends inexplicably keep marrying and having babies, so here are some shower invitations I made with a pal last week. 
You can download the butterfly template as a PDF file, a zipped Studio file for Silhouette users, or a zipped SVG file for Cricut users. And folks without a digital cutter will have to make do with an X-acto knife. Eek, that's a little bit daunting.
In keeping with yesterday's stationery post, here's a little wedding invitation I did for a friend. I hope she won't mind, but I have to tell you her story. Valerie and her future husband were college acquaintances in Taiwan. Ten years later, they bumped into each other in front of a Starbucks in San Francisco. Both had moved to the US for grad school, then relocated to California on the exact same day many months before the fated Starbucks meeting. Pretty great, right? 
Here are other designs that were part of the process. Congratulations, Valerie!
Tiny Prints is an online stationery company with gazillions of design options, from party and wedding invitations to birth announcements, thank you notes, and address labels. To kick off their brand new holiday greeting card line, Tiny Prints is offering a $50 gift certificate to two How About Orange readers. Spend it on Christmas cards or anything else you like on their site! International readers are invited to participate, too. 
