The Creative Children

Spectrum began fabricating furniture in 1983 as a family-run design group.

In later years, the company decided to build a line of furniture that was more affordable and accessible to the public—without sacrificing quality in the process. With this goal in mind, the Spectrum West Collection was born—timeless designs created for both residential and commercial use, with all the luxurious, luminous qualities of acrylic intact: functional, artistic, modern, strong, fluid and beautiful.

This elegant gift bag just begs for an equally luxurious gift to be tucked inside. What a great way to present champagne, a cashmere scarf or a big box of gourmet chocolates. Follow these steps:

Materials

1 yard crushed red velvet

BagWorks white feather boa trim
1/2 yard lime green cord
Wright’s swirly holiday ribbon trim
narrow maroon trim
Beacon Adhesives’ Fabri-Tac glue
sewing machine
red thread
needle
pins
ruler
scissors
parchment paper

Steps:

1. Print, enlarge and cut out bag template provided in the PDF Template file below the image, above right. Fold velvet in half with right sides together. Pin bag template to velvet and cut out.

2. Baste along top raw edge (1/4-inch seam) of each bag piece. Fold basted edge over and stitch (3/8-inch seam) down.

3. Pin bag pieces right sides together. Stitch together sides and bottom of bag. Turn bag right side out.

4. Cut holiday trim to fit along center front of bag. To stop holiday trim from fraying, glue the narrow maroon trim all around bottom edge of ribbon trim and let dry.

5. Place sheet of parchment paper inside bag. Use small dabs of glue to adhere holiday trim down center front of bag.

6. Cut lime green cord to desired handle length. Sew ends of cord to left and right sides of bag by hand.

7. Glue white boa fringe trim around top edge of bag.  

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we try to do our best to make the Web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore, we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

Today we are glad to release Cellar Heat: a free professional WordPress theme created by Evan Eckard. The design of this theme focuses on patterns and typography, and it comes in two flavors. It is designed especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Download the theme for free!

You can use the theme freely for all of your projects without any restrictions. However, it’s forbidden to sell or redistribute the theme without both the designer’s and Smashing Magazine’s permission. Please link to this article if you would like to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish, but if you plan to release your modification, please ask our permission first.

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Last week we announced a books giveaway (the page take minutes to load) — we were giving away 10 professional web design-related books that cover the topics CSS, usability, user interface design, innovation, web navigation, web form design and JavaScript programming.

We genuinely appreciate our community and respect our readers for reading us, and now we wanted to give something back. Over 3,500 readers participated in the giveaway. And the winners are now announced in this post.

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