Adorable Fair-Trade Coffee Mugs

We just found the cutest good morning coffee mugs! These colorful animal mugs ($10) were intended for children, but they're good enough for adults too. From the fair-trade supporters Wedge Worldwide Coop, these cheerful animal finds were made in Japan. We think they'd make a great companion to any morning latte. And they're microwave and dishwasher safe.

Alien Finds and Indie Designs

Today’s roundup of fashion is out of this world. We’ve picked out a collection of great guys t-shirts good enough for humans or humanoids. Each of these shirts is screenprinted by hand on American Apparel shirts. We picked out t-shirts with the best designs from indie fashion friendlies. Each is a stylish, snug-fitting, rocker-esque tee. Soft and durable, these sweatshop-free shirts are stellar: We’ve chosen the best intergalactic designs to liven up your time on terra firma.

Men to the Future Rocket Ship T-Shirt ($18) by Soft Mechanics


Invasion Space Invaders T-Shirt ($20) by Nerdy Shirts


Telescope Diagram T-Shirt ($24) by Slow Shirts


Sightings T-Shirt ($20) by Spread Shirts

Tired of Designer? Invest in a Cruelty-Free Fashion

For most people, veganism is probably associated with food and diet. But for true vegans, this is a lifestyle that extends beyond the kitchen. While making an effort to eat a plant-based diet and purchase products that weren’t tested on animals, vegans also try to steer away from clothing and accessories made from animal fur and leather. In the past, it has been difficult to stay stylish while living the vegan life. But the trends are changing. As more people pledge themselves to responsible eco-friendly lifestyles, fashionable products that you can feel good about are on the rise. We can all appreciate cruelty-free purses that weren’t tested on animals and aren’t made from our furry friends. And now with these stylish finds by Cleo Roos you can look good while feeling great!
If you’re not familiar with the Cleo Roos line, check out these fashionable alternatives of what you can wear and still care. All shoes, wallets, handbags, and clutches are made with faux fur or leather.

The Cleo Roos Blue-Green clutch ($60) is small yet functional, made from soft faux leather. It has a removable shoulder strap and magnetic snap closures. For a bigger carryall, check out the matching hobo bag ($85) with a fully lined-interior enclosure and side pockets for easy access to your cell or ipod.

To stick with the blue-green theme, coordinate with the matching wallet($40). Featuring 11 card slots and a soft leather feel, you can’t go wrong with these cruelty-free products. For more coordination options, try other purses and accessories in brown, bronze, silver, and black. You can find these products and more at Vegan Unlimited.

Nerdy Shirts Coupon Code

Right now, you can save 10% on any purchase at Nerdy Shirts. Through the end of August, enter the coupon code NERDYTEN to get 10% off anything in their entire store. This is Nerdy Shirts' first ever coupon code. They have a great selection of funny, retro, and just plain strange t-shirts. With great designs printed on American Apparel shirts, we've featured them before.

Decorate Your Home with Ocean Objects

Your beachside finds don't have to stay stowed away in the garage all winter or tossed out back like the remnants of a summer sandbox. Even if you don't live in a cozy ocean cottage, the shells, rocks, and other great treasures from your summer sea vacation will get added life as objects of decor. Use these tips as inspiration for incorporating shells and sea glass into your home.
1) The top of this bookcase has an array of white framed photos. Large white shells add an organic element to more simplistic modern furniture. Displayed on a shelf above, the repetition of the four shells in a row balances the asymmetry of the different sized picture frames below. Arranged with the pictures are an off-white candle under a glass ornament and two handmade sea urchin candlesticks.
2) Have you collected any beautiful sea glass along the beach? These polished shards in blue, green, white, and brown are arranged around the base of a turquoise candle – very similar in color to the Mediterranean. They will catch the natural sunlight coming in near a door or window. The rest of your shells and rocks can be arranged in a decorative bowl. Prominent pieces like sand dollars and sea stars can be mixed with smaller broken shells, agates, and palm-sized bits of driftwood. These pieces are arranged with Franciscan Ware pottery to reflect the blues and greens of the sea glass.
DIY Sea Urchin Candlesticks: Whole sea urchin skeletons are a superb find! If you're lucky enough to come across some of these, save them. The skeleton shell has a hole on either side. The smaller upper hole is just the right size to fit the base of a tapered candle. If you have two sea urchin skeletons, stack them so that the smaller one rests securely on top, and attach the two with hot glue. A small tile or square piece of wood painted to match your interior can be used for the base and will help keep the stacked shells steady. Use more hot glue to anchor the bottom skeleton to the base. When the tapered candles are lit, the melted wax will add to the decoration and the natural beauty.

Handmade Sea Essence Jewelry

September may be right around the corner, but that doesn’t mean summer is out of style. These pieces of jewelry carry the colors and essence of all your summer sea-scapades, just right for wearing back at school or to the office. The blues and greens are a mood-lifting reminder of relaxing summer vacations, and they integrate perfectly with the deep chocolate brown and tan hues in your fall wardrobe. Check out these handmade designs for a great new jewelry find.

Mediterranean Sea Pearl Bracelet $80
This handmade bracelet by Shukai Studio is designed with a cluster of semi-precious stones and crystals, including green and blue fresh water pearls, c pearls, crystal nuggets, and woven sequence beads. Each is in shades of sea blue and green, they’re layered on non-allergic chains.

Mermaid and Sea Foam Necklace $75
More elegant than a flow of seaweed, this necklace is a tangled mass of metal strands studded with pearls and glass beads. Amanda at EbbandFlow has hammered silver spirals and interwoven them with copper wire strands, blue and green glass beads, and rice pearls. This sparkling necklace has a pearl focal bead.

Recycled Dangle Necklace $16
This piece is made of recycled bits of broken jewelry, including a gold electro plated shell, a seashell charm, cultured pearls, and sea blue glass beads. This drop necklace by Lynette April shows how beautiful recycled jewelry can be.
For more ocean-inspired creations, check out Sea Glass Jewelry.

Distruk Gets a Facelift

before

Notice something different? Here at distruk we needed a little room to grow. So we did! We believe in great design, and great design should be easy to use. We support the innovation of art and design by others and believe in doing the same ourselves. We've tweaked a few things in our blog to make them better for us, and hopefully they will be better for you as well. We'll continue to update and innovate in the future. We hope that you grow with us! Enjoy!

after

DIY T-Shirt Design #2

This do-it-yourself shirt redesign is great rehab for an old tee that's too big or loose to wear on a regular basis. The resulting design is simple and feminine.
Materials: 1 short sleeve recycled t-shirt, scissors, needle & thread

DIY: I used a too-big white t-shirt and then dyed it a neutral tan color using tea. (You can do the same by brewing a half gallon of strong tea - black works well - and then soaking your shirt for 20 minutes or more in the mixture. You can change the color of the shirt by changing what kind of tea you use, but in all cases, the longer you steep your shirt, the stronger the color). With your (dry) t-shirt laying flat on a table cut off the edge of the sleeves working at a downward angle from the armpit down and out to the edge of the top of the sleeve. With a cut like this, the sleeves should be longer on top than underneath. Next, cut out the neck along the shoulder seam to make the opening slightly larger. Then from the center of the neck use a running stitch to loosely stitch 6 inches down the center of the shirt. Pull your thread tight from the bottom to gather the fabric at the bust. Tie the thread off tightly to hold the gather, and you're set!
For more great designs, check out DIY T-Shirt Design #3 and DIY T-Shirt Design #1.

Illustrations We Love at BoyGirlParty

We've found an adorable new artist in the Susie Ghahremani, a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design and creator of BoyGirlParty. Her little creatures are sweet and innocent like children's storybook illustrations. Susie's work is simple and pleasing, with little details and patterns in the designs that draw largely from the arena of wildlife animals and nature. She offers a variety of colorful drawings in the form of memo pads, stationary, buttons, and t-shirts.

As a self-coined illustrator, stuff-maker, and musician, Susie describes a BoyGirlParty as "the first party you go to as an adolescent that has all sorts of kids at it (girls and boys) that you're not used to playing with, It's exciting and strange. Maybe you play spin-the-bottle. The term, to me, is loaded with all different kinds of child-like wonderment and energy." Check out these great examples of her work, all copyright Susie Gharemani. If you want more, visit her shop to buy your own little bit of BoyGirlParty, or if you're in the New York area, Susie has a solo show "Teacher's Pets" going on now until September 12th. Check it out at the Giant Robot Gallery, 437 East 9th Street, New York, New York 10009.

Underwear Can Care

I just came across a post on the Alternative Consumer blog that is much more relevant to humanity than any fashion review or haute couture event. As someone with friends and mentors who work in Kenya and other parts of Africa to support women’s rights and education and to bring resources to AIDS orphans, I fully support the motivation behind Panty Line Productions. After spending time in Kenya to teach anti-violence and HIV/AIDS prevention, Jen is saving the world from the bottom up. Literally.
She hand screen prints underwear with quirky expressions and is sending 20% of the proceeds to Dolphin Anti-Rape and AIDS Control Outreach. Working through Dolphin, Jen’s mentors and other volunteers travel through Kenya to teach HIV prevention and non-violence techniques to different communities. Back in the U.S., Jen is screen printing American Apparel underwear and sending 20% of the profits to support Dolphin. Check out Jen’s blog to learn more about Dolphin’s work with children in Kenya. If you want to put your assets to good use, check out a pair of Panty Line Productions’ undies for $12. The American Apparel underwear styles tend to run small, so order a size larger than normal. For more, check out PLP online or at Etsy.

Shop Sustainable at Beklina's Sale

Beklina - the online fashion boutique featuring green fashion greats like Stewart + Brown, ParkVogel, Edun, and Prairie Underground - is having a sale to make room for fall's upcoming arrivals.
Most women's items are 35% off, and there's no shipping!

Based in Northern California, Beklina features the best in sustainable style, choosing products for their comfort as much as their appearance. A great place online to shop organic, they carry designs from some of the most popular eco-designers around.
Each of the products Beklina sells is either fair trade or made in the United States. Check out these great summer sale products for your comfort wear.

Summer Sale at Ecoist

There's a special summer sale going on right now at Ecoist. You can save up to 50% on their handmade clutches, purses, and coin wallets, and shipping is free on purchases over $100! The summer sale only lasts until August 31st, so check out Ecoist now. This creative company sells eco-friendly accessories made from recycled candy wrappers. Where else can you buy a purse made from soda can tabs, a clutch made from Luna Bar wrappers, and a bag made from gum wrappers? At Ecoist, style comes first, and all products are made to be socially and environmentally responsible. If you're ready to celebrate design and save the earth, check out this great sale!

Cutesy Little Designs

Because every day needs a little bit of spunk, we’ve picked out our favorite oddities of the moment to share. Functional or not, there’s no reason design shouldn’t make you smile once in awhile. Here are our top four cutesies of the moment.
Cutesy 1) Emotibles has the most unique iPod accessory we’ve seen so far. These little doohickies look like a caps key crossed with a bag of tropical Skittles. Do they have a function? Sure they do (if fashion accessory counts as a function). They’re Emotibuds, plastic charms that grip your iPod headphones. At $4 a pair, they come in a huge array of stylish colors, and each one has a strange little face based on emoticons. With names like Frisky, Starry-eyed, Brilliant, and Befuddled, there are at least 16 little personalities to jazz up your pod. Also at Emotibles, check out the tees, free wallpaper, and custom ichat avatars.

Cutesy 2) If you ever thought geeks have no style, you’ve obviously never seen Mimo Bots. Perhaps marketed towards those of us who can’t live without storage sticks or perhaps geared towards those who just like nifty looking gagets (USB what?), the Mimo Bot has more personality than anything you’ve ever plugged in. Designed by toy studio vs consumer electronics brand Mimoco, these are USB flash drives with soul and style. The Mimo Bots run the full gamut from fairy to monster, depending on what mood your electronics normally take. Data storage has never had such attitude.
Cutesy 3) This might be the least functional of the batch, but who could resist? It’s Mr Tofu Robot! Apparently served fresh in a sealed package, Mr Tofu Robot comes from a favorite store of ours, Spicy Brown. Although we primarily like Spicy for their apparel, if you’re in the market for tofu gone gizmo, they’ve got you covered.
Cutesy 4) And finally, if you don’t Google, you should. Yes, iGoogle. The web dominators have several options for those search savvy followers who may get bored with the monotony of white day after day. We like the seasonal theme for our iGoogle. If office work has you down, give it a try. Functional? Yes. Efficient? Not so much. Office work is now more distracting than ever with customizable news bars, tips, horoscopes, and jokes. However, short of a coffee break, that may be exactly what you need.

Sassy Finds from Solsis Designs

We have loved Solsis Designs ever since we first discovered the little fashion line several years ago. Since we’re forever envious of the bright colorful clothing, it seemed appropriate to highlight this unique designer while the weather’s still hot and the beaches are cool. Solsis Designs are inspired by the spirit, movement, and energy of life. Each item of clothing is unique and handcrafted for the woman with an active sexy lifestyle.

Solsis brings the Brazilian beat to her creations, incorporating the world of dance, rhythm, and laughter into her work. Each item is free flowing, perfect for hot nights in the dance club or long days at the oceanside. Colorful and creative, these pieces are surefire headturners.
Pictured here are the best-selling New Orleans Crescent Dress ($78) and the Yemanja Blouse ($62). The dress, shown in two different fabric swatches, is a limited edition and a very popular style. The high waist gives the dress a slimming effect and the fabric is stretchy enough to hug all your curves in just the right way. The blouse is a new design brought back from Brazil and inspired by the funky seaside culture. Check out other styles at Solsis Designs.

The Orchid Handmade or Fair Trade

The orchid always adds an element of the exotic to any room. Elegant and graceful, these flowers are an excellent decoration for a living room, bedroom, or office space, especially if you want to bring a little paradise and tranquility to your hectic daily life. Delicate and beautiful, the flowers come in many astounding colors. Capture the essence of the orchid’s beauty with these great finds.
Alicia Brock has a lovely baby blue orchid photo. The first print in her “Through the Viewfinder” series, this piece is $30.Moondrop Clothiers has a 22K gold necklace handcrafted in Thailand by Danai Leosawathiphong. This piece of fair trade jewelry is a real Dendrobium orchid preserved in the gold plate and sells for $34.99.
Hanami also offers a pink Cattelya orchid necklace, mounted on a suede cord with glass beads for $63.
The Cattleya was captured in print by Mark Mittleman. This print of a Black Momilani Rainbow orchid is $15.

Purple Passion: This Fall's Top Color

As a color once reserved only for the rich and powerful, purple has again hit it big in the fashion world. A regular favorite in the fall season color lineup, purple has been plucked out as the “it” hue for this fall’s fashion trends. The rich, deep, plume shade has always been a hit when crisper weather arrives. Purple integrates well with earth tones, shades of brown, and a more neutral schema. Plum, dusky lavender, and deep wine shades look bold but not glaring when integrated with dark denim, black, burgundy, and chocolate brown. When shopping for the perfect piece, be sure to choose an article of clothing with rich undertones, like a deep velvet violet or a shade of rich purple wine.

These go best with an understated palette and can be combined with other shades like mustard, ochre, or dusky cobalt for an exciting color combination. As a jewel tone, purple is an excellent choice for eveningwear or accessories. Look for brighter shoes, shiny purses, and sequin tops for a night out and about. For more help coordinating colors, check out this season's color chart

Purple is a creative color, and because it was so expensive to come by (in the ancient times, purple dye came from a mollusk), purple is known throughout art and history as the color most associated with kings, emperors, and wisemen. Check out these indie designers for more fashion inspiration.

Empire Gown by AngelRox at Unsung Designers $228
Old Friends hand screen printed top from Little by Jenny $34
Georgette Top by Scott Gibson N.Y.C. at Unsung Designers $220
Purple Marsh T-Shirt by The Red Prairie Press $25
Flashdance Top by Robot Arms at Unsung Designers $60

Go Global! Nomad Fashion from Independent Designers

Feeling inspired by this fall’s nomad fashion trend? Ready to wear some bold ethnic prints, layered textures, and free flowing fabrics? If you like the eclectic and adventurous look of this season’s global fashion exchange but don’t want to pay top dollars for the premium designer brand, check out works by these independent designers.

Venni Caprice offers custom handmade-to-order pieces based on her red carpet designs. This empire waist dress features a tribal African design and her batik dress is just right for fading from summer into fall. For more information, check out her Etsy store or her blog.

There’s a summer sale going on right now at Asian iCandy, an online boutique store offering Asian ethnic inspired fashion from artists worldwide. The shop offers authentic and unique apparel and gifts for those who would like to blend a little Asian inspiration into their day. Also on Etsy, check out the wide leg linen Capri pants for easy movement in an earthy brick red color or the all-natural linen mermaid skirt for a free flowing bottom with a bold decorative pattern.