A new spin on Wedding invites: check out this great video featured by  DreamGrow Social Media. It is really cool, fantastic and amazing….

When you get a comment like CobisTaba   “gratz offcourse! For some reason I think alot of people who you don’t know wanne come ” you know you have achieved great communication, I thought the same, I want to be there!

Jeff & Erin’s EPIC Wedding Trailer: Save the Date

They  created this EPIC wedding trailer as Save-the-Date. For the full effect, turn up the sound… way up! Enjoy!….continue For YouTube Video

As my spare thoughts this week are all tied up in the new Apple release and the Apple Tablet!! ( just take my credit card details now and sent it to me)  I didn’t think any other product could take my attention.  But Notemaker and Idea Paint have managed to do this and ….I want it now for the office along with their other products…..I think I have just gone to heaven…

Check out notemaker.com

Turn your home or workspace into an amazing whiteboard wall – anywhere, anytime!

The Behance team started experimenting with Idea Paint in early 2009 as a way to boost productivity while brainstorming. They discovered that the ability to transform walls into useful space yielded benefits well beyond brainstorm sketching. [...]

I read an article in at heraldsun.com.au: Pens being written off as chldren turn to technology it brought a little smile to my face, why? read on.

Anyone that knows me well without a doubt will tell you that I have four very very passionate loves of my life, notebooks that I only ever write one page in, technical books to read that bore everyone else, Salsa my brother’s Staffy and PENS!! I LOVE PENS, any type any kind, I have special pens that I select for various tasks, but in general… bring on the pens!

So a pen story is always of interest and this one very close to my heart!! When I was in Primary school (Mountview Primary School in Glen Waverley) it was grade 4 and it was the year you graduate from pencil to pen. This was very exciting for me, but oh! NO, not for me, days and days went by. months and months… for some reason my teacher Mrs Murdoch made sure I was the last one in the class to change from pencil to pen because my writing was too messy.  I have been scarred for LIFE from this experience. No joke!!  From this day I was obsessed with pens and having the best and coolest handwriting. I remember some of my friends in high school with amazing writing, the grandparents generation that had amazing and perfect cursive writing, and old friend Simone Maynard who is an artist had the most extraordinary writing I have ever seen, and she changed it in relation to the art she produced… awesomeness! I just loved it.  But I wanted my writing to have my style on it so I worked on it for hours and hours, which led to years and years! Which now.. is perfectly me.

Now I have a small chuckle every time someone gets me to write on cards, whiteboards in meetings and even 12 years later, making my way up the chain of the business ladder and what not…I held a position as Chief Marketing Officer at Bondi bar and kitchen in San Diego, it became my daily duty to write on the windows and the blackboards, because I had the most appropriate and coolest handwriting!  So no matter what, it’s so important to make sure you have great handwriting that represents you. There is nothing more special than a handwritten note, card or message beautifully crafted and being able to know exactly who its from, by their handwriting.

Nothing better than picking up the marker pen and write across a whiteboard in reasonable handwriting.  It is definitely an asset to have artistic writing in business.  When it comes to the whiteboard, business people seem to think they ‘HAVE THE POWER’ when they get that marker in their hands, so why not make it look good.

This is the article and, with my love of pens, it is also concerns me:

ARE children losing the art of handwriting? Many parents think the skill is disappearing, owing largely to technology.

Today’s children are much more likely to communicate with friends via text message, email or Facebook than to send a written card or letter.

“Thank you” notes are almost a thing of the past.

A Bic back-to-school survey found more than seven in 10 parents thought handwriting was becoming a lost art. Almost as many blamed technology, and eight in 10 wanted to see their child’s writing improve.

But children are taking up technology at a great rate.

Conducted by Pure Pacific, which interviewed 1000 people nationally this month, the survey also found that almost one in 10 children learn to type on a computer at age three or younger, and more than 40 per cent have done so by the age of five or six.Ruth Collins has always encouraged daughters Bec, 9, and Grace, 12, to write things such as shopping lists and “thank you” notes. Bec also loves writing stories.

But Ms Collins admits it is getting harder now that Grace has a mobile phone and loves texting.

Much of Grace’s homework was also now computer-based.

“You just sort of wonder, at what point are you going to write your assignments?” she said. “The day all the computers go down, how are you going to communicate?”

Education and parenting consultant Kathy Walker is also concerned by the trend.

She said that it would be unwise for parents to assume that technology and computer skills had superseded the need to write and to have good fine-motor manipulation skills.

“The importance of children developing appropriate fine-motor control cannot be underestimated,” she said.

“Being able to manipulate, place together, build, construct, create, and make things is a fundamental part of childhood and developing skills for later in life.

“Too much dependence too early on computer skills at the expense of creativity, moulding play dough, painting, drawing, writing, experimenting with letters can compromise or impede the early development of fine-motor skills.”

“To be able to control a pencil, Texta, pen; to be able to form letters, is an important part of communication throughout life.”

thanks to heraldsun.com.au: Pens being written off as chldren turn to technology. by Cheryl Critchley.

A few weeks ago, Green Trash Can featured one-of-a-kind gifts made from recycled silver cutlery. A spoon ring took my eye.  Linda Taylor uses vintage and antique flatware to create elegant, whimsical jewelry that can be dressed up or down.  I made my purchase online through Etsy:LTCreatesJewelry , and am now in possession of a ring that attracts admirers and I am thrilled with it.

To some craft enthusiasts that is just the name of a popular blog on Etsy, the fast-growing Web site that serves as a marketplace for crafts and vintage goods. When I looked through the Etsy site there were handcrafted pieces of all kinds.

This article appeared in the New York Times: Fashion and Style: That Hobby looks like a Lot of Work. At first I thought how cool, watching up on podcasts, watching old Hitchcock shows and knitting….and then I read 13 hours knitting every day.  I thought of the holey mess growing wider as I drop stitches, unknowingly add stitches and quickly realised this wasn’t for me.  It would be a case of arthritis and other hand complaints as well as knitters version of tennis elbow.

To those with these gifted talents, congratulations on your patience and I am only to willing to check out the Etsy site and make the occasional purchase.

QUIT your day job?

But to Yokoo Gibran, it was an epiphany.

Ms. Gibran, who is in her 30s, had been selling her hand-knit scarves and accessories on the site for less than a year when she decided last November to quit her day job at a copy center in Atlanta. Thirteen months later, she would seem to be living the Etsy dream: running a one-woman knitwear operation, Yokoo, from her home and earning more than $140,000 a year, more than many law associates.

Jealous? How could you not be? Her hobby is her job. But consider this before you quit your day job: at the pace she’s working, she might as well be a law associate.

“I have to wake up around 8, get coffee or tea, and knit for hours and hours and hours and hours,” said Ms. Gibran, who leveraged the exposure she got on the site to forge a deal with Urban Outfitters. “I’m like an old lady in a chair, catching up on podcasts, watching old Hitchcock shows. I will do it for 13 hours a day.” And even after all those hours knitting, she is constantly sketching new designs or trading e-mail messages with 50 or more customers a day.

“Etsy saved my life,” Ms. Gibran said. But, she added, “this is the hardest job I’ve ever had.”

These days, the fantasy of building a career on Etsy, an eBay of sorts of the do-it-yourself movement, is not just the stuff of dreams. Even before the recession, the site, which was founded in Brooklyn in 2005, was riding the “crafting” boom to prominence. When the job market collapsed, many hobbyists who already were selling jewelry or glassware as a sideline suddenly needed a real income.

While most people would find it impossible to meet a mortgage payment selling $8 crocheted mug cozies, some top-sellers on Etsy have moved beyond the stage of earning pocket money and are building careers — in some cases, earning six-figure incomes.

But even the successes add a note of “seller beware.” To build a profitable business on the site, they say — well, it’s a business. You need to build a brand identity, which often means courting design blogs or the news media. You need to manage distribution, which might mean standing in post office lines with a baby on your hip and a garbage bag filled with 30 self-packed boxes to ship. And as with any start-up, you need to maintain the morale of the labor force, which can be particularly challenging when you are the labor force, and the workday runs from “Good Morning America” to “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

“Working from home, people think it’s so easy and great,” said Caroline Colom Vasquez, of Austin, Tex., who last year made $120,000 in sales from her Etsy shop, Paloma’s Nest, which specializes in ceramic and wood collectibles for weddings and other special occasions. But “there’s nobody there to tell you to take a break, or take a vacation.”

This year, she expects her business to have $250,000 in sales, but she will have to divide that with the three employees she just hired because Ms. Vasquez, who has a young daughter, could no longer handle the strain.

“I physically could just not do it in 24 hours,” she said. “My husband and I used to get up at 4 or 5 in the morning before the baby, then stay up till 1 or 2, stamping boxes, making shipping labels.”

As sales heated up for the holidays, Angie Davis, a former project architect in Minneapolis who lost her job last year, said her Etsy shop, Byrd and Belle, which sells handmade handbags and cases for iPods, laptops and cellphones, has “easily matched a month of architecture salary in five days, but I’m also working 16 hours a day.” To deal with the holiday rush, Ms. Davis said, she had to produce 112 cases in 48 hours, which involved turning her loft into a mini assembly line, where she cut leather and stitched and sewed cotton and wool fabric until 10 p.m. “It’s surprising how physical it can be on my core muscles,” she said. To get the work processed in time, she had to call in her mother from Iowa to help make tags and press fabric.

The number of people turning to Etsy as a full-time career is unknown. The site does not track how many of its members try to make a living, and it does not disclose the sales figures for individual sellers, said Maria Thomas, chief executive of Etsy. But over the last year, the number of registered members has more than doubled to 3.75 million, and the Quit Your Day Job blog on Etsy now attracts 2 million page views a month.

Several shop owners interviewed for this article, including Morgan Peterson, who runs a fashion label — Eliza + Axel — on Etsy, view their layoffs from traditional jobs as an opportunity to build a more fulfilling career online. In Ms. Peterson’s case, she lost her job as an assistant designer for Dillard’s and decided to create and sell her own line, made from reclaimed fabrics.

“In fashion school, they tell you you can do anything, they push you to be creative, but as soon as you get a job in a corporate environment, you’re only able to do certain things and it has to make money,” said Ms. Peterson, who said that she supplements her income on Etsy by selling wholesale to several boutiques. “With Etsy, I have my styles that make a lot of money, but I can also put work out there that I do just for creative reasons.”

As with eBay, start-up costs are a lot lower for people opening a “shop” on Etsy than a shop on Main Street; the site charges sellers 20 cents for each item listed and 3.5 percent of each sale. Etsy, which has a user base consisting largely of women, also provides a support network, including several blogs and forums where sellers swap tips and words of encouragement.

A healthy income, however, is far from guaranteed. After Tara Scheuerman was laid off from her job as an office assistant at a college in Milwaukee, she started a company, Cracked Designs, that sells greeting cards and wedding invitations on Etsy. After a slow start, she said she is thrilled to be selling more than 50 cards a week and is optimistic about her long-term earnings, but said she now spends more than 40 hours a week on her line, not only designing and making her products, but tirelessly promoting them on design blogs like Poppytalk and Design*Sponge as well as in magazines (her cards were recently featured in House Beautiful). So far, she said, she is earning about $15,000 to $20,000 a year, which on the low end works out to about $7.25 an hour — the same as Wisconsin’s minimum wage.

“You have to be really realistic with your goals and know you’re probably not even going to make a profit the first couple of years,” said Ms. Scheuerman, 26, who relies primarily on her husband’s income.

Such experiences were the focus of an essay, much-circulated among so-called Etsians, that ran last June in DoubleX, an online lifestyle magazine. In it, the journalist Sara Mosle (also a contributor to The New York Times) argued that Etsy was profiting off unrealistic expectations held by many women. “What Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts,” Ms. Mosle wrote, “but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career.”

But the experiences of at least some of the site’s successes, like Ms. Vasquez, don’t support that view. Still, Ms. Vasquez said, there is an unforeseen psychic tax even when — or especially if — one’s profit outstrips initial expectations. As her business, once a sideline run from the kitchen table, grew into a six-figure powerhouse, her work not only swallowed more rooms of her house, but also her family life. At dinners, she and her husband talked only about business.

“I felt like I was being a bad mother, a bad wife, being all-consumed by business. That was the breaking point,” she said. Ms. Vasquez has found time to exhale, at least occasionally, since hiring a staff. The family even took a trip, the first since she started the business, to the nearby Texas Hill Country.

Still, the challenge is to find balance. “What’s the point of doing something you love,” she asked, “if you are too exhausted to do what you love?”

thanks to the New York Times: Fashion and Style: That Hobby looks like a Lot of Work.

Great article in the New York Times/Personal Tech: ‘Helping Grandpa Get His Tech On’ A reminder to us all that with little help technology can be a comfort  and communication tool for the elderly. [...]

Hawthorn’s AFL Star, Luke Hodge is the ambassador for ‘My Room’, the organisation which raises funds for the Children’s Cancer Centre. [...]

CNM and Mizu join the creative world of Netsuke – There are only about 50 netsuke artists in the world and most of these are Japanese men. However, amazingly enough, one of the best netsuke artists in the world is Susan Wraight and she lives in Melbourne, Australia.

Even the creative world needs to rehydrate with Mizu.

We have seen a radical change in the marketing world in the last 2 years, and its getting harder and harder to ignore the power of conversation. Informal and fun sessions to introduce you into the explosive area of social media – like YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter – increase your confidence, visibility among the new influencers and helps future proof your identity. This intensive, hands-on workshop will also help establish you or your brand in the digital space. For session times and bookings email max@codenamemax.com