domesticity

Tucked into the pages of this week's issue of Newsweek was this clever promotional piece for Häagen-Dazs. The sheet is filled with bee-friendly wildflower seeds to plant and provide food to feed the honey bees and keep them buzzing.

There is also a beautifully-designed website at helpthehoneybees.com to learn more about the plight of the honey bees... you can even design and send your own animated honey bee. Isn’t mine cute?

I also want to try the new Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream made from vanilla from Madagascar and honey from the clover fields of North and South Dakota. Anything to help save the honey bees and keep them pollinating!

Although I love the ease of sending evites, I don’t always like the designs available to choose from. The online invitations available on pingg are much more my style and I love that you can upload your own designs.

I love handwritten fonts and am always looking for new ones to add to my font collection. Font for Peas has some wonderful fonts created from handwritten samples sent via email. I am very tempted to email a sample since I would love to have a font created that resembled my handwriting and have toyed with the idea of ordering a digital font from my handwriting via FontShop.

If you are like me and use a news aggregator (like Bloglines) to browse weblogs and other news feeds, you can subscribe to my site via an rss or atom feed. Click on the desired post feed in the left column under feeds for the link.

Last year I had a Sanrio calendar that came in a little flip CD case that I loved. Unfortunately, this year I couldn’€™t find a similar calendar anywhere! I finally decided to stop searching and reuse the CD jewel case by printing and laminating these templates featured in Blueprint to create a desk calendar for this year. I don’t know why I never thought to make my own templates to create a calendar to fill the case sooner!

Rather than doing my office paperwork (like I should be) this morning, I have happily distracted myself with random Marthadex searches. Marthadex is a searchable archive from Craftlog of Martha Stewart magazine issues. Key in a search and related articles are listed by title, issue, date, and page. It’s a very Good Thing!

Walk Score is a nifty tool that calculates the “walkability” of an address based on their proximity to grocery stores, restaurants, movie theaters, schools, libraries, and more to provide an idea of how pedestrian-friendly a neighborhood is. Not surprisingly, my score was only a 20 out of 100 (virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range) since I live in a relatively new subdivision. Hopefully the walkability of my neighborhood will increase as the area develops.

I finally got a King County library card! I applied online and received the card via snail mail a while ago, but only made it to the library this past weekend to activate my card. I ended up leaving with seven books… some knitting books containing a few patterns I wanted to try and a couple of light summer reading fiction books. I didn’t even wander through most of the library stacks!

I stayed up late last night to finish reading one of the books (Something Blue by Emily Giffin) and made color photocopies of the knitting patterns I wanted to try. I can’t wait to go back and spend more time perusing the shelves.

I need to start keeping a list of books to look for and read this summer… any recommendations?