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Sunday, July 30, 2017

Five Years of Customized Creations for DIFFA's Picnic by Design: Michele Alfano Design

Credit: Erik Bardin of Picnic By Design Rooftop


Design, Food and Charity is a great combination for a fall event. It will be my sixth year participating in DIFFA's Picnic By Design! This event rocks .... amazing sponsors, designers and creativity! Picnic By Design redefines the concept of a traditional picnic where 20 designers come together to create innovative picnic basket experiences that are on auction at the event with all the proceeds benefiting DIFFA's grants for organizations fightng HIV/AIDS across the country. The twenty original basket designs will be on display alongside the New York City skyline. Lots of creative candy for the eyes.  Guests who purchase a basket will bring home one-of-a-kind baskets created with love...





Wednesday, September 6, 2017 6:00-9:00pm

ROOFTOP @ STAGE 48
605 W 48TH ST NEW YORK, NY

Purchase your TICKET 


Designers will be sharing their designs on DIFFA's SOCIAL:

Hashtag: #PicnicByDesign #PicnicWithDIFFA 

I will be posting on my social too ( Instagram and Facebook):
 Michele Alfano Design @michelealfanodesign and Twitter @moddesignguru



Join me 
down memory lane 
for what I thunked up 
the past five years:


PICNIC BY DESIGN 2012: 


In 2012, the designers were given existing bags that we had to reconstruct. The sculptures of Richard Serra inspired the design of my 2012 basket with plumbing wrap and electrical wire from the Home Depot. I felt like I was on one of those TV shows shopping in the Depot.




Dwanye Clark and Bob Gaynor purchased my bag!!




PICNIC BY DESIGN 2013: 

With all the amazing work DIFFA does in promoting life and caring for those living with AIDS, Michele Alfano's picnic design is based on the pure elements of LIFE: air, fire, earth and water. Each essential LIFE element is embedded into the picnic experience:







PICNIC BY DESIGN 2014: 
Farm-chic represents the wheelbarrow to table/picnic experience.  The mood will be set with reclaimed oak, sponsor Robert Allen fabrics and firefly LED lighting. 






PICNIC BY DESIGN 2015: 

 The basket transformed into a boom-box...aka The Basket of Beats




Tiago Fonseca of Five Star Millwork and Michele Alfano

Tiago Fonseca of Five Star Millwork , Cindy Allen, Editor of Interior Design Magazine and Michele Alfano



PICNIC BY DESIGN 2016:
 The basket was the shape of a molecule and its contents had a cosmos feel. Astronomers and researchers are looking for answers from the universe beyond and for the cure of AIDS. The molecule stands as a beacon of hope!






Michele Alfano and Tiago Fonseca of Five Star Millwork . Thank you Tiago, you make all my ideas come to life. You are the best partner in crime! xo


THANKYOU to all the sponsors for this years Picnic by Design 2017 coming up soon!! Without your support, this event is not possible!! 







Stay tuned for my 2017 creation this year!
Sneek peeks will be on my instagram @michelealfanodesign 
and
 DIFFA instagram @DIFFANational




Saturday, July 29, 2017

Photobucket Holds my Images Ransom

I usually do not use my blog Mod Design Guru as a forum to rant and rave but in this case I am pissed! Today I woke up with a rude awakening as Photobucket decided to block my images on my website from being displayed. 




For six years now, I have used Photobucket to change any image into a HTML format inorder to embed the image into my site. Now I have black blocks all over my site. It reads: Please update your account to enable 3rd party hosting. For important info, please go to www.photobucket.com/500. I started to erase all of these blocked images off my side bar and then realized all of my pull down menus have the blocked images too. Ugghhhh! Ofcourse they do because I created libraries of all of my six years of posts with an image I created from Photobucket. Seriously this is very sad...




The only good news is that the images are not totally gone. They are still hosted on Photobucket- right click to open them up. But really? You know how many freakin images I have? What a pain in my ass it will be to recover each one and recreate a new HTML! 

Basically to avoid all of this work and to get the images to show again, I will have to upgrade to their new P500 plan for $399.00 per year. Are they insane? No credible storage service charges that much and their lack of features compared to other sites does not justify the premium cost. So, Yeah, no thankyou Photobucket, I am not paying the ransom!

Now I will use Postimages or Smugmug! So I recommend you do the same!!