Every year we save the best shoe, shirt and jewelry boxes from the holidays and recycle them to hold craft supplies, store photos or use as gift boxes for the next giving season. Our stockpiles were getting unruly, as were our drawers full of scrap ribbon and wrapping paper, so we came up with a…
Our family loves a gift theme. We have given knitting, crafts, cooking, sewing and even butcher shop-inspired gifts in years past. This year we are excited by the multitude of handcrafted, naturally sourced and locally focused gifts available (many of which come from our hometown of Portland, OR!). “Natural” is a rather broad, all-encompassing term…
It’s possible that we have done everything you could think to do with mini pumpkins and gourds in the name of a beautiful Thanksgiving table — glitter, spray paint, stencils, papier mâché, carving, drilling, stamping. There is hardly a tool or technique we haven’t applied to (or tried on) the squash family. We thought this…
We grew up in a family of readers, and our mother saves every book she’s ever read. She has bookshelves everywhere, books stacked on the floor and a constant towering pile next to her bed. We got inspired to start organizing our own book collections, and came up with this idea when we found old…
It feels like every year, from Labor Day onward, the days and weeks fly by, and suddenly, the very busy holiday season is upon us! Feeling inspired by memories of back-to-school shopping, getting our supplies organized and anticipating the jam-packed months ahead, we made this very simple greeting card organizer. So many times in the…
For the last few craft parties we have hosted, we’ve become veterans of knitting and egg-decorating projects. Our latest crafty afternoon was inspired by a friend’s fig tree that we stumbled upon at a backyard soirée a few months ago in Los Angeles. Taking Paul Smith’s advice, we found “inspiration in everything,” and the idea…
A recent house clean-out yielded many items we had a hard time parting with, even though their very existence has become obsolete in the last few years. One of the most noticeable of the bunch: road maps. As our ever-advancing phones and computers take over our lives, we find what was once useful is now…
Learned from our grandmother — who used to collect shiny black sharks’ teeth and pristine white sand dollars on Florida beaches and Petoskey stones on the shores of Lake Michigan — we are a family of beachcombers who save up our treasures found by the sea and lake to use in craft projects all year….
Nothing makes us happier than the weekly (twice weekly if we’re lucky!) trips to our local outdoor farmers’ markets. With spring in full force, the farmers are flaunting their goods: brilliant radishes (French!), fresh eggs (We spotted turkey eggs last week!), lettuces and greens (Lamb’s quarters! Watercress! Wild arugula!), tall stalks of rhubarb, sweetly scented…
This time of year, we get so excited about the produce at the farmers’ markets, the green buds on the trees and the blooms all around us. To celebrate the change of seasons, we threw this green, herb-infused dinner party. This is our first Hunt, Gather and Host dinner in Laurel Canyon, and we wanted…
Although we’ve yet to exhume our sandals and tank tops from their winter resting place, we do see spring rearing its head . . . at last! After an especially long season of bare trees and cold days, we thought it might be nice to preserve some of spring’s bounty to hold us through the…
From growing up in Oregon, we are used to drizzly, wet springs (and winters and falls . . . ), and with those come rainy-day craft projects. This April, we’ve had a bit of a “rain, rain go away” feeling, but we know that in just a few weeks, we can expect sunshine and May…
Though we love the nostalgic, vinegary aroma of coloring eggs that always revives memories of Cadbury Egg-laden Easter baskets, Easter egg hunts in wet spring grass and stale, yellow marshmallow Peeps, we are always looking for new ways to adorn our eggs (check out last year’s Ukrainian egg DIY). This year, we skipped the dyes…
For years, many of our friends have been asking us to teach them to knit. We finally had a get-together for the knitters-to-be on a Saturday afternoon when we hosted a winter-to-spring knitting party. Saying a slow farewell to winter, we celebrated our favorite parts of winter with knitting, warm bowls of chili, hot chai…
March is our favorite time of year for two things: 1. organizing and 2. knitting. In theory, we’d like to start knitting in the fall to prepare for holiday gifts and the winter months ahead, but it always seems to be the busiest time of year, and sometimes it just isn’t practical to start knitting…
We have loved February 14 since our first doily-glued-to-a-red-card that we crafted for our classmates in the first grade. Every year since, we’ve covered our kitchen tables, desks or floors with supplies and materials weeks in advance while we work on our valentines. This year, in addition to handmade cards we’re sending in the mail,…
If it were totally up to us, we would be living on a farm or rural homestead in the middle of nowhere, spending our days foraging for mushrooms, milking our goats and gathering pine boughs from our backyard. But the reality is that we live in cities, and when one of those cities is Chicago,…
Happy New Year, everyone! We started the year off with a great plan for a winter get-together. We packed snowshoes, sleds, boots and our very best snowball-packing mittens and headed up north to Michigan. And we made invites to hand out to friends and family for a snowy sleigh ride picnic. But when we arrived,…
With the new year upon us, the reduce, renew, recycle mantra is at the forefront of our brains. That paired with a long list of thank you notes still to write inspired this recycled-cardboard postcard project. We have so many boxes around from the holidays that we decided to cut them up and make our…
Hello D*S readers! We bbbcraft sisters are so excited to start sharing our entertaining ideas! The three of us grew up between the Pacific Northwest and northern Michigan and found ourselves constantly foraging for beautiful things out-of-doors, bringing them inside to decorate and adorn our craft projects and parties. Although we live in cities now,…
