My Spoonflower Fabric Designs - Dog Accessories

This post is about a couple of awesome shops who makes Dog bandanas, bows & collars with custom fabric. But first, let me give you some background on the designer fabric I offer... 

I enjoy dreaming and imagining happy places! Just recently I got to materialize some of it through the designs I created to print on fabric. 👩‍🎨 I now offer my work through the on-demand fabric printing company Spoonflower, and my Etsy shops PawesomeBaby & Malamutes Make Me Happy 🎈! You can check out my fabric collection here. You’ll find a variety of fabric type with awesome dog breeds (more to come!)! Spoonflower also offers Home & Dining products with my prints. If you click on a design, it’ll show what else you can put those prints on and have them make for you!

Don’t worry if you don’t know to sew! 🧵 This post is about a few Small businesses owned by amazing and talented women entrepreneurs, who can make you something special to put on your fur babies with any of my fabric. 🥰

Dog Bandanas and Bows! 🎀 🎁 

My friend Amy makes pawesome bandanas and super cute bows!! She is a mom to a sweet Golden Retriever. Find her shop at HappyPupCycled . She is also on Instagram @HappyPupCycled. 

She’ll buy any of my fabric and make bandanas for you, saving you extra work. 

Or, you can buy the fabric yourself and have it shipped straight to her shop! Simply reach out to her for the custom order. 

Spoonflower’s Petal Signature Cotton fabric works just fine for bandanas and bows. If you like it more drapey, you can get a more flowy fabric like polyester sateen. 

Regardless of what you choose, you’ll be very happy to see it on your pupper!! ☺️

The cover picture is adorable Mishka showing off her pawesome bandana by HappyPupCycled. The design is my Feast at The Castle collection printed on Petal Signature Cotton. 🦇💚

Dog collars! 🎀 🎁 

Wagologie is another pawesome shop who makes really high quality collars! Lauren is a mom to three Poodles and is amazing to work with. She will make collars with any of my spoonflower fabric as a custom order. 

You can reach out to her to find out more! She’s on Instagram @wagologie

Here is my Snowy showing off his pawesome collar by Wagologie, made with my Feast at the Castle fabric from spoon flower. Design printed on Petal Signature cotton. Collar is 1.5” wide. 

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Grays & Beiges

I decided to experiment with more grays and beiges (greiges) with our second home, as I was looking for more brighter ambience with a rustic modern touch. 

Roman shades for dining area

Combined dark espresso table with pale oak French chairs. SW Magnetic Gray for wall color. Roman shades in darker shade of grey to match the drapes in the living room.

Guest bedroom

Sponge painted accent wall and combination of antique white and espresso furnitures. 

Living room

We replaced the standard chandelier that came with the house with a wrought iron one from Pottery barn. I like the sparkle it adds to the room :)

Balcony

Balcony on the backside of the house. Railing planters and the potted Hinoki cypress give good level of privacy while open enough to let the fresh air in. Interestingly an Oregon Junco bird duo found the planters safe and attractive to set up their nest. It was fun to feed them, watch them hang out in the balcony and listen to the young ones. Though it got a bit annoying at times when both birds would come out "scolding" us when we got near the planter to water it, in spite of the care I took to avoid the nest itself  :D

Early spring 

Mid summer; pansies have taken off in full form. And petunias add a nice softness. 

Patio

Patio on the front side of the house. Nice spot to watch people, dog, cars, sunset and paragliders take off from the top of Tiger mountain. 

Master bedroom 

(in spring)

The accent wall is another of our projects. We got the ready to stick reclaimed wood from Stikwood (Amazon.com offered it for discounted price and prime shipping). Added wrought iron accessories to dress up the room a bit. 

(Winter)

Red is one of my favorite colors. And winter is the perfect time to put it on display. It adds more cheer when the days get shorter. Got the accent pillow cover from an Etsy store. 

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My Texas Rose Garden

      Very first home, and the first opportunity to grow my own plants! And I chose roses! Red being one of my favorite colors, I was naturally inclined to red roses. Before I knew, flower beds in my little home was full of red rose bushes, some climbers. Hubby & I moved plants around as it matured, and added other colors over time.

     Most of my roses were purchased from Oregon based Heirloomroses. They sell own root roses that arrived very healthy and grew vigorously with a bit of Mill's Rose Magic every year :)

Alec's Red, very fragrant!

Prairie Squire

Alec's Red in its first year

Don Juan, the climber

Alec's Red from living room

Last autumn at Humble home

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Norway - The First Impressions

 It wasn't so long before I stumbled across another hiking destination, hut-hut hiking in Sweden's Kungsleden trail. This Arctic trail takes you through 443 km (275 miles) of absolute wilderness in the Swedish Lapland covering amazing forests, hidden glaciers, everything a nature lover could dream of. However, I wasn't quite sure about such a long hike; it would probably take us a month to complete. But the idea of a Scandinavian adventure kept beckoning like a honey pot calling out to a wandering bee! As I started contemplating the possibilities, a friend who lived in Finland mentioned Norway. I was still gauging my tolerance to multi-day hikes, and looking up Norway showed some amazing trails with breathtaking beauty and a good level of solitude I was looking for. Norway's rugged and dramatic terrain soon became a challenge we had to undertake and must overcome!

Before we knew, we were in Oslo, all geared up for a 15+ hours long road trip to the Arctic circle, and then a 3 hour ferry ride to one of the most beautiful archipelago in the world - the Lofoten Islands. The whole trip was planned around a few handpicked hiking trails we thought to accommodate within the two week vacation.

Ferry from Bodø to Moskenes

Difficulty in finding reasonably priced accommodations that was worth the cost in this expensive country, and freedom to camp anywhere without fearing any predators as long as you kept sufficient distance from private properties, both further encouraged the idea of combining hotel accommodations with camping during our trip.

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Beautiful Alberta - Banff National Park

Cradled in the lap of Canadian Rockies lies two of the most beautiful national parks in North America, Banff and Jasper. In this part of the country one would find numerous glaciers, including the largest ice field in the Rockies - Columbia icefields, turquoise & emerald glacial lakes, and lots of berries & bears! 

It was the beginning of autumn, and enough time had already passed to make us want to be back on the mountains. I was so excited when I came across these gems of the Canadian Rockies, with its interesting and rewarding trails. Due to lack of time, we had to limit this trip to just Banff and leave Jasper for later. But we managed to squeeze in enough activities for the 5 days we spent in Canmore, a small town located near the outskirts of Banff national park.

On our first day in Banff, we drove from Calgary all the way up to Athabasca glacier, one of the several glaciers constituting the Columbia Icefields. It is also the most visited glacier in North America due to its close proximity to the scenic Icefields Parkway. 

Driving through Icefields Parkway

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Hiking the Swiss Alps

Switzerland had been in my bucket list as long as I can remember. Probably from the 90s Bollywood movies, or all time classics like Sound of Music portraying the Alps which I always associated with this beautiful country. It was in late 2011 that I came across the World’s best hikes post on Nat Geo Adventure site and Grindelwald caught my attention. The First - Bachalpsee (Bachsee) trail was the anchor to our roughly 9 day vacation in this little Playground of Europe.

I got Fodor’s Switzerland travel guide, which gives some general guidance on various regions/cantons and highlights for each. But we didn’t find it much helpful for the kind of vacation we were planning. After digging through a few Swiss tourism websites, another hiking trails book called “The Bernese Alps - a walker’s guide” by Kev Reynolds and a few youtube videos, we decided on an itinerary perfectly customized to our liking. To avoid the summer crowd, we picked late June for our travel, hoping the mountains would warm up enough to open the trails to hikers.

I also got the Talk Now app for learning Swiss German and picked up a few words like Tanke, s’Wasser, d’ Dame/ d’ Herre toalette, Wo isch d’Bank. Keep in mind you could potentially buy sparkling or even flavored water if you don’t know enough adjectives for s'Wasser. A note on water: do not bother to buy bottled water. Its very pricey. But why pay for it when people generally drink tap water and it tastes so good and mountain fresh!

Another word that came handy is d’Bank. We needed to find an ATM and no one could understand ATM or the "English bank" until Bobby pronounced it as "bahnk". People in general knew to speak English. But the trails, gas station, stores all tested our German skills. When grasping the meaning of a foreign phrase becomes inevitable, you would be amazed at the human brain, how quickly it learns, remembers & re-learns especially the mistakes! 

Most of our activities were centered around the canton of Bernese Oberland which includes Grindelwald, the home of the famous(and sometimes infamous) mountain trio - Eiger, Jungfrau & Mönch, Lauterbrunnen and Interlaken. 

We landed in Zürich after a 2 plus 7 hr flight, and spent the rest of the day walking through old town Zürich, visiting some Romanesque cathedrals and renting a boat on the lake. Later in the night, we drove to Grindelwald where we were to spend the next couple of days.

The steeple of St Peter's church, the largest church clock face in Europe

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Yukon's Winter Wonderland

Its such a joyful time of the year! Yet another reason to commemorate the purpose of my Savior's visit. Plus, even people who don't believe in Christ or Christmas seem to be just generally happy and celebrating during this time of the year. As we move towards the winter solstice, the approaching of the long "dark" days (for those living above 40ºN), its such a pleasure to see the streets lit up in colorful lights, the sparkly decorations on the evergreen trees and listen to the Christmas carols playing in radio stations. All in all a season of nostalgia!

Brings back fond memories of my childhood days where I would spend the Christmas and New Year(which was also my grand father's birthday) at my grandparents', on mom's side. The family dinners everyone worked to put together, which always ran late, but came out as much anticipated and delicious. I didn't have much share on the dinner preps, but to put together a manger scene with my brother or cousin, some lights, a paper star, and sometimes decorate the tree nearby. Evergreen coniferous were rare in southern part of India where I grew up, not even any noticeably long cold nights; so the thought of Christmas trees and arrival of "winter" was a bit different. But it was still a season of lights, cooler weather, yummy food, homemade wine, no school and much joy!


As Bobby & I began to gear up for this season in late 2011, I found it interesting how most people flock towards the warmest parts of the continent like Florida & the Caribbean. But my heart was set upon some place different. Somewhere I could feel the intensity of Winter, what the season is meant to bring. And I started searching the map for how far up north we could go, and if it had anything that interested us. Which led us to Whitehorse, a small town in Yukon Territory in Northern Canada. Its actually the largest town you would find in the entire Yukon province (with a population of 30,000)! A perfect place to experience the long dark winter nights, and the life below zero. As an added bonus, the Aurora Borealis band regularly went over this part of the country. Since it was our first visit to such a low populated town that stayed frozen most of winter, we decided to do some guided tours - such as snow shoeing in Kluane national park, snow mobiling, dog sledding and ice fishing. While searching for places to stay outside the town we also had to make sure they had running water in bathroom and flushable toilets, as the primitive types are more common.

We arrived at Whitehorse on Dec 24th after a long flight, only to find out our rental car company, Budget was closed on Christmas Eve & Day, in spite of a confirmed reservation we had. Perhaps not many people rent cars at this part of the world. I was also expecting to see some Christmas busy-ness on the streets instead was welcomed by a quiet, empty town. We took a cab to get to our cabin at Sundog Retreat the next day, and was prepared to be content with protein bar Christmas dinner. But our kind hosts at the cabin found out about our low estate and shared the Christmas dinner they had prepared with us. 

Although it wasn't the Christmasy town I imagined, I so loved being there, taking in as much of pristine nature as I could, the powder snow, long starry nights, magical northern lights and the fresh crisp air..

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