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Our Top Picks from the Etsy Design Awards #TheEtsies

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For the first time ever, Etsy is running a global award program: The Etsy Design Awards. There are 160 global finalists that fall into one of the following five categories for #TheEtsies: Inventive Decor, Signature Style, Festive Celebrations, Earth-Friendly, and Creative Collaborations. We’ve done round-ups on favorite toddler products, but this is our first Etsy round-up.

Here are our top picks from #TheEtsies!

My Picks:

My top 5 choices represent items that inspire me to buy from Etsy or make myself.

minimalist wall calendar from Etsy seller

Calendar Wallplanner from the shop WiLaNo (Inventive Decor Category)

paint your own photo backdrop

Custom Painted Photo Backdrop by the shop thesmallcreative

stylish pegboard organizer for your home

Monstera Leaf Wood Pegboard Organizer by the shop littleanana

I think this makes a perfect jewelry organizer, although I think I’d rather have the larger version (it’s almost twice as big!). I love the versatility of the moveable pegs. The dinosaur pegboard would also be a great addition to a child’s space. My daughter would love it in her room. Plus, I’m game for anything that will encourage my kid to clean!

custom family paper portrait

Paper Cut Custom Portrait by the shop PurplePaperPeople

minimalist wood dollhouse for etsy design awards top pick

Large Modern Dollhouse “The Milky-house” by the shop MilkyWood

Well, we already made a dollhouse for our daughter with our CNC machine. But, if we hadn’t already done this ourselves I would totally buy this modern dollhouse.

Adam chose his ideas independently of me, and all his picks were different except one. He also picked the dollhouse! I chatted with him for his reasoning behind his picks. This is what he had to share:

Adam’s Picks:

My top choices are designs I appreciate in terms of their form, function, and material choices.

eco-friendly lamp

ECOWOOD Table Lamp by shop TedzukuriAtelier

This lamp uses an interesting recycled veneer from a banana’s plant trunk.

Paper cutting your house diy

Custom House Portrait by shop yeiou

The use of white paper for a 3d representation of your home results in a minimalist, elegant design. This would make a great anniversary gift for parents.

Cat house for Etsy design awards pick

Designer Cat House by PetsandPods

I feel like my cats would crawl into this immediately. It’s a cat bed you don’t mind having in a prominent location in your house.

succulent ring dish

Succulent Wedding Ring Holder by shop Waen

This ring dish stands on its own as decor, with or without a ring.

special wooden ring box for gift or proposal

Diamond shape engagement ring box by Woodstorming

Woodworking is one of my hobbies, and I like the movement of the lid on this uniquely shaped ring box.

From design inspiration to must-haves for your home, this round-up features a variety of designs. These top Etsy design awards picks for this year are based on our current tastes, which are ever-changing.

So, what is your favorite ETSY nominee for #TheEtsies and why?

Revamp Your Old Kitchen Table with this DIY Tile Idea

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FTC disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission for purchases made through my links.

We’ve had the same table for more than 10 years. It was showing some serious wear, especially once the little one came along. The table isn’t made of actual wood, it’s compressed dust with a thick wood veneer. For years Jess wanted to do a tile mosaic on top of this.  Due to an abandoned project (I was going to build a tile gas fireplace for our patio), we had some tiles in the house. We had both this wood-patterned tile (which is on clearance for half off at the time of writing this blog post!) and this Spanish patterned tile. Both of these can be substituted for other tiles and patterns depending on your personal preferences and table preferences. For instance, this similar but more gray tone wood-patterned ceramic tile  would pair well with this patterned tile.

We arranged our tiles on the table just to see what different designs might look like. Here were our three main options based on tile and table size:

1. ) This first arrangement idea was the Spanish tile on everything. This was too busy by itself, so we added our place mats to break up the pattern.

design option 2

We weren’t really feeling that one, so we tried a different arrangement.

2.) The second idea was with a centerpiece of the Spanish tile and a border of tiles that look like wood planks.  Overall we liked the look, but it didn’t work out well because the two types of tiles were ever-so-slightly different dimensions.

design option 3

Plus, if you are going to go with a bold tile you might as well feature it, so…

3. For the third idea (which we picked) we laid out a Spanish tile centerpiece and border with the wood tile only in the middle.

final

Once this was decided, we glued the tile down to the table with acrylic adhesive.   Once this dried for a week or so, we then grouted the cracks with a dark grout called “truffle”. A couple of things we learned was not to have too much water in the grout mix, otherwise it’ll dry with lighter whitish spots in places.  This was (sort of) fixed by using white vinegar. Another thing we worried about was the edging. At first we just used the grout and our finger to cover the edge of the tile and smooth the transition to the table edge, but over time this proved quite fragile and pieces kept breaking off. The fix was to move to a silicone caulking material (in Charcoal color, the best match to the Truffle color we could find). This isn’t the first time we used silicone caulk as you can see on our hardwood to tile transition of our flooring.

When we applied the sanded silicone caulk, it didn’t look the same at first, but when it dried it became much darker and looks great!

First we laid out painters tape on the whole table, including around one tile that had come off when I got too aggressive digging out the grout on the edge.  We then caulked around the edges with this sanded caulk, smoothed with a gloved hand and then peeled off the tape. Don’t touch it for a few days!  It takes a long time to cure.

caulking2      silicone calking

Overall, it has been holding up great to the wear and tear of our toddler. This DIY has brought new life to an old table.

Cat and Baby Door Catch Device

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Since I don’t have the energy to commercialize this, I’m posting it on here. If anyone does commercialize it or some derivative, you gotta give me a fair cut.

There’s products out there to prevent toddlers from locking themselves in rooms by preventing the door to close all the way. This also helps make sure no tiny fingers get smashed in the door jambs.  To add to that problem, our toddler liked closing the door to the room with the catboxes in it, or getting in this room and trying to play with the litter.  This led to multiple accidents by the cats when we didn’t realize their door was shut for a whole day or so. and multiple close calls of our baby touching cat turds.

To fix this, I doodled up a door latch in Fusion 360 that would prevent the door from being shut too much so the cats can get in, but not open enough for a toddler to fit though. I 3D printed it on a Dremel 3d20 printer. I had at first attempted to print this in parts since it was so long, but regardless of how I made the interlocking mechanism, it always failed in one way or another. After about 5 attempts, I printed a single slightly shorter version with 40% infill and a handful of shells.  This was strong indeed!

        

It worked well until a guest came over and slammed the door.  Oh well. We had it for about a year which did the task of training the baby for the most part. We’ll still catch the door closed every once in a whole, but have only had one accident  because of it.

Installing and using Guitar Rig 5 Player in Reaper and Actually Recording Great-Sounding Music

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Some time ago, I got interested in modeling different amps and effects when recording guitar. I already used Reaper for recording for the last 10+ years, so I finally paid for the full license (only like $60). Reaper’s free version doesn’t have limitation in functionality, but does have a nag screen that pops up for 10 seconds when you start and you can’t use it commercially. Reaper is a full-featured DAW (Digital Audio Workspace) complete with pitch correction, MIDI and tons of other great features and plugins. On its own, you can record some nice quality music. The issue is external equipment… When you are cheap or broke, you likely don’t have one of every amp or pedal ever made to use when recording guitar. That’s where VST plugins come into play.

There are a lot of good VST plugins that allow you to make your guitar sound like it is going through any amp head, cabinet, effects pedal, etc. TH3 is one I played with for a while that I likes a lot, however the one I settled on that fit my needs best was Guitar Rig 5 Player. There’s a pro version as well, but the PLayer version is free. You could set it up on your computer as a stand-alone application, or as a VST plugin inside Reaper, Audacity, Ableton, etc. to record with. It is kind of complicated if you are unfamiliar with VST plugins or just getting started, so I made a how-to video to show step-by-step how to install and actually use Guitar Rig 5 player.



While it comes with a lot of patches to make you sound like different artists, or different songs, or even different styles, you can also google around and find patches online to download that other people have made for free. Note that if someone has the paid version of Guitar Rig 5 Pro, you might not be able to use their patch if it utilized amp and pedal models not available in the free version.

Plugging your guitar into the computer can be a bit of a challenge. You need some kind of interface. I’ve used a lot of things over the years. Up until recently, I used a lot of cheaper Behringer mixers and USB interfaces. I stopped because the drivers became an issue for my Windows 10 setup and Reaper. A friend of mine really like his Yamaha MG10XU mixer that has built-in effects. I’ve switched to what I see a lot of recording folks on youtube using, the Focusrite Scarlet 2i2. Its drivers play nice with everything (except OBS for some reason as you can see in the video above. This is not actually Focusrite’s fault, it’s all OBS’s fault since they don’t support ASIO audio drivers without a plugin and couple of workarounds). These options allow you to connect multiple channels at once so you can get mics and instruments at the same time.

Another option is to get a guitar pedal with a USB interface built in. There’s more on this option below.

Guitar Rig 5 Pro used to be sold with an awesome little MIDI pedal with multiple buttons and an expression pedal you could use to trigger different effects chains in the software or plugin, however it seems hard to find nowadays. Literally any MIDI controller would work, even something you can build yourself for cheap like the Mini UNTZtrument. If you build your own, I recommend forgoing the keypad and instead opt for some actual pedal pushbuttons, and maybe hack an old broken expression pedal from ebay or reverb nation as one of the pots. I’ll have another custom designed post within the next year or so from a project I’ve been working on (or rather which has been sitting on my desk) for a year or so now that is a guitar direct input/pedal/looper using a Teensy microcontroller. I’ve seen a lot of people using the SoftStep 2 and I nearly bought one of these myself (and still might actually…)

Eventually I wanted a bit more… A friend of mine had a Fractal AX8 which has a lot of this functionality built directly into a pedal (including a USB interface). Fractal makes really quality equipment.
A Perfect Circle and lots of other bands tour with Fractal modelers exclusively, then just run their audio out the venue’s monitors.

I can’t afford one of those. I looked for a lower cost solution. I wanted to be able to play without having to bring my laptop everywhere. I opted for a POD HD500x. The HD500X is a bit older, but it has a lot of these same capabilities built into a pedal form. In fact, in comparing to the AX8, there are a (very) few things in which the HD500x sounds a little better.

You can setup your own custom amp, pedal, and effect chains you want (within reason) using Line 6’s HD Pro software. Lots of other peoples’ patches are available for free download on Line 6’s website, but there are lots of people on youtube and online forums either sells or give away patches. This guy’s channel shows you how to set the patches up directly on the pedal itself.Check out the video below showing how that works. It looks quite similar to Guitar Rig Player 5 to some extent which made the switch to using it easy. You can also edit these presets and create new ones directly on the pedal itself if you want to. It is a ridiculously flexible piece of kit! It has a built-in tuner and even a 40 second looper which I love! You can run it as a pedal into an amp like normal (for live shows), or as a USB audio interface to just record awesome riffs, or as a pedal into another audio interface (this is what I typically do), or as a MIDI controller. You can use this as a complete replacement for the Focusrite Scarlet I mentioned above because it has a separate Mic input as well by using this patch. The only difference is that the HD500x doesn’t supply Phantom Power, so you’ll need a driver for that if you use a condenser mic, which is why I have the Scarlet. TIP: Don’t update the firmware to 2.6.2 because it’ll make a lot of the older patches sound horrible. Flash Firmware 2.6.1 is where it’s at. Luckily if you are dumb and updated it like I did, the Line6 Monkey program allows you to rollback the firmware.

I hope this article was helpful for you. Please comment to ask about other things in this area. I haven’t posted much about my music ever even though I’ve been playing and singing for like 20+ years at this point. I’ve only recently gotten more into recording more and digital tools.

Quick and Easy Method to Spice up the Builder Mirror in the Bathrooms

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Like most cookie-cutter plaster-of-paris houses in America, our bathroom mirrors had no frills. Just a reflective piece of glass on the wall to provide basic functionality and that’s it.  To make your bathroom look a bit fancier on the cheap and really easily, you’ll need the following:

  1. Low temp hot glue gun and glue
  2. Bathroom caulk
  3. Primed polystyrene (foam) Window/Door Casing (Enough to cover the perimeter of each mirror )
  4. Four Primed Rosettes
  5. Fine toothed saw of some kind (I highly recommend a miter box and a pull saw) The material is really easy to cut, but you want a nice clean straight edge that might be tough to achieve with a razor.

We’re getting primed moulding and rosettes because white works well with our bathroom colors and I’m lazy and don’t want to have to paint anything.

The first step is to measure out your cuts for the casing or moulding. This is actually kind of hard to do because we are going to have a rosette in each corner of the mirror. I tried an elaborate method of calculating this at first but ended up just having to go with the flow as things didn’t turn out how I expected at first.  Start with the rosettes. These will be in the corners of the mirror and what we want is to maximize mirror space. We don’t want to cover the mirror any more than we need to, so let’s say 1/2 of the casing thickness will cover the mirror. The casing and rosettes are the same thickness, so if we do 1/2 the thickness from the side, and 1/2 the thickness from the bottom, only 1/4 of the area of the rosette will actually be covering the mirror.  Pretty complicated to read but easy to see.

Now to attach these pieces we will have to use a two-step solution. We’ll apply both silicone caulk and low temp hot glue. The reason for this is that the hot glue by itself falls off after about a day or two (ask me how I know). The caulk will hold it great, however it doesn’t have enough tack force to hold the pieces in place long enough to dry when you apply it. So we’ll use the silicone caulk for long term stickitude, and the low-temp hot glue just to hold it on the glass until the caulk can set. Voila’.

Warning:  I used hot glue with no problem, and I used low temp hot glue. I don’t know what kind of hot glue gun you are using, or how your glass will react. If you shatter your bathroom mirror due to thermal stress it can be dangerous and will be totally your own fault. Do this at your own (slight) risk. If you are worried about how hot the glue is, then just apply it to the rosette and let it cool for a bit before applying it to the glass.

Put the rosette in the corner, and make sure to align it straight. You really only get one shot to stick it to the glass with the hot glue. If you get it wrong you’ll just have to pull it off, clean the glass and back of the rosette and try again. Once the hot glue touches the cools glass it nearly instantly sticks. After doing this a couple of times we got the hang of it. Again, use caution pulling this off the mirror if you need to because doing it wrong could break the corner of the mirror. It isn’t a huge worry, but just be careful.

Once you have the rosettes in the corners you can cut your moulding pieces to length. In our case I measured roughly and cut the casing, then wedged it in place and tweaked the cuts if I needed to. This was also a time when I realized that some of the rosettes were misaligned and I redid them yet again.

 

When applying the casing, you have to make one long line of hot glue and make it as straight as possible. This is on the back side of the moulding, however due to the thickness of the glass it can be seen. Also, once this foam material is on the mirror, you won’t easily get it off immediately without snapping it in half.

Once you get all the pieces on the mirror, caulk the connections between the casing the rosettes to complete the look.

I’m really overcomplicating the project. It was super easy and looks great with no painting required.

Midway and After shots of Mirror 1. You can see the transformation even in the first pic.

A simpler method is to find an old frame and paint it white and hang it. Check out what Jess did here: