10 Great Holiday Gifts Under $50
Dec.14
Photo credit: Ian Barnard
Christmas Day is only two weeks away, but your shopping list isn’t getting any shorter. Between your kids, relatives, friends, and the lucky colleague whose name you picked from the Secret Santa bowl, there are probably still a few handfuls of folks you’d like to surprise with a little something special this year. ‘Tis the season to feel elfish, right?
Giving gets even better when it’s done without breaking your holiday budget. We’ve compiled a quick list of 10 great holiday gifts under $50, which we’ll gladly ship to any of the 48 contiguous states for free until the last day of December. When you give a gift from WallCandy® Arts, you support a small mom-owned-and-operated business that designs products proudly made in the USA with non-toxic, high quality materials that will last for years to come. So, go ahead – shrink your shopping list with universally appealing wall décor from our 10-under-$50 gift guide:
Luv Letters – $6 per letter
Help your coworker claim his cubicle with starry blue stick on letters, provide your family’s patriarch with a proud surname to display on the foyer wall, or personalize your daughter’s bedroom with peel and stick letters in a whimsical bird print.
Superstar Chalkboard – $14
Give your niece a removable, reusable chalkboard star sticker to decorate her bedroom door now (and her dorm room door later). It’s removable and reusable without damaging surfaces, so her parents and future resident advisor won’t have to worry about chips or smudges.
Mini Chalkboard Panels – $18
Redesign your beau’s office space or your son’s pretend workshop to include mini chalkboard decals he can use and reuse to manage his to-do list without damaging that cherished Mets-themed paint job.
Mini Whiteboard Panels – $18
If there’s only one way to show your child’s teacher some thoughtful holiday appreciation, it’s giving him or her a trio of peel and stick dry erase decals for the classroom, kitchen, or home office.
Watch Me Grow – $32
For your family’s littlest growers, a cheerful growth chart wall sticker provides the best way to check vertical progress daily without marking up the walls.
Design Your Own Snowman – $38
For your aunt and uncle’s family, a design-your-own-snowman kit packed with removable, repositionable winter wall decals will encourage them to spend more than a few snowless afternoons sipping hot cocoa and building snow pals indoors.
Rococo Chalkboard – $36
This regal-looking decorative chalkboard decal is gorgeous enough to fit in with your best friend’s posh living room décor and functional enough to provide your dear mother a place for working out her latest recipes.
Chalkboard Heart – $36
No kitchen is complete without a peel and stick chalkboard heart for jotting down phone messages, grocery lists, or love notes. This spacious chalkboard wall decal is the perfect place to write “I adore you” all year long.
Night Lights – $48
Surprise your dear mother with a screened-in porch decked out in glow in the dark wall decals that emit just the right amount of moonlight without electricity or recharging. Each peel and stick strand is removable and reusable, so she can easily transfer her design to the guest bedroom in case visiting grandkids need a little nighttime light.
My Sunshine – $48
Know a nursery or playroom in need of some warmth? This all-in-one sunshine kit comes with a brilliant sun wall decal and the celestial accessories to keep blossoming babies always looking on the bright side.
Need your gifts by Christmas Day? Order with ground shipping by Dec. 16, or with expedited shipping by Dec. 20. We can’t guarantee that orders placed after those dates will arrive in time.
Happy holidays!
Decorating a Dorm Room with Removable, Reusable Peel and Stick Wallpaper
Sep.10
Where to begin?
Inhabitants of even the swankiest campus dorm rooms agree – at first, those cinder block walls can be daunting. The wall color is typically an economical eggshell with a dingy yellow tinge, and you don’t have to be a talented interior decorator or celebrated psychologist to know that a week spent with such an icky color can be draining. The goal (and instinct, in most cases) is to personalize and add deinstitutionalized color to a dorm room’s drab walls, pronto.
Unfortunately, a significant roadblock to better dorm room design typically exists. Students who live on campus are familiar with the strict no-tape-no-tacks rules, and even those who dare to repaint with the promise of returning the wall to its original hue at semester’s end risk receiving a write-up once the first round of room inspections commences. Regular glue-reliant wallpaper poses a similar liability, but a quality alternative is newly available. WallCandy® recently launched a collection of removable, reusable peel and stick wallpaper that won’t elicit groans from an overworked campus maintenance staff. It’s a cinch to use, relies on a water-based adhesive that won’t ruin a dorm room’s paint job, and comes in stripes and patterns so cool visitors will wonder if they’ve somehow stepped off campus and into your posh first apartment.
If you’ve never worked with wallpaper before, no worries – this is not your typical wall covering. For starters, no primer, water, or glue is required. As you prepare to begin a full-time campus life, here are five suggestions for decorating a dorm room with peel and stick wallpaper:
1. Create a focal wall. Highlight the unique size and shape of your dorm room by covering the most prominent wall with colorful stripes or an eye-catching pattern. If you’re working with a railroad-style room, consider covering two small walls instead of one large wall. Once the mid-semester doldrums hit, you’ll have the option to change things up without worrying over chipped paint.
2. Design a unique headboard. It’s a cinch to cut each wallpaper sheet with scissors and add a little oomph to an assigned sleeping spot. Trim scalloped or ornamented edges with a quick cardboard guide, and then complete the look with bedding in complementary patterns or bright solids, depending on which wallpaper design you’ve chosen. If the standard-issue twin bed already has an existing headboard, a larger wallpaper headboard behind it will create some dimension.
3. Cover the ceiling. If you happen to like the color your school has selected for painting the dorms but need something other than chunky furniture to break up the monotony, consider adding a layer of wallpaper to the ceiling for a chic overhead view. Hey, it might even help muffle your upstairs neighbor’s midnight bowling sessions.
4. Line bookshelves, drawers, or dresser tops. Those massive textbooks won’t cover all the scratches and scrapes your borrowed bookshelves and bureau drawers have earned over the years. Give subtle spaces new life by lining them with leftover wallpaper and you’ll find that your room’s daily aesthetic value has increased exponentially.
5. Make a nook. Cover two perpendicular walls surrounding a corner desk to create depth and a multiple-room illusion. Decorating a designated space to look significantly different compared to the room around it can open up even the tiniest efficiency apartment and do wonders for a dorm room.
Perhaps the best part of working with removable, reusable peel and stick wallpaper is taking it with you when it’s time to move on. At the end of the semester, peel away each sheet and transfer your wall decorations to their original backing until it’s time to spruce up a new dwelling or give your old home bedroom a makeover.
Got a great idea for decorating a dorm room? Tell us about it! Leave a comment and share your vision for the perfectly adorned campus home.
Warm Up Your Decor with Summer Shades, Shapes, and Wall Decals
Mar.16
We definitely need some sod for the living room. (Photo credit: Ryan L. Hyde)
This week, it’s supposed to reach the 60-degree mark on the official New York City thermometer. Lately, I’ve been wondering about that thermometer. I’m not sure where it’s kept, what it looks like (cartoonish oversized novelty thermometer, or electronic wonder small enough to fit inside a button?), or who’s in charge of checking it, but I hope he or she is strict and diligent in limiting viewing access. This winter is passing through at a frozen-molasses pace, so it worries me to think that someone has been staring at the official thermometer often enough to cause watched-pot-never-boiling conditions.
Because I just can’t wait to stash my woolly socks away for a short season, I’ve decided to take on a summer-invoking decorating project the way a kid left to call all the interior design shots might hang up the holiday lights the day after Halloween – with gusto! March is always a low-budget affair, but there’s usually a welcome delay in any financial pinch I feel while sprucing up for the warmer months. I suppose throws, insulating curtains, and thicker materials are easily more expensive than vintage mirrors, potted African violets, and pillows fit for a warm afternoon’s nap.
If you’re interested in starting your own relatively inexpensive early indoor summer, start with these five tips for an easy seasonal shift:
1. Consider the sun. As you switch accessories and adjust your color scheme, choose fabrics and hues that look best in bright, cheery light. Mirrors – especially the kitschy vintage kind – are classic sunshine reflectors, so why not hunt ‘em down and hang ‘em up?
2. Berries are best. Replace forest greens with grape, beiges with golden raisin, and reds with raspberry. Color is king from May until December – go ahead, crown your space early this year. After all that snow shoveling we did, we totally deserve a sweet color makeover.
3. Pick summer shapes. The iconic soft-serve snack inspired WallCandy’s new ice cream cone chalkboard wall decal. It’s taller than Lilly, our resident product tester and Allison’s adorable 6-year-old, so there’s plenty of space for a Saturday sundae bar menu, potential summer road trip routes, or a countdown to the school year’s official end.
4. Move flourishing greenhouse perennials to the living room. I love a few good cacti because they love a humid day, they live to be forgotten, and the cat stays far away from all tipping points. If you’d rather keep your plant life to a minimum, try enhancing your indoor creepers by adding a kit of gracefully lush flower garden wall stickers as a baseboard accent.
5. Decorate to remind your kids that winter is on its way out. Nothing’s more contagious than childhood spring fever, so adding a row of festive flowers wall decals or a mighty sun wall decal to your child’s favorite environment is sure to inspire more than a few infectious good moods.
Share your summer decorating tips – we’d love to know how you shed the winter blechs and prepare for longer, sunnier days perfect for sipping iced tea and watching the bubbles float on the breeze.
What’s Stickier Than Helicopter Parents? Wall Decals!
Sep.2
We all know so-called “helicopter parents,” those overprotective moms and dads who hover over their children on playgrounds like they are Secret Service agents. And who are afraid to let their kids make mistakes on even the most rudimentary levels.
According to the New York Times, helicopter parents are now hovering over college campuses, too — some refusing to leave the dorms!
The Times reports that college administrators now have to formally include messages to “hit the road” in orientation programs to parents who insist on setting up their children’s dorm rooms as if they are still playing with Barbies and Mr. Potato Heads.
“In order to separate doting parents from their freshman sons, Morehouse College in Atlanta has instituted a formal “Parting Ceremony.”
It began on a recent evening, with speeches in the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel. Then the incoming freshmen marched through the gates of the campus — which swung shut, literally leaving the parents outside.
When University of Minnesota freshmen move in at the end of this month, parental separation will be a little sneakier: mothers and fathers will be invited to a reception elsewhere so students can meet their roommates and negotiate dorm room space — without adult meddling.”
Smothering your kids’ independence in college, which is supposed to represent the first real steps into adulthood, is obviously counterproductive. But as a sentimental parent, I do think that this is not a black and white issue. I have played the role of bodyguard on many playgrounds over the years because the reality is that toddlers don’t need to learn the harsh lessons of life by getting stepped on and crushed.
Any parent who goes to the playground can attest that older kids have absolutely no regard for the fingers and toes of younger children. Sometimes I see teenagers playing on the slide and swings and making things very unpleasant for the kiddies meant to be there.
If or when I am ever confronted with the unpleasant issue of bullying, I guarantee I will not sit idly by if the school officials look the other way. We all want to protect our kids and it is tough to let go at every mini-stage of independence. But overall, I side with Lenore Skenazy, the leader of the Free-Range Kids movement.
Skenazy maintains that kids don’t need a helmet and elbow pads when they are climbing in the backyard treehouse. And she urges us to drop the fear that every kid who rides his or her bike to the local grocery store will get kidnapped. Check out some of the irreverent lecture topics she offers for her speaking engagements:
Playdates & Axe Murderers: How to Tell the Difference
Who’s Crazy: People Who Trust the World or Those Who Assume the Worst?
How Come We’re So Much More Afraid Than Our Parents Were?
Raising a Sad, Worried Wimp (How Not To)
No matter where you stand on the helicopter parent issue, here’s the great news…. WallCandy’s amazing removable wall decals come in creative themes and styles appropriate for both the nursery and the college dorm.
Just one piece of advice, though. Please let your college students peel and stick the decals themselves. These decorations are phenomenal for building up hand-eye coordination and self-confidence! 
Instant Gratification: Polaroid-Style Frame Decals
Jul.22
I’m old enough to remember shaking blank Polaroid photos to try to speed up their developing, which was like watching a picture fade in reverse. Shaking them was as effective as tapping your feet to make a long line move faster.
And I’m delighted to discover that old-style Polaroid film has been brought back from the dead in the Digital Age by some photography enthusiasts in the Netherlands! Appropriately, they call themselves The Impossible Project.
The genre is super hot. Lady Gaga, recently signed on as Polaroid’s Creative Director, just posed for a giant Polaroid portrait. You’ll find it at the MIT Museum, which houses iconic photography memorabilia dating back to inventor Dr. Edwin Land.
And now, WallCandy Arts adds its stylish tribute. These removable wall decal Frames turn any wall into a nostalgic scrapbook. They look just as fashionable with 8 x 10 color enlargements taken 10 minutes ago as they do with vintage black and whites from your grandparents’ wedding album. If you are feeling extra creative, we recommend running your photos through editing software or free Web editing apps, such as Rollip.com, to give them a subdued Instamatic look.
Completing the scrapbook or bulletin board theme are pieces of yellowed Scotch tape and push-pins. The blank white area underneath the photos are meant for your witty captions with Dry-Erase markers — the same ones you use for your office whiteboard.
Some WallCandy Arts designs are clearly targeted toward specific ages and genders. For example, unless your hubby still wears Batman underwear, it is unlikely he’d be choosing these RACE ME race cars for his Man Cave.
The beauty of Frames is that they appeal to every demographic. Here are a few occasions and locations where decorating with them would be a huge hit:
WAYS TO USE WALLCANDY FRAMES
1. Dorm Room Decor: While your roommate sticks up the same cliched shots of James Dean, John Belushi’s Animal House college spoof, or (yuck) trendy guerrilla icon Che Guevara, you can show off the fun places you’ve traveled or hope to visit one day.
2. Birthday Parties: Doesn’t matter if the guest of honor is 1 or 100, frame the cutest moments of his or her life in wall decals.
3. Graduation Parties: These are going on all summer long! Kindergarten class photos will make your grad’s friends smile.
4. Wedding Anniversaries: We hardly open up our wedding albums any more, let alone share them with new friends. Make them the central focal point!
5. Bridal Showers: Decorate the house with action shots of the honored couple!
6. Bar and Bat Mitzvahs/First Communions: Any “This is Your Life” is an excuse to line the walls with a Time Machine tribute.
7. Adult Halloween Parties: Put blank frames up on the wall with categories for a costume contest: Funniest Costume, Sexiest Costume, Funniest Couple, Scariest Couple, etc. Take digital shots and print out 8 x 10s on your printer and have people vote for the winners. Give out WallCandy Arts decals as prizes
8. Going Away Parties: When a friend or family member moves, it’s another “This is Your Life” moment.
9. Childhood Bedrooms: Great place to showcase favorite family vacation pictures.
10. Office Decor: Show off the kids to your co-workers or your family vacation pics.
11. Playroom Decor: Kids are fickle. One day they love the Wiggles or Teletubbies. The next day they are “too old” for those characters and are Sesame Street sophisticates. Frames are ideal for displaying magazine pictures and children’s artwork, too.
As with all WallCandy Arts decals, there are no limits to where your imagination can take you.
We’d love to see how you’ve used WallCandy Frames. Please send us your photos and stories about your favorite decoration projects! Share them on Facebook or drop us a line here.
