Donna sent me a link to this – My First Bento Box!

Wow, I’m super flattered! The folks at Fred Flare wrote into the comments from the entry below and gave this offer:

Hey there! This is Keith from fredflare.com. If you would like to order anything, enter “not martha” at the special instructions and we’ll credit your shipping charges, anytime before April 4th. Also, please check out our new Nancy Drew Review! She was really the inspiration behind us carrying the Personal Library Kit.

Mucho thanks!

Altoids now have those little breath strips, and they come in a cute little slidy tin. I must find this new Altoids treat. via Suzie Q.

Fred Flare certainly has grown since I paid attention to it last. The sushi note set is adorable, and the personal library set makes me nostalgic for my quiet, solitary high school job as a library page. Also nice are the felt dot garland (where oh where else have I seen this?) and magnet board. And there is something so happy about this photo of the superball set.

I was wrong! Crayola brand chalkboard paint doesn’t come in many pretty colors, it only comes in black, and that dark green in other brands like Krylon. I apologize to everyone who I might have led astray (errr… hi Erica). Turns out I just wasn’t paying enough attention to this page, and going back I see that I must not have been the only one since they put up a huge bold statement at the top which was most definitely not there before. Oops.

Scott doesn’t like store bought frosting, and I can’t blame him, the whipped light and fluffy stuff I bought a while back for last minute office cupcakes tasted distinctly like Play Doh. Scott grew up with frosting made with Dream Whip and pudding mix. A simple example recipe is here. For those of you who, like me, are new to this Dream Whip stuff, it’s like meringe powder, but slightly flavored and does not dry hard. It comes in little paper pouches like pudding mix. I’m curious, did you grow up with this stuff? Is this a part of the American foodstuff culture I somehow missed out on?

I keep hearing about these from everywhere – Ex Libris Anonymous journals made from rebinding old book covers with blank pages. My favorites are the ones with simple covers like Old Thoughts In New Dress, Bigger and Better The Book of Enlarging, and Hair Styling (note: links out of frames). Be sure to check out the retro (whoo hoo!) Nudie Journals too.

going back to children’s play house envy for a moment, jennie found the most wonderful, magical tree stump house, the stump of a redwood to be specific. read all the way down, it’s amazing.

and she finds a use for plastic canisters in the reusablog, for letterboxing! yay!

jejune has a new section – d. i. your own damn self. very cool stuff, this big wooly scarf leaves me weak with wool envy. and this plexiglass poster frame reminds me of the frames for this show at RISD, as shown by bryan boyer, also check out the diy lcd panels.

Scott brought back some issues of Venus from SXSW and I was delighted to find an article about Susan Stars in the Winter 2002 issue. Yay!

littlecabbage has up a tutorial on making your own knitting needles, hers are blue!

The Jenville Show – Cooking With Rockstars with videos of her cooking or chatting with indie music people about cooking. Fabulous.

Girlhacker has compiled a list of stuff in the Oscar Goody Bags. Man.

Last weekend I was listening to This American Life, the Say Anything show, specifically the reading of the parts of the zines Fears of Your Life and Fears of Your Life: A Whole New One by Michael Bernard Loggins. About half way through I heard the name Andrea Scher, I wrote to ask and sure enough, it was the Andrea Scher who is Superhero Designs and is a big part of the Another Girl At Play website. And she just started a new blog, welcome!

Fears of Your Life and Fears of Your Life: A Whole New One were made at Creativity Explored in San Francisco, a place worth checking out.

Evany (one of my long-time reads, and she reads this site! swoon!) started up a crafty portion of her site, you must see the Go-Between, I need one of those just for those times when I am sitting in a restaurant in an open-backed chair accidentally giving the other customers flashes of my pale skin.

It may just be this way on me, but Target’s Sonia Kashuk Frangrance #1 smells exactly like red kool-aid.