Design by Techdesigns.co.uk.

New cocktail drink trend – add bees & worms!

Forget the cocktail umbrella, why not garnish your drink with an insect instead?  That’s what New York City restaurant White & Church is doing with a selection of alcoholic beverages with an unusual twist!  The restaurants mixologist Cristina Bini has already made a name for herself creating unique drinks with ingredients like tree bark, and smoked salmon.  Now she’s taken it to the next level with her insect drinks after discovering what a great source of protein insects actually are.  Take a look at one of her concoctions:

Insect cocktailsAnd they come in different varieties too, such as a margarita with avocado, and spicy Mexican worms, or one of their upcoming specialty drinks which will be served with scorpions!  Are you in the Big Apple and feeling feisty today?  Then head on over to White & Church and get your drinkable proteins!

Edited: June 23rd, 2011

Cool new tool for Ramen lovers!

Ahhhh, Ramen.  We all know it.  You tend to either love it or hate it.  A neat, tidy little package of cheap eats.  College student staple, quick food fix, savior of time-starved mothers everywhere.  And did I mention that it’s so cheap as to almost be a free meal.  A blank canvas for food doctor-uppers.  And yet, despite all that ramen has done for all of us over the years it goes widely unappreciated.  Well, now all that has changed with a new gadget created specifically for ramen eaters.  It’s the ramen noodle spoon & fork.  Take a look:

ramen spoon forkThis sleek new upgrade on the old plastic spork was created by ramen restaurant owner Masami Takahashi to enhance your ramen eating experience.  Looks pretty sleek to me.  If you’re ready to try one for yourself and take your  ramen slurping to the next level, then head on over to Unicahome and get one for yourself.  And don’t forget to stock up on your ramen!

Edited: June 15th, 2011

Free icon set – beautiful acorn character illustrations

Since it’s Friday, I think it’s time for a freebie, don’t you?  Today we have a beautiful set of illustrations by designer Monica Corduneanu.  This sweet icon set was created for Smashing Magazine, and are free for your personal or commercial projects.  Take a look:

free illustrationsCute, huh?  This is just a sampling from the set, which includes 17 different icons in all.   You want them?  Head over to Smashing Magazine and get your download, then start your designing!

Edited: April 8th, 2011

Fabric Giveaway Winner Announced!

And we have a winner!  I’d like to announce the winner of our first fabric giveaway of 2009 as Michelle Frame!  Congratulations to Michelle, she has won a yard of custom fabric in the design of her choosing!  Thanks to everyone who participated in the giveaway, and keep your eyes peeled for our next giveaway, which will be a design contest in honor of Valentines day.  Congrats again to Michelle and Happy New Year to everyone!

Edited: January 1st, 2010

Tutorial – Customizing A Ready-Made Design

Tutorial time!  I’m going to give everyone a step-by-step pictorial on how you can take one of our ready made designs and turn it into a completely new and different work of art by changing colors, adding text, uploading photos and using some of the advanced features of the designer to dress things up!  Ready – here we go!

1. Choose a design.  You can do this by either clicking one of the popular designs listed on the right side bar which will open up the graphic in the product designer:

sidebar 

or clicking the graphics link in the top menu bar:

 

topbar

The graphics link will take you to a page which lists all of our designs by category, or you can just look through them all page by page:

grapicpge

If you click on a design that you like, it will open up the graphic in the product designer, just like first option above.

2. So, now you’ve found a design you like.  You can try it out on all of the different products that we carry by using the dropdown in the designer

prodtype

Then you can resize it by dragging the handles in the four corners shown above until it fits/looks how you like.  Please keep in mind that all of the graphics in the designer are not the same size so the designer will let you know if you’re stretching/expanding a graphic too large for it to be printed correctly.

3. Once we have our design set up on a product, now we can make some changes!  Whenver you want to edit a design, click on the design name to open up the options available:

image

Now we have options!  Want to change the colors in the design?  To the right is a color bar which shows all of the colors that make up your graphic.  By clicking on the color you want to change a box opens – click the print colors button and a color palette opens up letting you choose what new color you’d like to change to – see:

chgcolor

chagcol2

chagcol3

I want to change all of the pinks in this image to blues.  Look what happens when I choose blue from the color palette ( I selected each of the pink shades in the graphic and changed them blue):

newcolor

You can also add text to your design, just click the add printing text button and type your words into the box and click ok.  Then you can move the text around, change colors and fonts! 

textbx

font2

Just make sure that you click on the box for the text or image you want to edit and you can go back and make changes as often as you like!

edit

Now wasn’t that easy!  Let’s try some other options in the designer.  Clicking on the advanced link in the designer will open a box with more effects for your design – you can change  tones, turn your graphic black & white, give it a look like an oil painting, or charcoal sketch, whatever you choose.  There’s a small preview of what the image will look like on the right – click the green checkmark to accept or the red x to delete.  You can also remove your changes.

advanced

Lastly, lets take a look at the options under borders in the designer, you can find them under the advanced settings as well.  Click the borders tab as seen below:

border

In the picture below I chose to add a TV border to my image:

tv

And in this one I chose a flower border:

flow

See – now wasn’t that fun?  When you’re all done with your design, simply add it to your cart, or you can save and come back to it later!

save

And thats it!  See you for the next tutorial!

Edited: December 14th, 2009

Back in the Saddle!

Okay, it’s true – I’ve been seriously slacking on the blogging.  But I have vowed to do better!  I had made a resolution to get back on track in the New Year – but that’s just my excuse to go a while longer without blogging so I’m starting right now.  Coming up look out for lots of content, new product announcements, tutorials, indie shop features, jokes, whatever I come up with to keep you entertained!  If you’ve got some ideas for things you’d like to see on the blog just let me know.  I’ll be talking to you soon!

Edited: December 10th, 2009

Fabric Yardage Now Available In Candeystore!

Hello All!

We’ve added fabric by the yard to the store for custom design!  Now available in our online designer is a full yard of cotton broadcloth fabric for you to create.  Upload your own design, or choose from the tons of graphics available online and design something truly unique!  Continuous yardage will be limited to a maximum of three yards.  There is no limit on the number of yards that can be ordered, however 3 yards is the maximum uncut length .  Be sure to let us know if you have any questions, and happy designing!

Edited: July 21st, 2009