Graffiti for home

We lived in downtown Ottawa for a few years before we moved out into the suburbs. It was great for us as a carefree couple who liked to dine out, enjoy a show or stroll along the canal in the evenings. Oh how life has changed with a toddler! But I digress... I was trying to get to the point about how I enjoyed living downtown when we did, except for one thing -- the graffiti.

I appreciate art in its many forms -- even unsolicited urban murals, because often, they're quite striking and an excellent example of modern art in its most raw form. I just feel bad for the business owner (or worse, home-owner) whose building it might be. I really have no respect for ugly tags though. I mean, it took me a while to learn how to successfully wield a spray bomb, but it's doable, and if that's your 'art', you should at least learn to do it well. (The whole spray can experience comes from having to make my own product models, I swear).

In any case, for anyone who wants to practice their graffiti style without causing property damage, check this out:



Those are pages from the Street Art Coloring Book. We actually found this in a bricks & mortar store while shopping today, but I was able to source the same book at modern tots for $15US. And now that I've found that store, I believe I'll have to do some shopping for my own little graffiti monster...

Win a foliage necklace

If you like our foliage necklaces, you can try your luck at winning one at Cool Mom Picks. See their posting on our necklaces for details on how to enter the contest. It's TODAY ONLY, as it closes at Midnight (EST) tonight.

The prize is the necklace of your choice including this pretty butterfly delphinium necklace:


If you're looking for a hint for their skill-testing question, maybe you should check out our 'about' page. ;)

We're in the Modish gift guide!

Okay, so every year it seems as though the Christmas decorations come out sooner than the previous year and now they're out even before the Hallowe'en costumes are put on clearance.

However, in the defence of the small indie business, we have to start thinking about the holidays earlier since there's no off-shore factory churning out our goods. That being said, this year, why not support the little guy and shop indie!

Indie businesses are usually one- or two-person (in our case) businesses that put all their creativity, love and enthusiasm into the selection of products that you see on their site. If they're anything like us, everything from the original sketch to the manufacturing to finally the photographs of the product, are made by the people who just 'run the store'.

A great source of other indie businesses this year is the Modish gift guide, assembled by Jena Coray of the blog Modish.


See the guide here. There are categories for her, him, teens, babies, eco-friendly gifts and more.

Happy shopping!

Foliage!

What better to do on a lovely Friday night than to update the site, I say! See the prettiness that are the new round 'foliage' necklaces:

This is the geranium leaf:



And here's the coral bells:


I've just put up those and eleven other foliage necklaces. Expect a few more in the coming weeks though, as we'll be adding new ones whenever we get the chance!

When pigs fly

A while back, someone (my better half, maybe?) introduced me to the Flying Pig company, because they obviously knew that I have this fascination for paper engineering in its many forms (elaborate origami, pop-up books, whathaveyou).

I just love the idea that something that comes as a 2-D form can be manipulated into something almost magically 3-D.
The Flying Pig makes these wonderful paper animation kits that are "paper models you make that move."

And they do have some pretty elaborate and whimsical models. Of them all, my favourites include their namesake 'Flying Pig':



and the 'T Rex':


Make sure to check out their page of free downloadable kits too. They're FREE! (I downloaded one, but I haven't had the time yet to actually assemble it).

... problems solved.

Well, whatever it was that was going on with PayPal (I think it has to do with various site updates, and they're not at liberty to tell their lowly customers that it might affect service...), it seems to have been fixed.

It appears we can now process payments through PayPal once again.

And now that that's solved, we're going to prepare for our upcoming sale. :)
Now that we have the awesome ability to do coupon codes, we'll be having a coupon code in the next newsletter, that will be coming out within the next week.

To be part of that fun, just make sure you're signed up to receive our newsletters (which you can do here).

*sigh*

*UPDATE on October 6, 2007*: Okay, so we still can't process payments through the website, which is more than a little annoying, but we are able to send out PayPal invoices for the orders, and payments to the invoices are being processed. So that's a small victory. Now if only we can sort out the rest of our PayPal woes.

We've got a little bit of a site issue thanks to PayPal. :/
It seems that PayPal.com is not working to it's full capacity and while it seems that I can actually log-in now (where I couldn't even do that earlier...), no payments seem to be making it through. We'll still be able to receive your orders, but we won't be able to process payments until PayPal gets their act together.

Today was supposed to be a good day since, if you've gone to our site, we've gotten a big update thanks to Aeolidia Design! (Shoshanna has been awesome to work with! And Arianne too!) So if you're looking for some people who know their way around a shopping cart, I highly recommend them.

If you look around the site, you'll notice that we've restocked our ever-popular ox bone pendants. Even more exciting than that is we've added these spiffy new round necklace designs:


and with the help of a handy-dandy laser-cutter, we've now got these pretty laser-cut paper goods:


So happy surfing around our new site and think happy thoughts for us that PayPal will be up and running for us again soon.