Do you live in Seattle and still need to get some Christmas shopping done but dread having to resort to a mall and push your way through all those sober people? Then consider the
Drunk Shopping Event in Ballard! tonight from 7 to 9 p.m. From Yelp:
Here is your exclusive invitation to shop the painless way - After hours with friends and a bit o' booze. It's not shopping, it's Yelp Shopping!
Start out with some great savings at Dish D'Lish where you can receive 20% off merchandise and treat yourself to a hot buttered rum. This is the first stop so sign in and receive your name tag to take advantage of exclusive discounts and deals at the select Ballard Avenue Stores which will be staying open late just for Yelpers. Then, let the partying...uhhh gift giving begin!
How perfect! Drunk shopping and then you can finish the week with a meal at Hattie's Hat or The People's Pub.
What's the funniest audio album you've heard lately that I can give as a gift? at Ask Metafilter
What is the best low maintenance, high gas mileage, low cost car I can buy (new or used) on a limited budget? at Ask Metafilter
PurseGuard Ultra, not only does it hang your purse from the edge of a table, it sounds an alarm if someone removes it, good in a crowded restaurant. at Chow
Slate's guide to overlooked Christmas movies, I have a soft spot for
Bernard and the Genie, but I suspect it isn't neccessarily a crowd pleaser.
What the best formula for Calcium supplements? at Ask Metafilter
Angry Christmas Crackers at Cool Hunting
Bake and Shake on wishing to be "
loving a magazine as much as I loved the few years of Sassy I was old enough to find relevant". Amen.
How Much Protection Can You Get From a Skin Cream? at The Beauty Brains
Privo Sofrito, shoes I just might want (also
at Zappos).
Fluid Earth Bowl, a bowl made to resemble the topography of your chosen area, via
GirlHacker.
I heart this
upside down snowman, at Magpie and Cake
Re-Nest on
the return of Brownberry bread, and the violent unrest the discontinuation of this bread caused. As crazy as it sounds, I understand, I love that bread.
Malenie Falick (did you know she keeps a blog?!) on
the sheep and wool related art of Andy Goldsworthy, just take a look at the last photo in that entry.
Mighty Goods has an excellent round up of spot-on suggestions:
Holiday Gift Guide,
Luxury Gift Guide,
Budget Gift Guide,
Stocking Stuffers for Grown Ups, the
2008 Calendar Guide and
Kids Stocking Stuffer Guide at Mighty Junior.
The Boss Lady gift guide is full of
great stuff from small, women-owned businesses, and also see
gifts for the entrepreneur.
Bake and Shake did a great collection of Etsy Holiday Gift Guides: #1 Ladies,
#2 Gents,
#3 What to buy for...,
#4 Bebes, and
#5 You
Design*Sponge has a whole lot of great stuff:
under $25,
under $50,
under $100,
eco-friendly, and
buy handmade
Alpha Mom has suggestions for
hostess gifts, as well as the anti-gift guides for what not to buy for kids -
one and
two.
Chow Gift Guide, and guide to
gifts to buy online.
Craft:
gift guide,
gifts for peeps,
crafty books,
gifts you can make,
tools of the trade and
edible gifts.
The 2007 Good Gift Games by Matthew Baldwin, at The Morning News. See also:
previous good gift games.
Cool Hunting 2007 Holiday Gift Guide,
Stocking Stuffers and the
Lush List.
Etsy has a huge collection of
gift guides for recipient, occasion, price and interest.
Readymade's gift guide to
155 perfect presents, each behind a door.
Rare Bird finds with a
gift list for those very specific, and very hard to shop for people in your life.
Leite's Culinaria on
Best 20 Food Books of 2007.
The Food Section's
2007 Holiday Gift Guide.
Salon's
Five books to help you become a chef by New Year's.
And I've collected a bunch of
stuff I love and stuff I want over at Amazon, it's full of things that are useful and, unexpectedly, largely monochromatic. (I wonder what this reveals about myself?) It's true, I get a small percentage if you decide to buy something from there, money that will go the upkeep of this site and into my
I want a Nikon D40 fund (which currently contains the 37 cents I found in the bottom of my bag). I also took the chance to put together lists of books by bloggers, there were so many I broke them into categories -
food,
crafts and sewing,
knitting and
fiction and non.
I wish everybody a Merry Christmas, I hope it's warm and bright and has full electricity and internet access.
Here are some (blurry and poorly composed) photographs of the gingerbread display in downtown Seattle this year.
This was much larger than it appears here.
(more...)
Kiddley continues the great projects:
Simple and charming tealight place settings.
Super cheerful gumdrop wreath, I remember seeing this on
Alicia's site last (?) year!
Alison from
Six and a Half Stitches used the Martha Stewart
mini pinatas to make Christmas ornaments, I swoon. You can see my Valentine's day version of them
here.
And Kungfoodie has gathered an impressive amount of information on
making gingerbread houses, excellent.
Culinary Fool on
sparkling shiraz, I love sparkling reds.
Mint chocolate brownies at Shelterrific. It uses York Peppermint Patties.
Candy Cane Cake! at Sunset Food. (I forget where I saw this one.)
Some very
soft trees at Two Straight Lines.
Craftapalooza turns us towards this tutorial on One Hour Craft for
Humbug Party Bags.
This is a beautiful
chocolate advent calendar, at Brownie Points.
David Lebovitz's
best holiday snack ever.
Pretty
snowflake templates at Freshly Blended.
Check out the
Christmas stocking with a special access panel at Skona Life (about half way down). Awesome. Take a look at the rest of the site too, it's beautiful.
Drink accessories at Cool Hunting. I like the chocoates that perch on the lip of your glass.
NPR Holiday Craft Winners.
The Anticandy at Smitten Kitchen. They look perfect.
Martha Stewart's
Tree Trimming How-To at Modern Roost.
It's beautiful, but might be deadly, go see the
Peppermint Fluff Martini at The Spirit World.
Gingerbread house patterns at The Kitchen.
I've always wondered if it was safe to eat the silver dragees or not.
The Dragee Report at The Kitchen.
DIY Holiday Tree to download and print out, from HP, very cool. At Swiss Miss.
Evany showed off a little
crocheted Christmas tree she received as a dinner party favor (so smart!) and shows off her own little forest. She points us to this thread on Craftster -
Crocheted Christmas Tree with Buttons for how to make them. If you are like me and don't know how to crochet (yet) see the
Soft Tree sewing pattern at Little Birds.
These
Santa Lucia dolls at Posie Gets Cozy are so sweet.
Mantle villages abound and make me wish I had a mantle:
made out of old Christmas cards at Danny Seo's Simply Green, all lit and pretty at
Wise Craft and
Angry Chicken and a sweet little one made from cardboard at
Kiddley with a decorated
update.
Kiddley has been filled with good holiday stuff, check out the
pom-pom garland, ,
paper Santa Lucia crowns,
Crazy Hat Crackers,
Advent Stick and
Advent Activities.
1017 grams of butter - Smitten Kitchen makes Ina's
Pecan Squares and now I want to make them too.
The Often Maligned Chocolate Pudding at Brownie Points.
Extreme Triple-Ginger Spice Cookies at A Finger in Every Pie.
Crispy Potato Pancakes at The Food Section.
Top 25 Food Hacks at Slashfood.
Gifts from the kitchen, at The Kitchen.
And 101 Cookbooks
Holiday Gift Guide.
The 2006 Good Gift Games. By Matthew Baldwin for The Morning News.
Monster Stockings by Crafty Robot.
From
Scott: a
gingerbread Star Wars Tie Fighter and even a
gingerbread At-At.
The photograph of Alicia's
pink-nonpareil sprinkled hot cocoa makes me all happy inside. She links to these
cocoa in a jar recipes by Sunset magazine, they are so pretty.
The Stranger seeks the best hot chocolate in the city. (If you live in Seattle and have more suggestions I, for one, would be happy to listen!)
I love advent calendars, and
Leslie's Advent Calendar is the best of all. This year each day we get a strange Christmas memory, a link, and a little bit of zazz. So far we've been gifted a
paint your own Xmas scene, a
dress up Santa and a
recipe for sugarplums.
- The Food Section's
Guide to Holiday Gift Guides, and also their own
Food Section Gift Guide.
- Mighty Goods
2006 Holiday Guide and the
2006 Covet Guide. A huge congratulations go out to Maggie for her
interview on NPR last weekend!
-
Make's Open Source Gift Guide
-
Photojojo's holiday gift guide
-
Treehugger's Gift Guide (thrillingly long!)
-
Quint's Gift Guide at Ain't It Cool News, multiple parts
- and this handy
Indie Fixx's guide to holiday craft shows.
- also see my own
little list of things on Amazon, it's my own store! and I cannot stop adding stuff to it!
Last Saturday I braved heavy rains and early holiday shoppers to see the Tord Boontje things at Target. The stores are decorated with his designs, what look like huge versions of his
Until Dawn curtains, it's amazingly cheerful. You can find the dinnerware for sale in the Target's
Red Hot Shop. But what I really loved was the selection of his things in the seasonal section. There are paper garlands, pictured above and reminiscent of the
Fairy Tail cards. There is also a darling advent calendar garland (also pictured above), glass votive holders (much like the
Table Stories designs) and plastic LED decorative lights. There was an empty hook labeled
window clings which I was intrigued enough by to travel to a second Target in an attempt to find. After I got there two friends bumped into me at an aisle at the second Target staring at a completely empty display. So I suspect if you'd like to get any Tord Boontje holiday things, you might want to act quickly.
Last year I stumbled across a display of
fabulous gingerbread houses made by architecture firms. Turns out it's an annual display set up in a mall in Seattle, and somewhere this translates into money for charity. I noticed that a few of the gingerbread houses used a clear material for windows that looked like it had been etched in a diamond pattern. You can see it best in the windows
here in the
set of pictures taken by Jeff Barr. I couldn't figure out what they had used to make those windows, and my best guess was something like these
3M clear removable mounting squares, except without the labeled backing. It made a sort of sense, it seems like something you'd have sitting around in an architecture firm. But of course, the mounting squares aren't edible so either I was wrong, or they were cheating.
Last week I found out what those windows are made of while watching an episode of Alton Brown's Good Eats - it is simply dry
gelatin sheets, and
it's not exactly a secret. So there you are, if you're planning a gingerbread house this year and you'd like it to kick all sorts of gingerbread house ass, you've got your window material.
