Are you ready Freddy? It’s almost Valentine’s Day and Freddy’s class is going to have a Valentine’s Day party. Everyone in the class needs to make sure to make enough Valentines to go around for the whole class so no one gets left out. But in Super-Secret Valentine by Abby Klein, Freddy wants to make a super special, one of a kind Valentine for his best friend, Jessie. All the kids in class, especially the class bully, Max already give him a hard time about his friendship with her so he has to try his best to keep his special Valentine’s Day project a secret.

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In book number two of The Jewel Fairies by Daisy Meadows, Kirsty and Rachel meet Emily the Emerald Fairy. The girls are at one of the biggest toy stores they have ever seen. Wall to wall with every toy they could possibly imagine, they wonder if they are going to meet any new fairies today or even find a missing jewel that Jack Frost has hidden in their world. The girls love helping the fairies from Fairyland and love that they have the coolest secret ever between them. They even get a laugh out of a fairy doll that they see in the toy store because to them, it looks nothing like a real fairy.

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Like most little girls, my daughter loves fairies and everything magical. While she still loves her “scary” books and mystery books like Nancy Drew and The Clue Crew, she has found a new series to fall into. Daisy Meadows has created a cute book series called The Jewel Fairies. They are all under 100 pages making them perfect chapter books for new readers such as my little girl. Kicking the series off are the Jewel Fairies and the first one we were able to read about (the first book in any series is almost NEVER available at the library, but we learn to deal) was Scarlett the Garnet Fairy.

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"Sending Jogger Coordinates..."

If the talking, seeing, all-knowing Sauron clothes weren’t enough, now we’ll have something else to contend with: Big Brother clothes.

Wal-Mart apparently isn’t happy with being the devil; now it has chosen to take the role of General Devil God. In other words, it will start inserting “smart tags” into its clothing sometime this month. These electronic tags will not be able to be turned off by buyers (though they can remove them) and they are, yes, trackable, meaning that Wal-Mart will now be tagging its victims like a wild animal species.

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I'd eagerly have to say for me, BOTH. I've always been one who chose fashion over function. I've even been known to walk around toting one bag INSIDE the other, simply because I didn't have time to change purses. In comes my new "purse methodology". I now change purses every Sunday evening. It allows me to make sure I'm constantly changing my purse look, and keeps my rotation of purses moving at the same time.How do you store your purses? I have an entire top rack of my wrap around walk in closet, especially used for my purse storage. They are arranged by size and color, I know, very OCD of me. I have my "special" purses stored in their original cloth purse bags, and my everyday purses are lined up like soldiers, all in a row. This system seems to be working out great for me and definitely keeps me organized!

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Recently I came across these super cool bath soaps in the shapes of various gemstones. Called soap rocks, they resemble real gem stones in such a likeness that you might swear they were the real thing. Best of all, most of the soap rocks I’ve read about are either completely or mostly all-natural, without harmful additives you’d normally find in commercial soaps.

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Stash-busting!  I like to say it with Jazz Hands!  Let's do it!

1.    Stripes
Got a bunch of single skeins of yarn where you need two skeins to make something?  Try stripes!  You can create a pretty great scarf by striping yarns of two different thicknesses, or the same yarn but in two different colors, or one boring yarn and one novelty yarn.  Same color, different color, same fiber, different fiber - the sky's the limit, here!


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I picked up a trio of ecologically-minded knitting books at the library, and this is definitely the weightiest of the bunch!  Seiff has obviously done her homework, and then some.  This is another knitting book that is more about knitting as a whole than it is a simple collection of patterns.  I love that!

Seiff digs down into what "sustainability" really means, the yarn carbon footprint, and even third and fourth level issues like which vegan yarns are best.  What she uncovers is - unsurprisingly - a lot of confusion and ambiguity, which is often muddled by a combination of good intentions and marketing spin.


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Are all knitters white?  No - but you'd never guess that by flipping through most knitting books.

My friends and fellow knitters, I have gathered you here today to talk about the preponderance of white people in knitting books.  Although knitting is a lifestyle (some might say "craft") which appeals to people of all ethnicities, the models photographed for knitting books are overwhelmingly white. 

You may wonder, is it right to judge whether someone is white or non-white based solely on their appearance in a photograph?  It is not.  In fact, that's really rude.  

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Up until very recently, I joined my yarn the way that A) you're never supposed to, and B) a LOT of knitters do.  Which is that I tied the new end to the old in a square knot, and later came back to weave in the ends.  

NO KNOTS!  That's what all the books tell you.  Tying your yarn ends together is like using scissors on origami: a complete sacrilege.

There are a lot of ways to join yarn.  I should emphasize that knotting at the join isn't "wrong."  If anything, knotting your ends together is a perfectly understandable expression of needless anxiety.  After all, even the slipperiest yarn will hold together if you settle the join properly.  There is really no need to knot it together!  


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