Celebrating Advent

Three days into December and I'm not doing great with the whole 'remembering the reason for the season' thing. I'm pretty sure my face was not the picture of peace and joy during another Christmas Concert rehearsal. Take a deep breath Erin, and remember it is not the end of the world if not everyone does the actions perfectly.

Anyway, at least 2 other people had a similar idea to me with celebrating this time of the year. I thought I'd let you know about 2 blogs I am following as they write daily about Advent.

Rare and Beautiful Treasures

and

The Advent Project

Enjoy :)

Pintrest

Who else has discovered Pintrest? I love it :)

It's similar to tumblr, but I never understood that, this is better. I 'get' Pintrest; it taps into two things I love - visual organisation.
You create boards which you then 'pin' pictures to from the net.

I use it as a mix of storing pictures I love (with the reference!);

From my Portrait Board

as a scrapbook of ideas I want to keep track of (mainly lesson ideas or tutorials);

From my Classroom Ideas Board

And as a bookmark keeper (becasue I have a huge folder full of bookmarks that I can't remember what they are - I need the visual reminder, lol).

From my It's all About the Hair Board

I'm on Pintrest as FrangipaniDream (because PurpleFrangipani was just 1 character too long!). To make your own boards you need an 'invite', if you're dying for one (I went on the waiting list but gave up and luckly Joshua's fiance had a spare one she gave me) I have a couple left so let me know if you want one :)

The gift that keeps on giving

It's that time of year ago; Christmas. I love Christmas, but I don't love shopping for presents. Besides the whole actually shopping thing (which I have never really enjoyed), trying to find the perfect gift for people I care deeply about is stressful.

This year I have the added worry of working and trying to find a time I can actually get to the shops. So I decided to try online. Once I started looking around I decided that I wanted all my gifts to be either handmade or fair trade. So far all but one of my gifts are unique fair trade/handmade.

I can't show what I have bought because that would spoil the surprise for some people :). But I wanted to share some of the places I have been looking for gifts.

Tribe and Nation; I found out about this store from Pulse, the NSW Presbyterian magazine. They have a small range of products - but it's different things from alot of the other fair trade online stores I was looking at. I especially liked that they have a little blurb about the organisations that are supported when you buy specific items.



This shirt sums up my feelings about shopping centres exactly.



New Internationalist; this is a store linked to a magazine I heard about from TEAR, which has the really useful gift shop that I've written about before. It's great if the people you buy for are into an actual present - rather than a card signifying a donation. They have a great range and also a whole heap of books and clothing which is about raising awareness of fair trade/ethical consumerism.

Oxfam; I love the actual store - great fun to walk through. Most of their stuff is also online.



This is one of my favourites at the moment.

 Etsy; While not exactly fair trade, most things on Etsy are handmade and totally unique. I especially love browsing their silver jewellery.   Because it's a range of smaller stores it can be a little confusing if you're not internet savvy and it can take a bit of searching to find exactly what you're after, but there are some really gorgeous stuff in there. (And it has changed a bit since I last was on there - finally Etsy shows the price in currencies other than USD!)

Early Childhood Fun

I have been enjoying the fun of the Play Link up at Childhood 101. Though it I have discovered many wonderful new blogs, especially those by teachers of preschool. I thought I would share a few of my favourites.

Irresistible Ideas for Play Based Learning is absolutely wonderful. Sherry and Donna are preschool teachers in Melbourne  - This is the type of preschool I want to be in. They have so many wonderful ideas for different set ups for play, and are so open to the children taking an idea and expanding, changing and enlarging it. I have already bookmarked about half of their blog as inspiration for when I have a class of my own.

Check out their water wall or maybe try making a paper bag art installation. I could go on all day - just go have a look.

This is their music frame - so cool.

Another fun site is Let the Children Play, Jenny is a teacher at a progressive preschool. While she shows alot of the traditional preschool activities, my favourites are to do with outside play in the bush they have access to a creek and bushland - imagine! I'm all for going outside, play in nature. I especially like the use of natural materials as play objects. What is makes this preschool different to others? You can find out a bit more in this post. 

And this little gem was passed onto me by Megan. While not a preschool site I had to share this blog of a Dad with his toddlers and the toys he makes them. The paper city is especially nice.

Write

I think it's interesting that the week before last I sat down and wrote, and then scheduled all the posts for last week.

Because last week was a write off. A week that reminded me of a time that I thought I was stronger than.

But one highlight was that i finally received my copy of the Kid's Edition of MixTape. The reason it was a highlight? I have my first published article in it! Okay, so it's a very small article (about creativity and children). But it's an article none the less, somewhere other than this blog :).

Here's to creativity, writing and a better week :)

Finders Keepers

Tonight we went off to Finders Keepers market. It's an annual designers market I kept meaning to go and check it out. And when Joshua's friend had a stall it was the perfect excuse.

Lots of gorgeous stuff to look at. A creative girl's dream.

One of my favourites was a stationary/card business called We Are Messengers. The cards have a clean design, and have many nice sentiments that I was delighted to recognise.

If you have the chance, go over to Finders keepers - you won't be disappointed.

My Sewing Circle

My Internet time lately has been taken up by this very cool site - My Sewing Circle. Basically it's like ravelry for sewers - you can add your projects, look at patterns and see what other people are making and comment on it.

It's still in it's early stages, but looks very cool. The Aussie sewing/craft online community seems to have taken to it, lots of the women whose blogs I read are on there. I think it's also a nice place to have all your projects in a nice neat file (rather than photos all over my computer as mine is now), and you can add any notes you want to remember about the pattern.

If you're interested, sign up for an account (it's free) and add me as a friend; I'm Purple Frangipani - of course :).

"It works for me"

I had an hour commute to prac each way, as much as I'm enjoying the extra time to do things, I do miss being forced to sit and stop for the time each day. I can't read or do work on the train (because of a rather weak stomach), so I listened to bits and pieces on my ipod - among music and my talking Bible I discovered pod casts.

My favourite was CraftSanity, a show which interviews different artisans and crafters. Many of them were really interesting, and inspiring. Some of my favourites are interviews with Amanda Soule, Anna Maria Horner, and the Beerhost Family.

It was through CraftSanily that I discovered Mohops, because of an interview with Annie Mohaupt who makes them.


Check out these shoes, they are so cool! They have a hand carved wooden sole and little straps along the side that you thread ribbon through to create the top of the shoe. You can interchange the ribbons and tie them in different ways to create all different types of styles.

They even make a thong version which I think is genius because I live in thongs (flip flops) about 10 months of the year, and could mix and match the ribbons to match my clothes. I'm so ready to start cutting up some of my own shoes and seeing if I can convert them to a similar style . . .

Baby Names

Names fascinate me. I love names which mean something. I love names which have a rhythm to them, or have a unique sound to them.

Dad found a great site which he passed onto me. Its with the bureau of statistics, and has the data of all the names which children born in NSW (Australia) have been given over the last 100 years.

We don't always think of names having trends, or fashions, but they do - you just type in a name into this page and it shows how many children a year were call that name. Take Erin for instance. It was unheard of before the 1960's and spiked in the 1980's (Hmm, that decade sounds familiar . . . ). It's interesting trying to work out what might have started a certian name being popular.

Check it out, it's lots of fun.

You may have already found these

Just wanted to share with you 2 sites that I have come across recently and absolutely love.


First up, librivox.org. Generally books that were published more than 95 years ago or whose author has been deceased for 70 or more years are in the public domain. This means that there is no copyright on them and they can be reproduced without permission. Librivox does free recordings of public domain books so you can download a free (really-truely FREE) audio file of that book (and don't have to worry about copyright or breaking the law).

They are all read by volunteers so I can't vouch for the quality of all the recordings, I have just finished listening to this copy of Pride and Prejudice which I enjoyed immensely (besides the obvious American accent. I always feel that Jane Austen should be read in the most proper English accent. And it's pronounced Bhing-leigh, not Bing-Lee, but as I said, it's free so I won't complain).

There are many other classics on there. I'm considering volunteering to read Seven Little Australians (So it's read in an Australian accent -grin-).



The other find is sewmamasew.com. Its basically a sewing blog attached to a fabric store; at the moment they are doing 30 days of hand made gifts. So every day of November they have searched the blogosphere to find great sewing tutorials for us to try. There's also older articles about girls and boys clothes. My list of things I want to sew has quadrupled since I discovered this site. I just finished a bag like these ones from a tutorial I found on the day they had purse/bag tutorials.


Go over and poke around, I grantee you'll be inspired.