It's a cubicle Christmas: Holiday decor made easy and cheap with borrowed office supplies

Whether you work in a cubicle farm or at your desk at home, the inspiration for crafty holiday decorating is all around you. Pushpins, rubber bands, staples, paper goods and even padded shipping envelopes can be twisted and trimmed with creativity. Here are five simple projects to brighten your workplace.  How you acquire the supplies is your own business.

File under “creative”: For the tree pictured at right, take a heavyweight hanging file folder (we used a classic dark green one) and lightly trace the shape of a tree.  Make sure  the trunk is fat and the lowest branch also touches the bottom. Trim your file folder and you will have two identical trees.

Locate and mark the centers of the trees (vertically and horizontally). On tree No. 1, cut a vertical slit from the bottom of the trunk to your mark.  On tree No. 2, cut a vertical slit from the top of the tree down to your mark. Slide the two pieces together at a 90-degree angle. Viewed from above, this notch-joinery technique should produce an X-shaped tree that stands on its own. We crowned ours with a red pencil eraser and decorated it with bulbs made of thumbtacks. 

Fruitful thinking: In a variation of a favorite holiday pomander — the fragrant orange studded with cloves — substitute rubber bands for ribbons and pushpins for cloves. The orange is wrapped in a colorful plaid pattern, with the vertical bands layered at the bottom and top. For the red apple, clear pushpins and a paper clip transform fruit into hanging ornament. And instead of setting out a bowl of Granny Smith apples — a decorator trick that has become a cliché — stud them with colorful round-headed map pins.

More ingenious uses of office supplies after the jump ...

Why not try ... a peacock holiday wreath?

Why wait until turkey day to hang the holiday wreath? And why spend a small fortune on greenery when you can quickly and easily create something equally dramatic that will last for years?

These questions were on my mind on a recent craft supply run to Michaels, where I found a $19.99 peacock feather wreath that spoke to me. What it said: Peacock motifs are everywhere these days, why shouldn't they replace Thanksgiving turkeys and Christmas cardinals? (The wreath was a fierce name-dropper too, whispering Auntie Mame, Tony Duquette and Bob Mackie in one breath.)

Naturally, I had to have it. With one push of a pushpin it quickly adorned my front door, which happens to be a pale shade of peacock blue. Stylish as it looked, it needed a little something extra. 

That's when I remembered the stuffed peacock I recently found at Mercado in Silver Lake for $23. Made from hand-spun wool by women in the central highlands of Chiapas, Mexico, it was the perfect folk art counterpart to the drag queen glamour of the wreath. And with a pushpin through its feathery tail, it is now happily perched on the wreath. 

Not bad for $42.99. (Tax and pushpins not included.)

-- David A. Keeps

Photo credit: David A. Keeps

Keeping guests happy: Five temporary room dividers

I recently learned that my parents don't like sleeping on the fold-out couch in the middle of my open floor plan living room when they visit. I can't say this surprised me -- but when my outdoorsy younger sister piped up that a room screen might be a nice touch, I felt truly ashamed.

So this holiday season I'm giving my house guests more privacy. I called upon our archives, design-savvy friends and the Internet to help me come up with workable solutions. Here are the best options I found:

  Super basic: DIY sliding curtain
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on  how to create privacy in loft spaces. Megan Boynton, pictured blurrily above, had an almost life-sized portrait of an elephant copied onto a 14-by-9-foot piece of nylon polyester and hung it from a rope made of pipe.

More options after the jump ...

DIY straw lamp shade: repurposing gone too far?

When I stumbled upon this do-it-yourself pendant lamp made up of 1,500 drinking straws at Addicted 2 Decorating, I had conflicting first impressions. First: This takes repurposing much too far. Second: This is awesome. 

Someone also made a version with translucent straws, which you can see here.

For step-by-step directions, click here. Apparently, even though this seems like a project that would be good for little fingers, it's not a craft recommended for kids. Darn.

-- Lisa Boone

Photo credit: Addicted 2 Decorating

Restaurant design inspiration: Rippou-Tai wall at Sugarfish

When the first Sugarfish sushi restaurant opened in Marina Del Rey in June 2008, brand designer Clement Mok worked with architects to create a space that would feel bright and vibrant. But when customers began to compare the results to Pinkberry, Mok knew he wanted something different for the Brentwood location, which opened in July.

Enter the Rippou-Tai wall -- an undulating wooden wall that runs the length of the restaurant. The oceanic symbolism is obvious -- especially with those glass bubble lamps hanging in front of it. The wall itself is gorgeous, at once intricate and simple, watery and earthy.

The restaurant and the wall were designed by Glen Bell of Studio Dex. He calls it a "Rippou-Tai" wall because the phrase means "3-D cube" in Japanese. It is constructed from more than 3,000 individually cut 3-by-3-inch cubes of Douglas fir that vary in depth.

The scale of Sugarfish's wall made it time consuming to assemble, but Bell says the construction is simple enough that anyone could do it. "It's like color by numbers once you have your piles of cut wood ready to go," he said. Bell screwed each piece of wood into a piece of backing (in this case, plywood). The only unforeseen difficulty? The lumber was so heavy it nearly tipped over a forklift.

-- Deborah Netburn

Photo credit: Studio Dex

Concrete jungle? Slice it up and make it green

While the remodeled barn I discussed earlier this morning has been logging clicks galore, one gallery that I assumed would be a hit with readers last month went largely unnoticed. It's a DIY solution that could help a lot of urban yards, so let's give it a second look, shall we?

The project is a twist on something you've no doubt seen: Concrete broken up into rough-edged chunks, the borders planted with ground cover for a green, more naturalistic look.

But landscape designer Stephanie Bartron offers a different approach: Renting a power saw (and a saw operator), then slicing up a patio or driveway into geometric patterns for a clean-edged finish.

In the project pictured here, the cut-out concrete was then stacked to create an entry fountain. Debra Prinzing details the process in her article and accompanying photo gallery, which includes a step-by-step look at the process and a peek at a few finished designs.

Sketch out the cuts yourself, then hire a pro to handle the heavy machinery. Cost for a day's equipment and labor: about $1,000.

-- Craig Nakano

Photo credits: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times

Costa Mesa barn turned into a slice of loft-like living

The story of Corey Gash and the Costa Mesa barn he turned into 700 square feet of loft-like living has been racking up some pretty amazing traffic on latimes.com. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, you'll find much amusement in the place. That dining table pictured above? It used to be part of a bowling alley. The tree stump used to create the coffee table? Gash bought it out of the back of a pickup truck in a Home Depot parking lot.The lights are IKEA, and the wood paneled was reclaimed from a church.

You can read Barbara Thornburg's full article, and don't miss all 16 images in Don Bartletti's photo gallery. What's nice about both is how a sense of humor shines through, whether you're looking at daughter Lilly's playroom lined in artificial turf or Gash's pretension-free library, stacked under the stairs.

-- Craig Nakano

Photo credits: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Decorating ideas from a pro party house (or two)

How's this for a sign of a successful remodel: Friends want to throw parties at your home.

Sherry Walsh, a former fashion designer, and husband Miguel Nelson, an artist, took those requests and turned them into a business, renting out two spaces for parties, weddings and more -- venues with unusual designs that do-it-yourselfers will want to steal.

The first, a free-flowing indoor-outdoor space they call Marvimon, had been auto showroom. That's it pictured above, with the couple's Woolly Pockets creating a vertical garden along one wall. Walsh and Nelson's second venue, SmogShoppe, is a former smog-check station in Culver City.

Both spaces are loaded with ideas: tables stained with coffee grounds, bookshelves wrapped in metal mesh, glazed brick used instead of tile, old doors lined up to form wall paneling. Check out our 19-image photo gallery here.

-- Jan Molen

Photo credits: Ricardo DeAratanha / Los Angeles Times

CanvasPop lets you turn photos into wall art, and it's pretty cheap

We've seen online services that let you put your own image on T-shirts, coffee cups, throw pillows and shower curtains, so why was I so excited to hear about CanvasPop, a new company that will print any image onto a stretched canvas for low-cost wall art?

Maybe it's because CanvasPop recognizes that (rightly or wrongly) many of us consider the photographs we take as worthy of hanging in our home. (Hey, what picture could be better than that photo I shot of the waves at Abalone Cove?)  Maybe it's because the price point is so reasonable: $30 will get you an 8-by-10-inch canvas printed with a photo of your choosing but not stretched, and a 3-by-6-foot canvas will run you about $500 stretched. Or maybe it's because absolutely everything about the site makes sense. It's easy to upload a photo, and an actual person will get in touch with you to show a proof of the cropped image and to help you with other tweaks you might want.

I can think of at least three photos in my iPhoto library that I feel are worthy of display in my living room, and apparently I'm not the only one. CanvasPop's founder, Adrian Salamunovic, said the company has taken hundreds of orders, and it's only been around for a month.

-- Deborah Netburn

Photo courtesy of CanvasPop

DIY baby costume for next year? Cupcake head!

It's never too early to start thinking about your newborn's first Halloween costume. And that goes double if you're one of those crazy, crafty people who insists that every costume will be hand made. (We'll see how far you go with that.) So, if you've got a little one fresh out of the oven -- or even in utero -- I recommend that you check out "Wacky Baby Knits: 20 Knitted Designs for the Fashion-Conscious Toddler" published this year by Perigee. The book is filled with kooky projects like a Mohawk hat, bear feet socks and the most insane colorful robot knitted suit I've ever seen, all for babies up to a year old.

The patterns, mostly beginner level, are by Alison Jenkins, who also brought us "The Knitting Directory" and "The Lost Art of Towel Origami." I can vouch for the simplicity of at least one of the projects: I made the cupcake hat complete with cherry on top for my niece Eloise (pictured above) in about three days of on-the-beach knitting last summer. (There's nothing like knitting for a newborn. The projects are so teeny that they knit-up in hours.)

Of course, the patterns and projects in "Wacky Baby Knits" aren't just for Halloween. Babies can get away with wearing frog suits, pirate outfits and cupcakes on their head any day of the year.

 

-- Deborah Netburn

Photo credits: Top is by Michael Polizzi; bottom three are courtesy of Penguin Group.