The Beat That My Heart Skipped – A blog dedicated to daily design inspirations. By Rohini Wahi.

I love the mixture of design and crafts from ex Habitat style co-ordinator and Wedgewood design director Nikki Jones’ homeware collection. The range is just so beautiful and unusual – it has a real high end Day Birger tone but still retains warmth of handmade items. This brand is one to watch, I can feel it in my design bones, can’t you?

Cheerful crochet from Wood and Wool…

Wall wizards Surface View are known for their extensive image library of archived designs with which they adorn walls and windows in your home. We wrote about them here last year.

Their recent addition has me breathless. Surface View have been given access to a beautiful collection of original mid-century textile designs, from the archives of French textile designer Zina de Plagny, prints were created for Parisian couturiers in the forties and fifties. The designs were retrieved from their portfolios last year, after a 60 years’ sleep, when they were revealed to the public for an exhibition.

Through Surface View these rare mid-century designs, can now be applied to wall murals, canvases, blinds and posters. Aren’t they gorgeous? You can see the whole collection here.

I’ll have to start with a confession: I don’t like doilies. There, I said it.  I’ve never seen the point of them, they remind me of dusty houses and an old lady who used to try and teach me maths when I was at school. And yet! I came across this inspired tutorial from Rachel Denbow on her brilliant blog Smile and Wave which got me thinking about doilies in a new, and much more favourable light. Rachel’s kindly agreed to share her tutorial with us, in which she turns a pile of old doilies into an adorable cushion.

In other DIY news this week, I have taken possession of a huge box of incredible craft materials. My mum’s friend Diana and her own mum had collected these bits and pieces over the years and has so generously donated them to the cause! Just look at some of these treasures, even the boxes are beautiful vintage designs. Now I’m sure there were some doilies in here somewhere…

Cat x

Smile and Wave’s DIY Doily Cushion

STEP 1

Gather some doilies you picked up at your local flea market, on eBay, or your grandma’s and arrange them like so. You’ll also need two pieces of fabric 1/2″ larger on both sides than your pillow form, a needle, embroidery thread, sewing machine, and scissors. I used a 14″ square pillow form so I knew I needed to cover at least that much territory with my doilies. I made sure I didn’t have many gaps in between by overlapping edges. Once I was happy with my layout…
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Remember we featured these works of hand embroidered mould art by fibre artist Elin last year? Well now she has added breathtaking purses and wallets and notebook covers to her collection, all with ‘mould embellishments’. The attention to detail in the black purse just blows me away…