House Blend

Get a little anxious without your iPhone? Find yourself exclaiming "There's an app for that!" at inopportune times? Bring your addiction into the non-virtual realm with magnets designed to look like the icons associated with iPhone Apps. Available in sets of 18, the colorful magnets are great for giving your fridge a high-tech update, adding geeky flair to a file cabinet, or spiffing up the real-life mailbox of your favorite Apple fan. Just be sure to keep them a safe distance from your prized gadgets, or things could get really sticky.

Sure, Crayolas rock, but the newest thing in crayons has a certain back-to-nature appeal. Meet Crayon Rocks, drawing tools that resemble richly hued stones. Designed to strengthen the tripod grip muscles to prepare young fingers and hands for handwriting, the chunky crayons are fast becoming a favorite with creative adults who like their wide, vibrant strokes (not to mention how good they look stacked in a glass jar on one's desk). Opt for a grab bag of 16 different colors of Crayon Rocks, which are made from domestically grown soybeans and colored with natural mineral powders, or splurge for the 64 pack.

Looking for some creative stimulation at your home or office—and a more interesting take on the typical wallcovering? Drop the Sudoku and try your hand at the "Wallpapergames" dreamed up by Paris-based design collective 5.5 Designers and produced in France by Lutece. The "Labyrinthe" design is a giant maze printed on a white background that invites colorful wayfinding. Grab some Sharpies and a few friends (select both the writing utensils and people with care), and soon you'll have created a unique pattern. The more verbally inclined can opt to cover the walls with a giant word search, but you might want to wait until they produce an English version. For now, all the hidden words are en français. Zut!

We love a beautiful book cover, but our conventional shelves are of little assistance in showing off our favorites. Enter designer Stephen Bretland, who created Picturebook, a simple wooden frame for holding and displaying a favorite book. It came to be after Bretland read a newspaper tribute to the work of graphic designer Germano Facetti, who helped to revolutionize book design in his post as art director at Penguin Books. Bretland began collecting Penguin titles with Facetti-designed covers (rarely paying more than a couple of dollars for each one). "A couple of months later I had 50 to 100 paperbacks with beautiful covers and no way to display them," he explains. "So I designed this product." Picturebook, which retails for around $20, is also open on the sides, adds Bretland, "so you can still read [the book] or swap it for another."

A mind-boggling 100 million pens are discarded each day, and so we're working to curb our enthusiasm for novel writing utensils. Keeping this Earth Day resolution is proving easier than expected thanks to the Seven Year Pen, a Swiss-made marvel that contains a jumbo ink cartridge. New York design company Seltzer Goods (which prides itself on eco-friendly materials, packaging, and production methods) promises that the pens, which it sells for $7.50 each, can write two meters a day for seven years. The hard part is choosing from among the seven offbeat colors and designs—including a baroque flourish, a lightning bolt, and a pair of Buddy Holly glasses—and then managing not to lose it.

We didn't think it was possible to improve upon the Post-It until we discovered Origami Sticky Notes. Designed by London-based Suck UK, they're identical to the 3M originals -- pastel yellow, three-inches square, and lined with adhesive -- with the addition of step-by-step graphical instructions on how to recycle any sticky note into one of ten origami creations, from a standard crane or frog to a lily or a bomb. In need of an origami tutor? The company's YouTube videos can guide you through the more complicated folds and provide encouragement to stick with it.