1) IDye is the fabric dye you’ve been looking for, but you had questions. We had answers! Melissa says: “I’m in an apartment building with shared washers/dryers – after using this yourself, do you think it would be safe for me to use it in one of those without worry that I’d end up washing my neighbor’s clothes pink? I’d love to try it, but I’d hate to ruin someone else’s laundry!” But, our own Katie D. puts fears to rest in comments. Intrigued? Click for iDye.

2) Ice cream and beer make a perfect pair. SuzyCat says: “I never thought about making a float with lambic! That’s awesome!
 I’ve seen a lot of places use stouts for their floats, but I think lambics would be much better.”

3) Blueberries make summer salads better, even without the dairy. Marissa says: “Oh delish. I am going to have to try this without the dairy and the sugar…but I am definitely going to try it. I am a bear and there is little a bear likes more than salmon and berries. YUM!” Click for summer salad with smoked salmon and blueberry lemon vinaigrette.

4) Waffle spread is a cheat-worthy treat. Pencils says: “Because I’ve been dieting, I’ve been resisting the Wafel and Dinges truck, which parks in front of my office on a regular basis. Now I’m going to have to try it, and it’s ALL YOUR FAULT! (Heh)”. For your fix outside of New York click here.

5) Designing for pets is a definite do. Julie says, “My family just built a brand new house, which my parents basically designed from the ground up (with the expertise of professionals, of course!). What was the one thing I think my father was most excited about? Putting in windows that go almost all the way to the floor, so our miniature dachshund can lay in her bed and see what’s going on outside. So yes, most definitely.” Do you design with pets in mind?

We are looking for any excuse possible to buy a set of these incredibly fun playshapes wooden building toys spotted over at swiss miss. Perhaps a Shelterrific daycare could justify the expense?

Wonder Thunder: we’ve mentioned our love of them before. Now Apartment Therapy is giving us a tour of their Seattle home and studio, and it’s all kinds of awesome.

Serious Eats puts corn in a place we’ve never seen it: in a spicy lil’ pasta along with prosciutto and burrata cheese. Yes, please.

Vegan roadtrippin’ just got infinitely more convenient, thanks to this list at the Huffington Post, bringing light to accidentally vegan foods at 7-eleven.

Someone’s having a birthday at Picnics in the Park. And we’re the one’s getting the gifts — a fabulous, limited edition linoleum block print of a vintage trailer. You’ve got till midnight tonight to win!

Miss out on Jonathan Adler’s Helix Rug at the summer sale? Well, it’s sold out, sadly, but CasaSugar shares it’s secret source for a steal of a stand-in.

Build yourself a beautiful modern planting table using only an electric drill, countersink drill bit, and a hand saw! Via the LA Times LA at Home blog.

If you can’t take a dip in a pool to cool down this weekend, how about dippin’ your chip into this minty pea dip at 30 Bucks a Week?

We’ve been OBSESSED with gallery walls since Sarah L’s recent post about Fred. Now we’ve got the ultimate gallery wall roundup, thanks to Design*Sponge.

When you just have too much stuff for your bookshelves and closets to contain, get the “You Stuff It Cargo Chair”, by designer Stefan Schulz, and cram it with your overflow. The basic wire structure is designed to be filled with whatever your heart desires. I love the look of the firewood stacked inside, but the rest of the options look far to cluttered for my eye. I wonder about the comfort factor of that wire frame, too…. But I guess If you used enough stuffed animals, it would cushion the blow? — Megan B.

via Curbly

If you thirst for real, lived-in design you may have heard of photographer and blogger Todd Selby. If you haven’t, click on over to Theselby.com, his well-edited and superbly photographed homage to the people he finds interesting and the homes they create around themselves. Disinterested in the “rich and boring” and those who’ve paid professionals to create an instant existence, Selby seeks out creative types; artists, designers, intellectuals, writers and actors whose spaces tell their stories genuinely. And people seem to like it. Since its launch in 2008, the curated encyclopedia of hip living has exploded in popularity and inspired a book, The Selby Is in Your Place, packed with the same alluring cocktail of celeb fabulosity and eclectic design uploaded weekly at the site. The New York Times chronicled his process, which concludes with subjects completing a survey in marker that accompanies their moment. For a refreshing break from glossy design titles, The Selby is not to be missed. — Sarah C.

Last week The New York Times ran an interesting article about the changing landscape of home design as it relates to pets. While many of us stick to purchasing cute pet supplies and accessories, some pet owners are integrating design elements that cater to their pets as well as their aesthetic to create a happy environment for everyone under the same roof. From a custom staircase for cats to a secretary desk transformed into a feeding station, many of the featured projects provide chic solutions to common problems (where to place bowls so all pets aren’t eating the same food, how to conceal a litter box, etc). We never made any major renovations when our dog was alive, so we didn’t do much in the way of actively designing for him, but we did make certain changes (adding a custom cushion to his bed for weary bones, buying him a NAP blanket from Brookstone, showing him how to use a pull out stool so he could watch my mom make dinner) that made him feel like a part of the family. Do you design with your pets in mind? – Sarah C.

Photo by Ko Sasaki for The New York Times. View the full slideshow here.

We moved from NYC to a ‘burbs a couple of months ago, and though we are adjusting marvelously to our new life, we are missing a few of foodie treats from our old hood. One we thought would not be replaced: Our Monday morning visits to the famed Wafel and Dinges truck, for a crispy waffle drizzled in Spekuloos. What is Spekuloos, you ask? We are not sure ourselves, but the best way to describe it as a spread, similar to Nutella, that tastes like fresh cookies. Joy of joys, we learned that the magic stuff is now for sale at Arcadia NYC for $7 a jar. We recently ordered a trio of them, and have been spreading it around on English muffins, toast and frozen waffles. It makes everything taste like a graham cracker. Someday, we’ll step up our game and make our own waffles. First we may need to get one of these. Spread the love! — Angela M.

Leave it to Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak to create ads that were every bit as charming as their books. You can find the Dr. Seuss Narragansett Beer poster at Abebooks.com, as well as one he did for war bonds featuring the aptly named Squander Bug. There’s also one by Maurice Sendak that promotes Freedom to Read that has me singing “Chicken noodle soup with rice.” Don’t have $1500 lying around to spend on a poster by a favorite author? M+E has a new line of posters featuring homes of famous authors, including Poe, Emily Dickinson and Flannery O’Connor. — Sarah L.

It’s a three-in-one Real Life Test Kitchen day! Last Sunday, the lovely Mary T. and her sweet fella Dave allowed me to tag along with them for a day in the boonies picking blueberries. Blueberries have never been my favorite fruit, but tasting them there, straight from the bush, gave me a new found appreciation for them. As I tasted around finding the perfect bush to select my fruit, I kept noticing the savory flavor notes in them, things like black pepper, and a faint hint of an almost grassy green flavor. They really got the creative gears spinning in my brain. Yes, I’ll be baking desserts with my pail of blue booty, but the first thing I did was to make this salad. It’s a meal to itself, light yet satisfying — and FILLED with smoked salmon, goat cheese, sweet onions, roasted corn, pecans and oh yes, blueberries. And it’s tossed with a vibrant and flavorful blueberry lemon vinaigrette, which makes it even better. It was a hit in my house, and I’ll be making this over and over until the last of this season’s blues disappear. — Megan B. Click for Summer Salad with Smoked Salmon and Blueberry Lemon Vinaigrette! (more…)

Continuing the blueberry theme today is this magically delicious salsa! Because we were picking our own berries, we got a lot — we ended up with about ten pounds. So we decided to see how many recipes we could find. My husband found this one for blueberry salsa, and I confess I was thinking it would probably be one of those “interesting” recipes that you don’t rush to make again. How wrong I was! We gobbled down nearly the entire recipe on the first serving — that little dish in the photo is all that’s left! And we already went out and got ingredients to make more. It’s not very spicy (feel free to add a little more of that) but the combo of sweet pepper and pureed blueberries against the jalapeno and onion are salsa perfection. Not only that, but look how gorgeous those colors are! Make this one for your next patriotic get-together! — Mary T.

P.S. As suggested at MyRecipes, we served the salsa with Blueberry-Rum Marinated Pork Tederloin. That was ALSO fantastic. Unfortuantely, we ate it all before I got a picture!

It’s been in print since 1987, but I finally broke down and bought Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream & Dessert Book. And for good reason: I finally broke down and bought an ice cream maker! I’d been coveting one for a long time, and thanks to certain good friends with in-store discounts, I got a nice price on a bright red Cuisinart Frozen Yogurt, Ice Cream and Sorbet Maker. It just so happened that all of this coincided with a trip to go blueberry picking (In fact, fellow Shelterrific contributor Megan B. was on the same excursion, so this will be a very blueberry-centric day) so naturally I chose this recipe. The book notes that fresh-picked berries have the best flavor, and I can vouch for that. It’s probably a combo of the recipe and the new maker that lets me say that the flavor is terrific! No greasy mouth feel that made Megan unhappy when she was working with her Kitchen Aid attachment. My first ice cream-making experiment was not without drawbacks, however… Click for Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Wild Blueberry Ice Cream! (more…)