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Drawing, eating and a Curious Bazaar giveaway



To begin with, I have a fabulous Curious Bazaar giveaway for you!

The prize: A $30 Curious Bazaar voucher and some secret surprise-y treats added to your parcel when you use the voucher. Yay!

The deal: We'd love to increase our audience for Curious Bazaar, celebrate the end of Summer (I love Autumn) and share the love! I have a nice big update happening later today and would love to get the word out. So, there are three ways of entering...

1. Share Curious Bazaar on Facebook, simply click 'share' under the giveaway post on Curious Bazaar's page.

2. Tweet the link to this post, and then comment here to let me know you've tweeted.

3. Share this giveaway on your own blog, and then comment here to let me know you've blogged!

Giveaway closes 14th March 2012! International entries are welcome, I'll be adding international shipping to all of the shop items over the coming week :)





Note: These photos are from Tickle the Imagination issue 03 and was photographed by Curiouser, featuring Curious Bazaar brands Sew Chirpy and Polkadot Lane as well as the gorgeous creations of Little Tree Kids and Monet Paisley!

In home news, Sienna has been drawing and crafting up a storm lately, with a decidedly lalaloopsy focus! She's made clothes, constructed a boat, various beds and houses, mini blocks and toys, paper baskets and lots of little drawings. Here is one recent sketch, a little picture of 'Lady Stillwaiting'...


I've been cooking and baking lately, and yesterday afternoon made some yummy cupcakes from Lauren's blog, some 'pirate cookies' from a book Ash had borrowed from school, and a favourite casserole (Chicken, Mushroom and Leek) for dinner. This is a native herb-y pasta bake I made last week - the recipe will be added to Season with Saltbush soon!

Cute things and a growing boy

Summer is nearly over, and to celebrate the February sunshine we are having a sale over at Curious Bazaar! Polkadot Lane is all reduced by 30%, including funky screen printed tshirts and tote bags, cute pillowcase dresses and more. In addition, you can get 30% off everything in the Canvas Art section by using the code SUMMERART on checkout! 


This boy is growing up a lot, playing trains for hours every day and starting to use the potty. He also loves playing with the keyboard (musical, not computer) and on the ipad. He likes pottering about with lalaloopsy dolls and has his own large Sir Battlescarred. But mostly it's about the trains ;)


Love at Georgie Love

Apparently I need prompting to blog at the moment, for whatever reason! Anyway I came across this lovely giveaway by Georgie Love and thought I would participate.

So...

if I had $50 to spend at Georgie Love I would have a hard time choosing. I would love to put it towards one of these clocks... so fairytale whimsical. I would have it in my loungeroom.


I found something else I would add to my list but it would be a gift for someone who might read my blog, I'm not sure! So I won't link that one. Ooh how about this:

It's a bit lovely, isn't it? I do love a lovely necklace or two. And Ash would love me forever if I wore this one:



I love window shopping online. Georgie Love is great for that, especially when I'm on a strict budget as I can't decide on anything and end up admiring a lot but purchasing nothing. I do the same thing a lot at Leeloo and Lark. A friend once recommended I submit my art to Georgie Love but I never did anything about it. I'm a bit lazy like that ;)

My own shop Curious Bazaar is a bit similar to Georgie Love actually, with a smaller range of sellers and products as nothing is available elsewhere and is all made locally in the Dandenong Ranges area. I'll be adding some gorgeous new baby / toddler pants and vests from Sew Chirpy soon!

It's La-la-land around here

Or should I say, Lalaloopsyland... Sienna started collecting mini lalaloopsy dolls a year ago, with the first eight released, and now has a bit of a collection of mini dolls, two big lalaloopsies - Lady Stillwaiting and Blossom Flowerpot (who has been sadly decorated in permanent green texta by a certain little brother) - and one little sis' - Specs Read-a-Lot (from Auntie Kell). Mini Pillow Featherbed has a broken (missing) leg and Dot Starlight had to have a funeral after she was beheaded by Cedar. Sienna decorated a cardboard box very prettily for the occasion.

Sienna also has the mini lalaloopsy treehouse, and my parents recently bought her the remote control mini lalaloopsy car, plus she has bits and pieces from playsets, like the bath tub (from Auntie Hayley), the bed and the cafe table and chairs. All quite itty bitty and cute. She has the DS game and loves playing on the website. She draws pictures of them and makes up her own picture books about them. She dresses up in similar outfits on the weekend, layering clothes that she has in the 'right' colours for her chosen character ;) In true Asperger style, she's either not that interested in something, or she's completely obsessed!

 
 

At the moment she is working towards some new mini dolls, plus the school bus, as part of her 'positive reinforcement' for occupational therapy. For each week where she does all her homework - 3 times a week - and her OT session itself, in a cooperative fashion, she gets one mini doll. At the end of the 6 week block she gets the bus if she's checked every box on her chart. But my point is, she's been collecting them for awhile now but it's only really the last two or three months that she has become really obsessed with them. Ash and Cedar each have two mini dolls and a big one too, they love them. Not as much as Sienna, but still. Ash has all the 'Patch Treasure Chest' pirate ones, not surprisingly, and Cedar has the big 'Sir Battlescarred', the mini 'Forest Evergreen' and the mini 'Ace Fender Bender'. These ones below are on the shopping / wish list....


So, anyway, when informed on Friday that she needed a pencil case, I thought we'd make her one with a bit of Lalaloopsy flavour. I'm not generally one to buy branded things like clothes and pencil cases, but I'm happy to make one, LOL. It was quite fun to ignore my to-do list and do some stitching for a change. This was all using stuff I had around, though I did have to cut up an old hoodie of Cedar's to use the zip. She requested the owl - Bea Spells-A-Lot's pet - be included to suit the school theme, so I made it a zip puller.

 
 
 
 


It made an 8-year-old girl very happy, though, so it's all good :)



I wanted to link up with 'Pin it? Make it!' on Kell's blog, but the truth is I searched pinterest for pencil cases and there were barely any at all. So I just started from scratch and made it up out of my head. Maybe someone else will pin it and make it one day!

Who's who: Baby name stories...


I just did a comment on a friend's blog post that turned into a total essay, so I thought I'd pop it here ;) Kate had shared her baby-naming stories over here. With a dear friend expecting a girl, it is a fun topic to share.

I love hearing naming stories :) Ben and I felt happy to have relatively similar taste, I known some couples have choices that are quite opposite to one another, LOL. We also found out genders at about 20 weeks, and wanted names finalised well before birth if possible. I just felt more settled that way.










Sienna I chose, 9 years ago. As an artist, I was naming her from the paint colour, it wasn't an unheard of name but at the time was quite unusual and wasn't in many books. I also loved the travel reference, as in the city of Siena in Italy. Now it's quite the opposite, having been a top ten name in Australia a few years ago! Either way, it's a pretty name and I'm happy :) After finding out she was a girl we went to a cafe and chose 'Belle' as her middle name. I love Disney films and Ariel didn't sound as good, LOL. We liked how 'Sienna Belle' could almost be one name from the way it sounds.

Shortlisted if she was a boy were Camden, Ash and Gabe (Gabriel). Tristan and Elijah were also on the list but not top choices.






Ash we had chosen finding it in one big fat baby book, as in, Ash tree. We loved the tree reference. Ben had a high school friend he had been close to called Asha and had always loved her name, so something similar had been on the list anyway. We said to one another that Sienna had been my choice, but Ben completely agreed. Ash was his choice, but I loved it too. Daniel is the name of Ben's younger brother who died at the age of 20 shortly after we got married. So that was an easy middle name choice, and a way of letting the kids know about the Uncle they'd never meet.

We had Ashanti Miette chosen for Ash if he was a girl. I really wanted Miette in there somewhere but having not used it for Sienna meant we missed out in the end!




Ben calls our youngest the 'hippy name' of the three, LOL. I got Cedar from looking online. We had London and Dublin as name options but weren't really settled or in agreement about them. We agreed on Rhodes as a middle name before choosing the first name, as Ben always loved a style of music that used a type of keyboard called the Rhodes and I was looking for travel references (it's an island). Anyhow, I was kind of stressed that we hadn't decided for sure once we knew he was a boy, it was quite annoying for me. I ended up finding Cedar on the blog of an American photographer and it was a perfect fit - another tree name, and we both just loved it. Cedar Rhodes it is.



If he was a girl he was going to be called Adelaide Miette. I would have loved to use that name as well :)

So, girl names we shortlisted all together included:
  • Sienna
  • Adelaide (kind of old-fashioned, German originally and with an English nod, plus our hometown)
  • Adeline
  • Miette (means 'sweet, small thing' in French, an abbreviation of Marguerite, french for Margaret, Ben's mother's name)
  • Ashanti (African)
  • Belle
  • Evangeline
  • Ariel
  • Kairi (love of Japanese culture, we had this shortlisted as a middle name for ages)
  • Asha
  • Quinn
  • China
  • Indigo
Boy names that were listed at one point or another and that I like:
  • Ash
  • Camden
  • Tristan
  • Gabe / Gabriel
  • Elijah
  • London
  • Dublin
  • Rhodes
  • Rafe
At school we've had a couple of kids called Sage - a girl and a boy - and I think that's a lovely name, also quite organic in feel. This sharing thing is fun and interesting, I'd love to know what are your favourites?

Sharing these stories remind me that I haven't shared birth stories for either of the boys yet. I'll get there eventually ;)



Another project and new shop

And that makes three (well, three little businesses, anyway, but there is always a myriad of projects going on!)...

A couple of weeks ago I launched a new online store, so that you can now buy online the Outback Pride products I talk about here and on my blog Season with Saltbush. Simply go to http://shop.outbackpride.com.au/ and have a look!



In everyday news, tomorrow is back to therapy with Sienna starting OT and Ash back at speech on Saturday. Friday is the first day of school. It's been warm and then actually a bit cold and then sunny again around here. I've barely scrapped - only one page in the school holidays - but will be back crafting this month. Now that the Outback Pride store is launched I have some design work to get on with, plus an album to design and photos still to edit.

Sienna is completely lalaloopsy mad, Cedar divides his addiction between his wooden train sets and the ipad. Ash is pretty technology-focussed at the moment, but also enjoying treasure maps and lego.