My eldest has a name that is rarely heard in Australia, we could go to Ireland and find ourselves overwhelmed with “Declan” merchandise, but we’re pretty much out of luck here. He treasures the facewasher and keyring that we’ve managed to pick up with his name on, but still scours gift shops and gets a little disappointed when his name isn’t there, it’s about ten times worse when he can find his brother’s name right off the bat. Growing up [...]

Penguin contacted me recently and asked if I would be interested in a quick book review and giveaway, never one to turn down new craft books, of course I jumped at the chance, and then roped my eldest, Declan, in to help with a child’s perspective. He didn’t so much jump at the chance, but groaned in a way that only a 4 year old who’s convinced he’s actually 14 could do. From the publisher: Little Things for Busy Hands [...]

I am in another one of my owl-y moods today, I’m feeding it by hunting for Owl inspired handicrafts on MadeIt.com.au. Here are a few of my favourites: Clockwise from top-left: Christopher Poker Broach by Osier – made using wood, a pokerchip, feathers and a hand drawn sketch, great for dressing up an outfit. Owl Headband by The Clip Cafe – a girls’ accessory that isn’t pink! I love this design, super cute and original. Sweet Little Owl Trio by [...]

I’m still trying to get used to having a Christmas in the heat instead of the snow (and by “snow” I actually mean grey Pommy drizzle) of the Northern hemisphere, and as such I tend to go a little bit over board at Christmas. I love decorating (with lots of snow themed decorations), shopping for everyone and the novelty that is having cold meat and salad for Christmas lunch in the baking sun before taking a dip in the pool. [...]

The final post in the Where The Wild Things are series before the giveaway on friday features some of the fab handcrafted items from Etsy that have been inspired by Maurice Sendak’s book. Elaine made this cute little monster pendant from sterling silver, it was created for a Canadian exhibition featuring work inspired by the book, and displayed with a matching Max in a terrarium. Munsters&Cupcakes features this awesome custom made Moishe hat, available in both child and adult sizes, [...]

Twitter seems to have infiltrated every single part of our lives, who’da thunk that we’d be working out how to condense each share-worthy (and some not so share-worthy!) moment of our life into 140 characters? No one could have imagined that the “Tw” prefix would be able to be applied to almost every word in the human vernacular, but somehow it did and we are a generation of Twits, or Twerps, or sometimes Twitterers. Whatever we are, the fabulous crafty [...]

One of the quilting forums I participate in recently had a discussion about fabric buying habits, primarily, how much is enough. Now we all know that you can never have a large enough stash, she (or he!) who dies with the biggest stash wins, but when buying pieces for that stash, how much do you go for? Personally, I feel I tend to err on the “not quite enough” side of the matter  (although my husband would probably disagree), if [...]

Anyone vaguely familiar with Ikea will probably be familiar with the KLIPPAN sofa, the absolute budget 2.5 seater that sells for $279 at the store. To celebrate 30 years of KLIPPAN Ikea has enlisted 30 Australian artists to design new slip covers for the sofa. The resulting pieces, featuring everything from industrial plastic meshing to granny square blankets found in op-shops, will be auctioned off with the proceeds going towards the Victorian Bushfire relief effort. Check out all of the [...]

Still without a laptop and sewing machine so this is just a quickie while I boot Daniel off his computer, on the upside because of all the spare time freed up by not reading all your blogs everyday I have achieved one of my goals for 2009 and have learned to knit! Anyway, Ethan got in touch with me to ask me to put the word out and see if anyone had any “Leonie Linen” in stone, Spotlight were selling [...]

This morning whilst wandering around the Lincraft website (yay for vouchers!) I stumbled on these, multifunction scissors. The blue ones include a retractable craft knife in one of the blades, the red ones include a tapemeasure snuck into the handles. I’m very torn on these, part of me is thinking that it’s an awesome multitasker that would make the folks over at Unclutterer proud, the other part of me thinks that, as someone who is notorious for forgetting where I [...]