at home with our graphic designer

lizzy janssen is an amazing artist, has great style, and is just an awesome person- so its no surprise that her home (in fishtown, philadelphia) is a reflection of all those things. lizzy describes it as somewhere in the early american, meets 1950’s housewife, meets mid-century modern neighborhood :) another fun fact – it was designed by our creative director, who lives here!

i’m completely in love with her place…the exposed brick, the spiral staircase, the amazing bathroom and her adorable cat arlo in the above picture (named after arlo guthrie).

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most of the stuff lizzy has decorated her place with – the furniture, paintings and figurines – was found at thrift stores, garage sales, and sometimes even on the curb! her favorite thrift stores in philly are germantown thrift and three potato four, in manayunk.

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here’s a quick little interview with lizzy, and check out more photos of her sweet place in the slideshow below!

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you can check out another tour of lizzy’s home here!

bohemian french wedding

one of our facebook fans posted a link to this gorgeous bohemian and french inspired wedding and i wanted to share some of the photos! i’ve never been the type of girl that’s into weddings or has any desire to have one (unless it involves bare feet, the beach and tribal tattoos) but i will say i find weddings to be beautiful and am always inspired by the tiny little details that people incorporate.  for instance, i love the little french touches in this wedding!

the bride, an artist, painted the image for the wedding invites and had them printed as fine art prints, with the details on the back, so that people could keep and frame them if they wanted to.

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they set up an antique french dresser with a stack of vintage postcards that people could write notes on and leave in a drawer for the couple.

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there was a coffee bar at the reception, and tea boxes were used as centerpieces for the tables.

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dried flowers and lavender were used as well for centerpieces, inspired by french country homes.

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so beautiful! source.

Amazing Entry Level Design Opportunity!

Here at Free People, our design team is made up of 40 people. Though most studied design in college, several did not. Their successes are the same regardless of their degrees. In fact, our two most senior designers majored in computer science and art history.

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Please submit a project that shows both your love and understanding of the Free People product and your vision of what the product should look like.

You can sew, sketch, collage…anything you’d like…to clearly express your creativity.

We will be accepting projects until January 30th. Please email a photo attachment (preferably a JPEG) of your project to: designlove@freepeople.com

The designers whose work we love may have an opportunity to travel to Philadelphia to interview and spend a day with us.

We are very excited to find some extremely talented young designers to add to our growing team!

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writing on the wall

our senior stylist recently moved into a new home and painted one of the walls with chalkboard paint – such a fun idea! friends can leave little drawings and notes when they stop by, and it would come in handy for bursts of inspiration! i love how elegant her’s looks with the mantel and mirrors – and don’t you love the fire someone drew :)

there are so many cool things you can do with chalkboard paint…here’s some more inspiration from around the web.

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wednes-diy

i can’t believe christmas is just a few days away… it always sneaks up on me! for today’s DIY i thought i’d give you guys a roundup of some last minute crafts. i wish i had time to do all of these!

a pretty fabric wreath… tutorial here.

a lace doily and christmas light garland – this would look cool with paper snowflakes too!

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love these sequin trees

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… and these felt ones.

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a pretty fabric fringe garland.

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make your own ornaments with little bits of nature inside.

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these little plastic figurines painted with nail polish remind me of our current store displays!

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another creative take on a wreath.

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and some really fun wrapping paper made with bits of crayon!

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something really cool from our store team!

in november we opened our 39th store in nashville, TN in the mall at green hills. we’ve begun to create stores that are as unique as our product and one of the aspects of this store that has us very excited is the art finish on the storefront.

we were inspired by the idea of hammered nail heads and patterns found in nature – based on fibonacci patterns like the golden spiral found in sunflowers.

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the geometric pattern was carefully created in graphic format and then printed full scale on the substrate. over 9,000 brass discs were then individually attached and sent out to be installed in the field. once the panels were installed an artist applied a rich layer of plaster and wax to finish the walls.

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the walls subtly glimmer and catch your eye from across the atrium. this finish took a lot of work and collaboration but we think it feels just right for our first nashville store! next time you are in nashville be sure to check it out!

so amazing…thanks for sharing store team :)

holiday downloads for you!

good morning! we have a new graphic design assistant and she made these adorable holiday downloads for the blog – the smaller one is iphone wallpaper and the larger one is for your computer desktop. but as our graphic designer suggested (and i agree) it would make such cute wrapping paper, don’t you think? just print some out and use it to wrap small gifts!

click on the images to go to our flickr page and download them. enjoy!

she made a really cute card too, i’ll post that next week :)

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some visual candy for your friday… step inside our newest store at cherry creek shopping center in denver – the holiday displays look right at home among the rocky moutains!

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beautiful.

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the theme for this section is “moto diaries.” LOVE IT.

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display boxes! i am always so inspired to re-create our store displays at home.

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a display animal peeks out of a jacket pocket :)

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and a couple of our fp girls try on the wide leg floral pants – cute socks!

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three of our lovely new fp girls, sara, gena and marie… welcome to the family, fp denver! xoxo.

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sorry for not posting the DIY yesterday!!

i may be a little late to the game but i just discovered the site craftgawker and spent a little too much time perusing page after page of crafty ideas – if you have not already heard of this site you have to check it out! these little felted acorns by lisa of lil fish studios caught my eye and i haven’t stopped thinking about them since. easy to make and just so adorable…i love projects where you can play around with color combinations and create different arrangements (a la andy goldsworthy). take a look at these and tell me you don’t feel inspired!

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so cute! love the idea of using them on gifts this holiday season.

making the acorns is very simple, requiring just a few steps:

  1. collect a bunch of acorns and remove the caps.
  2. get wool for felting in various colors at your local craft store
  3. roll the wool into small balls, wet with hot water and add a little bit of soap. continue rolling the ball in your hands for about ten minutes, occasionally adding soap, until it is firm. mold into the shape of an acorn and glue into the cap using fabric glue or even krazy glue or guerilla glue.

for  the holidays add a little glitter for some extra sparkle :)

i explored lisa’s site a little bit and was also very inspired by her experimentation with natural dye:

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pieces of felted wool, from left to right: nothing/undyed, dyed with carrots, dyed with parsley and dyed with pomegranate.

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left – parsley dyed wool and thread; right – pomegranate dyed wool and thread

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left – red cabbage dyed wool and thread; right – onion skin dyed wool and thread

such gorgeous colors. check out her blog here!

In touch with our designers

We caught up with our crafty knits designer to find out what she is inspired by.

In the outside world, what inspires me?…

I’m really loving all the costumes on Boardwalk Empire. The girls are dreamy, milky white skin with burgundy lips, and then all of the amazing 20s styling, oooh! So inspiring. Also loving the outdoorsy/early 90s styling on the classic TV series Twin Peaks for Fall. There were at least 3 awesome boxy tops I wanted in my closet from season one alone.

Sheer sheer sheer legs! Sheer stockings, maxis, skirts, pants & leggings. I know after the fall silhouette meeting the girls were feeling this way, but personally I think it might have more to do with my relatively new leg tattoo?!

I’m always listening to New Order, Morrissey, The Stone Roses, etc. but lately I can’t stop listening to oldies and lady gaga! Go figure! I can’t get enough of the color red. Red lips, and accessories. And ginger boys and girls too. Hehe ;)

Design-wise I’m going crazy over doing really fashion forward bodies with embellishment/ fp trim details. Finding the perfect combination of cool body with cool artwork/trims details is the best – It feels so fresh and makes me really happy!

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for today’s DIY i want to show you guys how to make snowflake panels like the ones in our new store displays! it’s actually really not as difficult as it looks, it just requires a lot of patience and good cutting skills :)

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image via design sponge.

these panels immediately reminded me of a DIY i saw a while ago on design sponge – the only difference being the material.  our team actually made ours out of paper first, and then had them laser cut out of felt.

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what you need: paper or felt or whatever material you want to use (this is a great way to re-use old scrap paper or junk mail!), scissors, and glue or tape!

start by making as many paper snowflakes as you desire, in varying sizes, patterns and shapes – because no two snowflakes are alike ;) if you’ve never made a paper snowflake before, check out this tutorial.

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once you have a bunch of snowflakes, start gluing them together where they overlap, alternating shapes and sizes as you please.

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i’m going to keep adding to mine over the next few weeks!

for best results, hang your panel in front of a window and enjoy the patterns the sun leaves on the floor :)

winter wonderland

our holiday displays are now up in our stores and they are so, so beautiful… like stepping into a magical forest dusted with snow,  where trees drip with crystals and shiny trinkets catch the moonlight and twinkle like stars…

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from our display team:

this year’s holiday display was inspired by vintage snowy showgirl dresses mixed in with antique silver and icy blue trinkets. we have intricately cut snowflake curtains paired with sheer glittery booti print panels – inspired by actual indian booti prints. we wanted to balance the delicate dresses and panels with organic branches and rugged cardboard gift boxes.  then to add sparkle and pops of color, we added the neon melon crystal chains to hang in groups from the ceiling.

their inspiration:

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and now here are the installed displays at our ardmore and king of prussia, pa stores! i actually drove by our ardmore store saturday night and it looked amazing with the twinkling lights in the dark.

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