Home Decorating with Pantone's Emerald Color of the Year 2013

Irwin Weiner ASID - Companies like Pantone create standardized colors that help extend our color vocabulary across a variety of artistic industries. Two of those industries are fashion and interior design, and they're interconnected.

Pantone selects a color of the year - this year it's Emerald 17-5641 - and this and related colors are used to tell stories and create moods that will soon determine what we'll be wearing and what home fashions will be popping up in stores, from decor items to appliances. We've selected four items that could help you tie Emerald, and related shades of green, into your design scheme.

CB2 works in Emerald shapes down the center of their sassy Totem Rug

Design Within Reach offers this green version of Flemming Busk's Twilight Sleeper Sofa

Love the green metal frame and legs on this Serpentine chair from Ligne Roset

Karim Rashid's pops green accents on his Ottawa Collection pieces for BoConcept

Don't go overboard decorating with any trendy color of the year; adding pops of current on-trend colors won't hurt anything, and you can use them to help freshen up your existing design scheme. Click on a product photo for more information.

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Dial Your Next Party Up to "Special"

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Irwin Weiner ASID - Jay and I love to host parties. We hope you do, too. If you enjoy interior design and creating a lovely home, then the natural extension of "home love" is to share it with family, friends, and neighbors. Entertaining is an art, and if you don't do it very often, it can be a chore. But if you keep with it, and mix parties for a small group with bashes bringing in a larger crowd, you'll feel right at home being sociable. The slideshow above show scenes from a small dinner party we threw this Christmas Eve. Total attending (including the two of us): 11.

We hand-selecting international dishes for their "yummy" factor and festive colors (the slide show contains a menu), and we began by serving Admiral Russell's Christmas Punch, a big hit and so festive and tasty! I went to a local Walmart and selected holiday ornaments to fill four footed bowls running up and down the table, we added madcap color-changing electric candles in votives, and I bought coordinating fabric and made the tablecloth and napkins (are you impressed?!). And we did fun things we'd never tried before, like using wooden paddles to hand-roll individual balls of butter and printing out our menu and putting it by each place setting on little snowflake placeholders. It was lots of fun! As we approach New Year's Eve, everyone at Design2Share hopes you have an amazing 2013, and your home is filled with the sound of entertaining, good parties, and celebration. (And a big thank-you to the amazing Jana Kolpen for taking the photos in the slideshow.)

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3 Videos: Celebrating Hand-Crafted Home Goods

Irwin Weiner ASID - Whenever I decorate a client's home, I always like to see one or more hand-crafted items included in a room. Handmade goods add texture and rich layering to the rest of the decor, and there's always an interesting story to tell about each piece - who made it, where it was made, what it means, and so on. I also love how no two items are exactly alike, a nice contrast to machine-made, mass-produced items.

We selected three videos today to help illustrate that there are real people behind hand-crafted goods: Mogck Pottery, RMIT Textile Design program (a weaving demonstration of technique used to make articles like the beautiful pillows shown in the top photo), and CMM Framing (custom framing work as in the second photo).

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Boxing Day Special: Boxer Art

The Boxers, Michael Mavian, 2010 (1st Dibs)

Irwin Weiner ASID - Boxing Day is December 26, and please forgive the pun, but I thought it would be a good day to accent boxing artwork. Visitors to my home in Pennsylvania know that I have a beautiful mid-century serving plate from Italy hanging on the wall of my dining room, and it features a stylized boxer. I like boxing art and decor for its active elements, enlivening a room. Perfect accents for dens, family rooms, and (obviously) man caves, boxing art is an underappreciated part of decorating that I just wanted to reinforce today. So happy "day after Christmas" for those of you who aren't used to celebrating Boxing Day, and for those who do, enjoy your day with family and friends. (And a shout out to all who observe the Feast of St. Stephen, too!) Click on each photo for more art information and details. 

The Hughes Brothers (Boxing), 1975, Jean-Paul Goude (1st Dibs)

Ali with Mini Boxing Gloves, 1963, Steve Schapiro (1st Dibs)

Stags Head with Boxing Squirrels, Simon Brown (1st Dibs)

Oskar Werner and Henri Serre Mimic Waltz in Boxing Ring, 1961, Raymond Cauchetier (1st Dibs)

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