Birmingham Trip Recap

This past weekend, we traveled down to Birmingham, Alabama to celebrate a college friend's wedding. The weekend was jam-packed with fun activities, catching up with dear friends and family, and enjoying some awesome 60 degree weather (I'm so over the cold right now!).

I am so grateful for weekends like this - it's such a treat to be with people who know you so well. I love the feeling of knowing I can pick back up right where I left off with these friends, no matter how long it's been since we've talked. I left feeling satisfyingly exhausted (know what I mean?), and yet craved more time with these gals I love. The moments when we're all (at least almost all - we missed you, Laura!) together are rare these days. Not to get all sappy and cheesy, but these times are simply the best. So thanks, Libby, for getting married this weekend (haven't uploaded those photos from my camera yet! ahh!) - I wish you and Ben the best as you start your lives together. You were stunning on Saturday, and the wedding was absolutely beautiful. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to celebrate with you and spend time with some of my favorite people.

Until I get my act together and upload some photos from my "real" camera, here's a photo from my iPhone of (many of) my friends together after lunch on Sunday at Big Blue Bagel (one of my favorite places!).

So many exciting changes are happening with these ladies - three are having babies in the next several months, and one just got engaged. It's fun moving into new phases of life with them!

Now changing gears a bit to a design-related find from our trip...

We had brunch with some of my family on Saturday, and it happened to be at this coffee shop/restaurant that I'm going to go ahead and call a design goldmine. The inside was full of awesome vintage/antique finds and re-purposed items. I'll let the photos do most of the talking (again, iPhone photos!):

{Baskets and other containers as light fixtures? Yes please.}

{I'm dying to know what the original purpose was of those old bins with the wine bottles.}

{Old school maps - always a hit.}

{Anybody speak French who can translate the writing on these plates? I wanted to bring one of these home with me.}

{Yep, that would be an old gas cook top hanging from the ceiling.}

{Kind of dying over that table...and that art, actually.}

See how cool that place is? I could have spent hours just looking at all the pieces in there. What's your favorite thing? The more I look back at these photos, the more details I notice and love.

In case you live in Birmingham, the name of this spot is Urban Standard. Pay them a visit, will you please? Sip a cup of coffee, eat a sandwich, and admire their amazing collection of things and report back. I promise you won't regret it :).

Blog Updates

You may have noticed little additions and changes popping up on the blog over the past couple of weeks/months (if you did, good job! pat yourself on the back). Since starting the blog back in October, I've been slowly customizing it to fit the personality and style of May Richer Fuller Be. My desire is for it to be clean, modern and simple (which is kind of what I want my life to look like too :) ). I'm hoping the "look" of the blog reflects those things, and that my posts do as well.

To be perfectly honest, I still feel like I'm trying to figure out my "voice" in the design/home blog niche. I think that there's always room for more creativity, but this is definitely an over-saturated corner of the blog world. If you've been reading since the beginning (ahem, probably three of you), thank you for sticking around, and if you're new, welcome!

DIY projects, graphic design and organizing are my favorite subjects to cover here, and while I would love to have a project or update to share with you every day, I can't even come close to promising that since I do, after all, have a day job that takes up 40+ hours of my week. I know that's true for many bloggers out there (can I get an amen?), so we use the nights and weekends we have available to do these things we love. I'm not writing this to complain, because I love writing this blog. When I started it, I decided very early on to commit to writing consistently. To dive head first and see where it took me. I truly hope you enjoy reading what you see here, and if there's anything different you'd like to see, let me know. I'm always open to new ideas!

Ok, getting off my soapbox now...

What I really want to share with you today are some updates on how this little blog works and navigates. The blogs I love make it easy for readers to go back and find old posts, read all the posts in a series, and connect with the author. Though I'm no website whiz, I do think the updates I've made since starting the blog are helpful for doing some of those things. I'm sure there will be more to come...

Shall we take a little tour of these things together? I'll try not to bore you too much and please excuse me if I get a little over-excited about this stuff :). The yellow boxes and arrows point to what I want to focus on in each screen shot. (If you're reading this post through a feed, email, or something like Google Reader, you may want to click over to the site to fully appreciate the rest of the post!)

Let's begin with the navigation bar below the header:

This is a great place to start if you're new to the blog and want to know more about me, see posts from a series on the blog (Creative Bits and Operation Reorganization are my current ones), or want to visit my Etsy shop (CSW Designs). This appears at the top of every page of the blog, so it's easy to find.

Now heading over to the sidebar...

This is (hopefully) pretty self-explanatory, but these three boxes show the best ways to communicate with me, find things on the blog, and follow May Richer Fuller Be.

You can click on each individual button in the "connect" box to find me in social media and email. From left to right, the buttons are: Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Email and RSS Feed.

The search box lets you enter keywords to find an old post or posts about certain subjects.

You can subscribe by email by entering your address in "follow" box. This will deliver new posts to your inbox automatically.

Continuing down the sidebar...

Again, self explanatory, but this box leads to my Etsy shop (again) and shows you what's new in the shop (currently my Richmond Fan District art print).

Inching farther down the sidebar you'll find...

The "popular posts" box shows what people have been reading the most. It's currently showing my office organization posts, which have been pretty popular!

The "blog archive" let's you see posts by month. I find the search bar to be a better tool to find old posts, but this is another option as well.

If you have a Google account, you can sign up to "join this site" on Google Friend Connect. It keeps track of blogs you follow in a feed format starting with the newest ones at the top.

Finally, at the bottom, there are a few things to note...

"Related posts" shows, duh, related posts to the one you just read. I've found that the widget that defines "related" is not always accurate, but I still think it's a nice feature. 

My favorite button is this little red "Pin it" button. It makes it so easy to pin an image from the post directly (yes!). The only trick to this one is that you have to be on that post's permalink page for it to work. You also can't use it from the mobile site (click "view full web version" at the bottom of a post if you're reading a post in the mobile format). If you're not sure if you're actually on the post's permalink page, all you have to do is click the title of the post. Then scroll down to the Pin it button and you should be able to pin images. (*Update! There's now a "P" button that will pop up if you hover over an image. Click that and you can post the image directly to Pinterest! This is even better than the button :).)

Lastly is the "share it" box. It allows you to email a post to someone, blog about it, tweet the link, post the link to Facebook, or share it on Google+. 

That brings us to the end of the updates. The point of this post is that I love my readers and I want this site to work well for them (y'all!). I've mentioned this before, but I love hearing from you, so I hope that these updates make it easy for you to say hey and stay up to date on the latest posts. Hope this is helpful (and not too boring). If you made it to the end, give yourself a gold star!

Free Font Round-Up

Being the typography nerd that I am, I love love pretty fonts (especially free ones!). When used well, they can really impact the look and feel of something you've designed. I've been collecting free fonts on my Graphic Design Pinterest board for awhile now, so I figured it might be time to share a few with you lovely people. Lots of blogs have put together lists of their favorites (I did that a little while ago here), and I hope that these sets will broaden your font world from the pre-installed ones on your computer. There is definitely some overlap in these lists, but that's ok - it must mean they're good ones, right? :)

Click on the links below the graphic to go to the original post. There are links to each font so you can download and install them to your computer. Installation instructions for PCs and Macs are at the bottom of the post as well.

*Note that all of these are free for personal use, but make sure you read the fine print for each one if you choose to download several of them. If you plan to use them for any items you plan to make money off of, you'll likely need to purchase a license.

/ 1 / A Subtle Revelry / 2 / I Will Invitations Blog / 3 / A Subtle Revelry / 4 / Homemade Ocean / 5 / Nicole's Classes / 6 / Nicole's Classes / 7 / The Handmade Home (Ashley's got a whole series on her blog) / 8 / The Handmade Home

To install fonts on a PC:

• Download the font (it will be a zipped file)
• Right click the zipped file you downloaded and click "extract all"
• Click "extract" to save the font files to your computer
• Double click the individual font file you want to install to open it
• In the new window that pops up, click "install" 
• Close the font file and you're done!

To install fonts on a Mac:

• Download the font (it will be a zipped file)
• Double click the zipped file and a new unzipped folder should appear in the Finder
• Double click the individual font file you want to install to open it
• In the new window that pops up, click "install font"
• Close the window and you're done!

Enjoy!

Pinterest Challenge: Magnetic Refrigerator Organizer

Last week, John and Sherry, and Katie Bower announced the winter edition of their Pinterest Challenge! I've been waiting a long time for this moment because I've always wanted to join in on the fun but couldn't until now because I didn't start this little ole blog until last October. Let's just say I'm psyched to be part of this edition.

The Pinterest Challenge is really simple. Basically, you find something on Pinterest (or pin it yourself from another site) and use it as inspiration to do your own thang. It can be anything you want. The only real rule is to link back to the original pin and site. You know, to share the link love. 

With Operation {Re}Organization in full swing, I knew this project would involve organizing something (duh, right?). One big, glaring need we have is something to help corral our paper clutter. I decided that since we pretty much walk into our kitchen from the front door of our apartment, I'd use that space as a paper drop zone. To avoid just throwing it on the counter, I knew I'd need some kind of storage. Preferably vertical, on-the-wall kind of storage. 

The "aha moment" and solution came when I was shopping my new favorite thrift store last week. I was perusing the aisles, not looking for anything in particular, and BOOM. I came across the perfect item to make my paper drop zone: a magnetic fridge organizer! I had recently pinned a couple of images relating to vertical paper storage and magnetic containers for the fridge so this was a perfect find!

Here's what my "pinspiration" looked like:

{Martha Stewart via Chaney Widmer on Pinterest}

{Noodlehead via Cindy Battle on Pinterest}

And here's what the fridge organizer looks like:

Oh yeah. Awesome. It has a little wear and tear around the edges, but for $3.63 (such a random price), I snatched it up. It looks like a part of the Real Simple organizing collection. Can anyone confirm that? And is it a little crazy that I would recognize that without any tags?

I stuck it up on the fridge when I got home, just to make sure I liked it.

I do. :)

So I decided to customize it a little bit and make it functional as our paper clutter corraller (not sure that's a word?) by adding label tags and a pad of paper.

It has some great organizing features including two large pockets, a pen holder, a handy-dandy list-holder, and a small pocket. I'm not sure what the little elastic band is for on the bottom right, but I like the little bit of color it adds.

I made the tags to designate a purpose for each pocket (inbox, coupons, grocery list) and paper-clipped them onto their respective pockets. Paper-clipping them makes it easy to change them out if I decide to use the pockets for something else in the future. You can see them better in the close-up shots below:

And since we all love a tutorial, I made one for these tags. These took me a grand total of 15 minutes since I had all the supplies on hand.

Supplies needed:

• Cardstock (I used blank notecards)
• Alphabet stamps
• Ink pad
• Washi tape
• Scissors/paper trimmer

I used this set of alphabet stamps (found at the same thrift shop as the organizer):

Grab a 4x6 blank notecard and stamp out your word/phrase - "grocery list" in this case. I placed my words about 1" down from the top of the notecard to allow room to add the washi tape.

Add a length of washi tape along the top edge of the notecard that is slightly longer than the width of the card. See the extra length on either side of the card?

Fold the edges of the washi tape to the backside of the card. This gives a nice, clean edge to the tape and secures it well to the card.

Trim the notecard down to size. I used a paper trimmer to give the tags a straight edge, but scissors work just as well. You'll end up with tags like this:

Then just stick 'em onto the appropriate pockets and you're done!

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Don't forget to visit the lovely Pinterest Challenge hosts and check out their projects too!

John and Sherry from Young House Love

Katie from Bower Power

Michelle from Decor and the Dog

Megan from The Remodeled Life

Also linking up to:

Creative Crafts Thursday

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This post is a part of the series "Operation {Re}Organization." To see other posts in the series, click the tab at the top of the page.

Lovely Links

Happy Friday y'all! Lately I've come across some wonderful things in the blogosphere, and today I wanted to share a few of them with you. I love it when other blogs pass on creative projects or interesting articles. It always broadens my perspective, keeps those creative juices flowing, and introduces me to new bloggers with similar interests. Beware the rabbit hole though...if you don't have time to read now, you may want to bookmark this post and come back to it later!

1 | Centsational Girl showed off a marvelous dresser makeover using O'verlays. Every time I see someone use that product, I want to try them out myself. Considering we don't have any furniture to redo right now, it probably won't happen for awhile, but a girl can dream!

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2 | I love a good IKEA hack, and aka design pulled off a good one.

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3 | I'm in love with anything that jones design company does, and this is no exception. The invitations she made for her daughter's birthday party are adorable.

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4 | Ever wanted to know how to hang a perfectly straight frames for a gallery wall without math (and without going nuts)? Head over to View Along the Way to see how she figured out how to do it for $0.

5 | My new favorite non-design blog is Our Freaking Budget (great name, right?). I love their writing style, and their approach to finances and debt. I find myself nodding in agreement on so many things. Lately, they've been doing a series on the finances of having a baby, which I'm really enjoying (and no, this is not a pregnancy announcement!).

6 | Everyone loves a good before and after, right? I was blown away by this one over at Farmhouse 38. They've done a major renovation, and the results are amazing. Here's what the outside looks like just to wet your appetite:

7 | If you have a creative business, an Etsy shop, or even just dabble in designing/creating things, you know that it can be easy to get discouraged when things aren't going exactly as you planned. When this happens, it's easy start comparing yourself to others or wondering if your work is "good enough." If you run into that problem, read this awesome article from Nicole's Classes about believing in yourself. I promise it's not touchy-feely - it's just plain encouraging!

8 | Lastly, I fell in love with these feather art prints from Furbish. I'd love a whole set of 'em to hang...somewhere? We have no more wall space. Shoot. Either way, they're quite lovely (and affordable!).

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I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. I'm so looking forward to it!

Fan District Art Print Giveaway Winner

I'm excited to announce the winner of the Fan District Art Print giveaway today! Thanks again to everyone who stopped by to enter (and for pinning, Facebook-liking/sharing, etc...y'all are the best!).

{Fan District Street Name Art Print}

And the winner is...(thanks to the random number generator)...drumroll please...

Congratulations! (Leslie - shoot me an email at mayricherfullerbe{at}gmail.com so I can get your address and send the print your way.)

In case you didn't win, but would still like one of the prints, head on over to my Etsy shop - they're available for purchase there.

Creative Bits | 14: Pretty Magnets

Raise your hand if you use magnets on your fridge (or anywhere else in your house).

Now raise your other hand if your magnets are less than attractive, utilitarian, or came as a freebie from that repair guy who knocked on the door and wants you to hire him do some work on your house.

Good, glad you're with me on this one. Now that you've got both hands in the air, feel free to raise the roof or fist pump or something because I've got a solution for your magnet problem.

I'm super excited to share this idea in my Creative Bits Series because this one comes from my sister-in-law, Mary! She's a wonderful photographer, and typically blogs about her photos, but this week she shared something a little different - a tutorial on how to prettify some regular ole magnets. I loved it, and want to try it myself since I have some of the same magnets she used, so I figured I'd pass the tutorial along to you lovely people in case you want to try it too!

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You probably have all the materials you need hanging around your house already if you're like me and hoard have a few craft supplies. Go on over and take a look at the full tutorial for details. I promise you'll want to do this project immediately. :)


P.S. I'll be back later today to announce the winner of the Fan District Art Print giveaway. Thanks to everyone who entered!!

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Creative Bits is a semi-regular series here on May Richer Fuller Be where I share little tips, tricks and simple do-it-yourself projects from other creative bloggers' minds. I figure if it makes me say, "wow," it's worth passing along to you! And remember, if you want to pin any images that don't belong to me, please click through and pin from the original source!

Click the "Creative Bits Series" tab at the top of the page to see more posts like this.

Barn Sales {+ what came home with me!}

Months ago my mom and I took a little afternoon trip to scope out a couple of "barn sales" about an hour outside DC. A barn sale is like a curated flea market with lots of vintage/antique/painted furniture, housewares, unique "finds" and even a few new items. These sales are open about once a month for a whole weekend. The thrill of the hunt is definitely a part of the experience, and I had such a good time on my first trip that I'll certainly be going back in the near future... ideally when it's warmer...you are exploring old barns after all, and it can be quite drafty in the winter!

The two we visited that afternoon were Chartreuse and Co and Stylish Patina. Chartreuse and Co is the more well-known of the two, with five enormous spaces to explore (housing many things I wanted to take home with me). Here are some examples from their blog of what you'd find:

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Apartment Therapy has featured Chartreuse and Co - and you know that's a good endorsement! There's a great article here if you'd like to take a read. This is one of their photos of the barns:

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Stylish Patina has a single barn jam-packed with beautiful handmade items, furniture, and vintage finds. They are also stockists for Annie Sloan Chalk Paint (love that stuff) and Milk Paint (need to try it sometime).

This is their barn:

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...and an example of their lovely wares:

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Adorable right? Who wants to go on my next trip with me?

So now that you've been introduced to the barns, you're probably wondering what I picked up while I was there (at least I'm guessing you are if you've read this far!). I must confess, I've been putting this post off for awhile because the items I picked up are begging for a project - and I haven't figured out what that "project" is yet. Finally (picture me throwing my arms up in surrender), I decided why not share these items with you so you can help me figure out what to do with them!

Here's my "find" - a set of vintage printing press (typography) letters:

There was a whole box of old letters at Stylish Patina's barn, and I knew I could find some to spell out something significant. I dug, my mom dug, and after several minutes of looking through all the letters, I knew what I wanted to spell out. With blackened fingertips from handling years of leftover ink, I arranged the letters to spell out "Chaney & Charlie 5/15/10." Our names with our wedding date (May 15th, 2010). I love the quirkiness of them all. Some older than others, some uppercase, some lower. 

I thought it would be neat to figure out a way to display these words and numbers in a prominent place in our apartment. This is where I could use some help! Honestly, I think they look pretty cool in a photo, which I could then frame, but if I can, I'd love to use the printing press letters themselves.

What do you think? I'm hoping you (and maybe Pinterest?) can help me out!

Have a great Wednesday! I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas :).