13
Dec
2011
Christmas Gifts to Inspire Your Child’s Creative Side
As much as we all try and remain completely impartial regarding the direction in which we steer our kids’ interests, there is a very fine line between nurturing a child’s natural abilities, encouraging their given interests (very important) and steering them towards the achievement of your own unfulfilled ambitions and lost hopes and desires. I am of course not one of these parents but, as luck would have it, my children have exhibited some very early genius in their play with lego. So when I crouch by their cots at night whispering ‘architect, architect, architect’ in to their sweet little ears I am merely celebrating the good fortune that has ensured that their natural abilities and my hopes for them happily coincide on a path to greatness.
This complete lack of self-interest and impartial guidance will undoubtedly ensure that we avoid tnhat whole messy parent-child conflict in this area.
I do recognise, however, that things don’t always go according to plan and in my open mindedness I don’t want to discourage my children from being anything they want to be. At least not right now. Unfortunately, creative professions don’t have the cache they should for a toddler. It’s challenging to dress your child as an architect, art director, costume designer, scriptwriter, filmmaker or commercially successful artist on dress-up day. Black rimmed glasses and turtlenecks just don’t have the same impact as a white coat and stethoscope or fireman outfit.
30
Sep
2010
Another Genius Gift Idea
As hard as they are to come by I’m not one to keep a good find to myself, so I’ll let you in on my latest stroke of genius, made possible by Flying Start Toys on Etsy, some serious Etsy search-and-discover skills on my part in finding this little gem and a flash of creativity, again on my part, although, admittedly, as someone who is not actually very creative on a whole, this self-perceived creativeness may not seem quite as grand to the outside world. But I can assure you the outcome is good. And… you may copy.
I came across Flying Start Toys’ Sail Away boats – made from materials with beautiful patterns and in the following lovely combinations shown below – while searching for a mobile for a baby’s new nursery as a gift (in an effort to find an alternative to the OTT sound and light shows one finds in commercial baby stores). I never found a mobile I liked, but was delighted to stumble across these.
4
Feb
2010
Make your own personalised word cloud canvas
I stumbled across website wordle.net a few months ago. Wordle lets you create your own word cloud image. I have been pondering ever since what a great gift it would be to use it to create a unique canvas for your baby’s room, or as a gift for, well, anyone. Or maybe you just want one for your own living room.
You can create your own word cloud image on wordle by entering a list of words and then changing the font, colours and the way the words are arranged. The image is yours to use as you wish, so you can save the file you’ve created and have it printed on canvas. (Google “print on canvas” and you’ll find any number of sites that will print your image on canvas and send it to you. Assuming you don’t live in Tristan da Cunha*).
