Object of the day: insanely cute animal wall stickers for kids

I stumbled across these door decorations from Finland on Etsy. 

If you're prone to being swayed by interiors trends (guilty) you might be thinking: wall-stickers, aren't they a bit 2011? Pah. Just try to think of trends while looking at these nice, friendly faces.

The vinyl stickers are made and sold by a little Helsinki-based company called Made of Sundays and cost around £28 each. What a sweet, inexpensive way to warm up a child's room.

Above (bottom image) is Haru the Bear. The nose, eyes, paws, and so on come as individual pieces, and so the little creatures can be configured to fit on all sorts of different sized surfaces. MoS will also custom make different sizes and designs if you have a special request.

Too cute.

Find them at the Made of Sundays Etsy shop.

Object of the day: sale special

I'm still smiling about the cushions I bagged in the Habitat sale for £4.50 each last week.

To capitalise on the high, here are some more sale goodies worth checking out.

These handsome pheasants by Exmoor- based Brit designer, Sam Pickard, feature on Swedish Åry trays in two different sizes.

Medium tray: £18.15, reduced from  £ 25.95 and small tray £11.85, down from £16.95, Theo-Theo.com

One of my favourite places to window shop – and the owners have a very nice home, too. Bergere dining chair £40, reduced from £50, from Thepeanutvendor.co.uk

A sale is the perfect excuse to buy something a little bit daft, like a 16-piece gold cutlery set, by Lisbeth Dahl. £39 down from £69. And this dinky little mirror, well, why not? It's only £19, down from £39. Both from Rockettst george.co.uk

The little home Dinotastic ceiling pendant for kids is super cute and now half price at £11 down from £22. Find it at Johnlewis.com

Perk up a wall with one of these bright beauties, a lesser-spotted number by ubiquitous Swedish designer, Maria Dahlgren. Harlekin birch tray £12 reduced from £18 at the ever lovely Howkapow.com

Happy shopping and merry weekends.

Post by Kate

Object of the day: stuffed drawings

This crazy looking little figure would look good on a shelf, especially in a kids' bedroom (but don't let that limit you). It's like a Donna Wilson creature cushion on acid.

And if children's brains are as free as a hallucinogen fuelled mind, then it sort of is. Because this stuffed character is modelled on an original child's drawing. Brilliant, no?

Thorody, the fabric company that makes them, offers a bespoke service whereby you can send in an original work of art by the small person in your life, and they will transform it into a 3-D one of these. Like this...

Not a bad idea for a birthday present for close family members or the little artist him or herself. And it'll last longer than that drawing Blutacked onto the fridge door (and it'd need to as they're not cheap). Prices for the bespoke service on request.

You can also buy ready-designed creatures, which cost £30 each, so only for very special people. My favourite is the Ginger the Reindeer, below.

Find out more at Thorody.com

Post by Kate

Objects of the day: alternative alphabets

It's been an alphabetty kind of a week. At Home 2014, I loved illustrator James Brown's colourful new letter linocut prints. 

I also came across Anil Mistry's excellent alternative A-Z print via Design Week (where you can see lots of close-ups).

His Icons Alphabet goes something like: D is for David (Hockney), X is for XTC, Q is for Quincy (Jones), K is for Kenneth (Williams)...

...you get the idea. It is brilliant. And costs £25. Mistry sells his work, in short runs and very affordably, at SuperArtClub.

When my friend Holly had her son last year, I wanted to buy a baby gift that both child and parents could enjoy together way into the future.

As Holly and I spent much of our youth trying to look cool smoking and driving while listening to the Tim Westwood show, the Nippaz With Attitude hip hop baby CD was a start (and no mentions of smoking!). But the same shop also sells these very excellent alphabet posters, for £36.99. They used to do it in yellow and, I think, orange but now it's just pink and blue. Still damn fine prints and good life inspiration for young minds.

And if you're nurturing a budding graphic designer or illustrator, what about this?

It is the work of Curtis Jinkins, a graphic designer based in Texas. I think it's beautiful.

The limited edition print costs $40 (about £25, with delivery to the UK at $10, or £6ish). You can buy it from Neighborhood-Studio.com

Post by Kate

Spotlight on... Ingela Arrhenius for kids

Ingela Arrhenius is a Swedish illustrator, who specialises in colourful, graphic and (largely) child-focused designs with a midcentury slant. 

Looking at her work makes me happy – it's got the sort of joyful simplicity of Charley Harper, and the characters she draws are friendly without being sickly.

Lionface poster, £18 from Hus and Hem (details below)

I featured some of her for-grown-ups work in this gift guide for chaps a while back and discovered that, disappointingly, her work wasn't then widely available in the UK. So I was delighted when a reader (thank you Tim!) emailed me the link to a nice shop in Dorset called Ruby Rockcake that sells lots of her stuff. And it now also appears to be stocked in quite a few other Brit outlets. Hurrah.

Because how good would a child's wall look decorated with these melamine plates (£6.95 each, 20cm diameter)?

Though, frankly, why save it for the little people?

Her memory card game is, from an adult perspective, a box of tiny prints ripe for adorning any room. I have a set of the Charley Harper memory game cards arranged in a square Ikea frame that hangs in my hallway. People always stop on their way out to comment on it.

Matryoshka dolls, £19.95 from Ruby Rockcake

Among Ingela's designs for larger fans of Ingela's illustrated animals, are these washing up cloths (above) from Hunkydory Home, £3.75 each. Apparently Scandi dishcloths are generally this good-looking. Gap in the market, Brit designers?

Find Ingela Arrhenius designs at shops including: Hunkydory Home, Ruby Rockcake and Hus and Hem. If you like her work, do also check out her nice blog, Ingelaparrhenius.com.

Post by Kate

River Wandle Alphabet

I came across this colourful and unusual alphabet print because it was on display in a restaurant near my house (Brick Box in Brixton Market). 

It is by children's illustrator, Jane Porter, and it's made up from something quite surprising – photographed and then turned into this artwork. Can you tell what the letters are made from?

Jane lives close to south London's River Wandle, and as part of a project she worked on with the Wandle Trust, which looks after this waterway, she fished out objects from the river and used them to depict letters of the alphabet. It's the same principle used by the artist Ella Robinson, whose gorgeous, colourful salvage art I wrote about a while back – but she uses objects she's found washed up on her local beach.

Sounds like quite a job: "It’s taken five years of wading, rummaging, sifting and heaving but my Wandle alphabet is finally complete – a complete A-Z made with objects found during clean-ups of the river Wandle," she explains. "I think my favourite has to be the false teeth ‘U’, though I am also very fond of ‘R’ and ‘O’. The ‘F’ is from a fish and chips sign."

You can buy the print, in A1 size, for £20 from Jane's website – with all proceeds going towards future Wandle Trust work.

Jane illustrates books for small people, and her first is Duck Sock Hop, by Jane Kohuth (Dial Books). Check out some of Jane's other animal-based children's illustrations too, which she sells as prints via the Art Cabin. I like her monkeys.