World Vision Handmade Baby Bib #Giveaway

While the world is vast-- global population exceeds 7 billion people across thousands of diverse ethnic, religious and linguistic groups--the Internet is transforming how we connect to each other, making it easier than ever to embrace global citizenship from an early age.

This spring, World Vision wants to talk about child sponsorship and ways parents can teach children to be global citizens leading up to Mother’s Day. Following are some tips from World Vision for bringing this concept home:

-          Turn story time into a teachable moment: Learning about other countries and cultures can happen during daily activities. Choose children’s books that accurately portray other cultures or focus on historical events for afternoon or bedtime reading. After finishing the book, parents can talk to children about what they learned and how the lives of the characters in the book differ from their own.

-          Make the facts digestible for young minds: Young children may have a difficult time comprehending abstract statistics about inequality around the world. Create a math activity at home to make this information more relatable. Use beads or buttons to count out how many children are in the child’s class, and then remove items based on global averages for clean water access or hunger statistics. According to World Vision’s 2015 Food Assistance Report, 1 in 6 children – more than 1.4 million kids - are dangerously underweight because they lack access to adequate food and nutritional assistance. For a classroom of 24, remove 4 beads to represent these children.

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-          Experiment at home: Ask children to put themselves in another person’s shoes by conducting experiments at home. For example, create a family menu budgeting $1.25 a day per family member. Give children $1.25 during the next grocery store trip - the amount of money that 1.3 billion people worldwide live on each day, according to World Vision - and let them shop and price compare themselves. Afterwards, talk about the types of foods they couldn’t purchase and what kinds of foods the menu is limited to: Were you able to purchase fresh fruits or vegetables? Is the meal limited to rice or pasta? What kind of protein could you afford to buy?

-          Sponsor a child: Get children involved directly in providing a “hand up” to communities in need around the world by sponsoring a child as a family through World Vision. Involve children in the process of choosing a boy or girl to sponsor; ask them to write cards and draw pictures for the sponsored child, and talk to them regularly about how the sponsorship donation is helping provide equal opportunities for boys and girls, clean water, bed nets, job training for parents, and much more – including the freedom to simply be a child.

Why sponsor through World Vision?

Though children and families face hardships like poverty and conflict, we can bring hope to a hurting world. Child sponsorship through World Vision allows for a one-on-one relationship with a sponsored child, while pooling gifts from sponsors who support children within the same community to provide long-term resources for lasting change. World Vision believes that effective development that lifts communities and individuals out of long-term poverty lies in helping them discover their potential as human beings and mobilizing communities to take ownership of long-term projects that support clean water, healthcare, agriculture, education and income generation. Join us in partnering with those in need to build lasting solutions that address their challenges. Together, we can be greater than adversity.

The Giveaway 

One lucky winner is going to receive a Handmade Baby Bib ($40 value) from the World Vision Gift Catalog to keep for yourself or give to a loved one as a symbol of the value of teaching children to be global citizens from the youngest age. Every bib is handmade by artisans in Bali using only sustainable materials and recycled fabrics. These Fair Trade artisans utilize the traditions of Balinese craftsmanship while honoring nature with the smallest carbon footprint possible.

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cuddle+kind Littles - Hand-knit Dolls That Help Feed Children

The Little Collection from cuddle+kind are adorable dolls lovingly handmade in Peru. They are made with premium natural cotton and come in thirteen cuddly designs. Every doll is designed with fine detail and exceptional craftsmanship. The dolls are simply stunning and a toy that is appropriate for children of all ages. Even their eyes are sewn, making it a safe choice for infants, yet older children will love them as well. These are toys that will grow with your child and quickly become a favorite bedtime companion.

The best part about the Little Collection is that every time you purchase one for a child you love, you are also giving a very special gift to ten other children. With every purchase of a Little Doll, cuddle+kind will donate ten meals to a child in need. They recognize the crucial role nutrition plays in every child's development.  Since their launch, they have donated over 200,000 meals to children in need.  The meals are donated through the WFP School Lunch program and Orphanages in Haiti through the Children's Hunger Fund.

With cuddle&kind, you get an adorable doll and the added bonus of knowing you're helping other children go to bed with a full belly! In addition to the Littles, they also have larger 20 inch dolls that also provide ten meals to children in need. To see all cuddle+kind has to be offer, be sure to visit their website or follow them on social media.


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Holiday Gift Guide - Artisan Gifts from Novica - #Giveaway

Over the last few years I have gone back to Novica again and again and bought lots of gifts for family and friends. This Christmas is no different.  They have united over 2000 master artists from around the world, bringing you an extensive collection of fine art in just one website. Their items are original and unique and something anyone would be proud to have on display in their homes. The item I picked out this year is the stunning Buddha Statuette with Sunset Motif.  This detailed piece depicts Buddha sitting in a woodland grotto, meditating to the peaceful sounds of a trickling stream. It's a wonderful addition to an altar or to use as a focal point for meditation.

The item I picked out is only a one examples of the gorgeous handmade creations you can find at Novica. They have  hundreds of beautiful items for all your special occasions. They have an elegant jewelry collection, home decor, instruments and sculptures to name only a few categories.  Here are a few other items of my wish list.

 In addition to offering lovely gifts, Novica also supplies free gift wrapping! This isn't just nice gift wrap, this is the kind of *WOW* Gift Wrap that only NOVICA can do, applying handmade elements, carefully crafted ribbons, and beautiful brass plates. Getting the beautiful gift wrap is a fabulous bonus. When it arrives you can just shove it under the tree. No worry about anyone seeing it ahead of time. No hassles with hiding it.  Another interesting fact is that each item comes with a little card all about the artist who designed your product.

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The Giveaway

One lucky winner is going to receive a $50 Gift Card to Novica!  To enter, just fill in the Rafflecopter form below. This giveaway will end on 12/24/15. The winner will be notified via email and will have 48 hours to reply. Open to the US only  Thanks again to  Novica or offering this fantastic prize. 

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Smell Sweet All Summer Long with Clean Bar Box

One of my favorite indulgences is artisan soap. There's something special about a fresh cut piece of handmade natural soap. They smell so nice, and leave your skin feeling so much cleaner than store bought soaps. I also have an obsession with subscription boxes, so of course I was excited to try out the Clean Bar Box. Every month, they send you a delicious selection of handmade soaps that match the season.

The June Box included an assortment of  sweet scents and I was in love as soon as I opened the package.  They smelled so amazing, and I love that they're made with  ingredients like   Coconut Oil, Olive Oil, and Organic Shea Butter.   Plus there are NO Preservatives, NO Animal Products, NO Petroleum Products, NO Parabens, and NO Lauryl Sulfate. All of the soaps at Clean Bar come in generous portions that will last for at least a few weeks. I got two full-size bars and two half-size. They leave your skin feeling soft and deep down clean. Each different fragrance offers it's own unique advantages. Here are the four I tried:

Blueberry Scrub Soap - The scent of blueberries is the perfect reminder that summer is almost here. This soap also contains oatmeal which helps give you a deep down clean. The soap is also a beautiful shade of blue.

Summer Citrus Soap - Citrus is the perfect scent to help get you started in the morning. It's so invigorating. The pretty design on the bar is beautiful as well.

Cotton Blossom -You'll smell as clean as your fresh linens with this delightful cotton scented soap.

Cucumber Melon - This soap is so pretty.  I love the dark green and light green swirls. The scent of cucumber and melon is also a refreshing summer scent.

I loved all these soaps. It's a great selection for a great price, and it's so much fun trying out all the different scents. If you're thinking about ordering a box, now would be a great time. Simply enter the code 5OFF at checkout to receive $5.00 off your subscription. There are several different options to choose from starting as low as $14.99 per month with free shipping!  With a subscription to Clean Bar Box, you'll never have to buy store-bought soap again!  

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Review: Cricut Explore Air Cutting Machine

Go from inspiration to creation with Cricut Explore Air (and Cricut Design Space), the most advanced electronic cutting machine for DIY enthusiasts. This system features embedded Bluetooth technology for wireless cutting. Use your desktop computer, laptop, or iPad with the new Cricut Design Space iPad® app. Cricut Explore Air is a design-and-cut system for making amazing, affordable DIY and craft projects. It’s our easiest way ever to turn an idea into a finished project!

   

Make more, every day
Cricut Explore Air allows you to create DIY crafts and projects from wedding invitations to DIY home décor to scrapbooking: there are so many ways you can create with Cricut Explore Air.  You'll be amazed at how often you can use this incredible tool.

Make party invitations, decorations, and favors. Create seasonal home décor or personalize wedding gifts. Add embellishments to your favorite photo memories. Turn ordinary items into beautiful, personalized pieces that let you say, "I made it!" 

Featuring Cut Smart™ technology, the Smart Set™ dial for easy material settings, and the ability to upload your own designs into Cricut Design Space, Cricut Explore Air is our easiest and most innovative design-and-cut system yet. Use Cricut Explore Air with Cricut Design Space™, the free cloud-based software, to make your ideas a reality.

What materials can I cut?

Cut any image on over 60 different materials, including paper, cardstock, vinyl, fabric, balsa wood, leather and more! See a full list of materials.

No settings required

Say goodbye to complicated materials settings. Now you can get the perfect cut on nearly any material—just turn the Smart Set^™ dial. You can even create custom settings for different materials. Cricut Explore Air can cut paper, vinyl, cardstock, fabric, wood, leather, and much more.

Design here, there, and everywhere
The easy-to-use Cricut Design Space^™ software system gives you access to all of your images and projects from any compatible computer or iPad^®. It’s cloud-based, so your projects are always synced across all your devices.

Machine Features & Details

• Smart Set™ dial for material selection
• Dual carriage heads
• Integrated storage compartments
• Cricut Design Space™ software
• 50+ free project ideas
• 100+ free images
• Compatible with PC/Mac

For more information:Watch the Video: http://us.cricut.com/home/learn/machines/explore-family

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Our Thoughts
I was really, really, ridiculously excited to accept this review pitch. Drool may or may not have been involved. ;-) I've been eyeballing cutting machines for a few years now, but wasn't sure which system to invest money in.  The original Cricut cutting machine involved buying cartridges, and I wanted something I where I could somehow use my own designs.  Enter the Cricut Explore and Cricut Explore Air.  On a basic level, the Cricut Explore and Cricut Explore Air are the same machine except the Explore Air has Bluetooth embedded in it, whereas the Explore you can purchase a Bluetooth adapter separately.  Cricut generously sent me an Explore cutting machine with the Bluetooth adapter so I could enjoy the same benefits as the Explore Air. 

I gotta say, this thing is AWESOME.  Not even kidding!  The first thing I did was read up on how to use it by way of the super helpful FAQ's.  Then I jumped into Cricut Design Space and started designing a gift for my mom.  Now, having Bluetooth is fantastic for me, since my PC is in our office - no real room to use the cutting machine in there, and my craft area is on the other side of the house - a little too far away to go wireless from my PC. This is where the new iPad app came in very handy! Once I had designs ready to go, I just logged in on the iPad right from my craft area and wirelessly told the machine to cut the design I picked. 

Machine in cutting stage - so easy to do right from the iPad!

While blue painter's tape is recommended over masking tape, I used masking tape because at the time, I didn't have any painter's tape on hand.  I also tried following an online tutorial that said the machine would cut fabric ironed to freezer paper - I followed the directions to a "T" but it was a big fail - use Heat 'n Bond Ultra instead - it works great!

The finished project with letters seamlessly cut out.

Next up was making a few new wood signs for my shop.  Many people recommended cutting contact paper to make their designs, so I tried two different ways - used it for the letters (paint over the contact paper letters stuck in place), and also cutting/weeding out the design, then painting it in.

Contact paper letters stuck to the wood.

Cutting the letters out of contact paper, then applying the letters to the wood is by far the easiest.  I really like how that one turned out, except I wanted to "antique" the sign, and realized that if the lettering is going to be "antiqued", the background needs to have it done before the letters are applied as once you paint over them you will have resulting indented letters when the contact paper letters are removed.

Contact paper background with the design weeded out.

Cutting the background using contact paper, then weeding out the design was easy to do, too, but this design was fairly labor intense.  But look how fine of lines the Cricut can cut! Beautiful! Doing it this way required touchup paint once the background was removed, but I could "antique" the sign as a whole rather than doing it in stages - so both ways have their advantages - and not really disadvantages - just doing things in different steps than I was used to.

The above two projects painted - you can see how clean & neat the cut design is!

The first two projects I used the information already in the Cricut Design Space because you can choose to use your system fonts.  The third project was a design I created in Photoshop, then uploaded the design into Cricut Design Space to be cut out.  The machine itself has dial settings that are very easy to use.  For cutting fabric, I just selected "fabric", and for the contact paper I selected "vinyl".  There are even "in-between" settings for materials that are thicker/thinner than what the setting is designed for.

Now, Cricut Design Space is fairly easy and intuitive to use - it has editable layers just like Photoshop does.  I did have some how-to questions that were able to be answered by way of the FAQ's.  There are also many pre-designed projects to choose from - if you have the materials you want to use on hand, you can go right to "Make it now"!

The only disadvantage I can think of, some of the designs created in Cricut Design Space you may not be able to send to the cutting mat "as is" if you're using the iPad app.  If the fonts used are not on the iPad, it will revert to an iPad compatible font.  You can still cut it as designed if you are plugged into your PC rather than using the iPad app.  There are iPad apps you can buy to prevent this issue though.  Right now there isn't a way to send it to the cutting mat from your iPhone, but that might be coming in the future - Cricut does listen to their customers!

Cricut machines & accessories can be purchased online and in select stores, and I've already purchased extra blades and the deep-cut blades and housing in case I want to cut thicker materials like leather or balsa wood.  Next up is finding a 12" x 24" cutting mat - which I may end up purchasing online since all the stores seem to be sold out of them!

Another really cool thing about this machine is it can WRITE, too!  Cricut recommends using their markers rather than another brand as the marker cases are specifically designed to work with the housing within the cutting machine.  This means you can not only have the machine cut your design, but write on it too!  If you're like me and don't have the neatest handwriting, or want to write in a specific font, the machine will do it for you!! They have several marker colors available.

The Cricut Explore is so easy to use, that the hardest part for me in making what I want - is simply the agonizing process of waiting for the paint to dry!  Haha!! Considering I used to spend hours cutting out intricate details by hand . . . count me as a HUGE fan!!  As of yesterday I now have a nice big pile of wood cut and a whole bunch of gorgeous fabrics - I am super excited to get started!  So many ideas . . . and they can all be done with Cricut!

Holiday Gift Guide - Handmade Gifts from Novica - #Giveaway

Over the last few years I have gone back to Novica again and again and bought lots of gifts for family and friends. This Christmas is no different. In fact, I get my husband's gifts at Novica for pretty much every occasion. He is the most finicky person in the world when it comes to clothes, but he loves the world fashions available at Novica. They have united over 2000 master artists from around the world, bringing you an extensive collection of fine art in just one website. Their items are original and unique and something anyone would be proud to have on display in their homes. I haven't received them yet, but these are the two items I ordered for my hubby:

This beautiful Poetic Buddha Journal  is bound with high quality, handmade paper. Buddha is sitting in a lotus thrown, gesturing a mudra while in serene meditation. This journal is the perfect place to jot down poetry, dreams or your innermost thoughts.

I also ordered this gorgeous set of maracas, which is something my husband needed for his band. You can't ask for a lovelier set . They are crafted from gourds and hand painted .


 The items I picked out are only a few examples of the gorgeous handmade creations you can find at Novica. They have  hundreds of beautiful items you can find at Novica for all your special occasions. They have an elegant jewelry collection, home decor, instruments and sculptures to name only a few categories.  Here are a few other items of my wish list.

 In addition to offering lovely gifts, Novica also supplies free gift wrapping! This isn't just nice gift wrap, this is the kind of *WOW* Gift Wrap that only NOVICA can do, applying handmade elements, carefully crafted ribbons, and beautiful brass plates.. Getting the beautiful gift wrap is a fabulous bonus. When it arrives I can just shove it under the tree. No worry about him seeing it ahead of time. No hassles with hiding it. Not to mention, this wrap job is much better than anything I could ever manage. Another interesting fact is that each item comes with a little card all about the artist who designed your product.

 Connect with Novica

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The Giveaway

One lucky winner is going to receive a $50 Gift Card to Novica!  To enter, just fill in the Rafflecopter form below. This giveaway will end on 1/2/14. The winner will be notified via email and will have 48 hours to reply. Open to the US only  Thanks again to  Novica or offering this fantastic prize.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 

Shore'ly Handmade Holiday #Giveaway

The best gifts are made by hand.  Shore'ly Handmade Crafts & Gifts is a little shop located in the Victorian town of Cape May, NJ.  They offer a variety of artisan gifts including woodworking, scarves, jewelry, and so much more. Two of the artists also sell their wares online at Etsy.com. To help get the word out, they are sponsoring an amazing giveaway.

Wendy Taylor Knits is offering this beautiful hand-knitted scarf--the perfect way to stay warm all winter long!

Down Home with Sally is offering up this gorgeous wooden snowman, perfect for indoor or outdoor display.
  

One lucky winner is going to receive both of these beautiful prizes! To enter just fill out the Giveaway Tools form below. Open to the US only. Giveaway will end 12/21/14. The winner will be notified via email and will have 48 hours to reply. Thanks again to the sponsor for offering this fantastic prize. 

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