Part of my summer fun is attending art fairs. I have such admiration for the artists who spend much of their summer on the road, navigating from one fair to the next, packing and unpacking their artwork… So what happens once the season is over? In a continued effort to provide independent artists with more visibility, here is a little shout out to give them some extra exposure to reach art lovers outside of the art fair sphere.

I love Groupon. I wrote about it earlier this year: Groupon is the online deal-of-the-day buying collective that offers substantial discounts to various types of local businesses.  I have since made lots of nicely discounted purchases through it. In fact, Groupon has helped me get acquainted with the new city that I’ve moved to, as I discovered cool restaurants in yet unexplored neighborhoods, got great deals on activities like paintball battles (for my son’s birthday), architecture cruise (to take visiting family along) and golf (for the husband).
Since Groupon’s inception, there have been a dozens of copycats that have crept up [...]

By Audrey van Petegem, Senior Editor
I recently went camping for five days  with my sister, her daughter and my two daughters. On the third day, it rained so heavily, with no sign of letting up, that we decided to head to town. We ended up in a Wal-Mart Superstore, in the pharmacy department. My niece, Alex, discovered these great Nail Color Pens by Sally Hansen. We grabbed a bunch of colors with some of the Nail Art Pens and headed back to the campground for an impromptu Mani-Pedi party.
The pens were so easy to use. My 4 and 6 year olds had no [...]

Seems like someone got a new marketing team… Mention “Waterpik” and I used to get visions of the water-spurting funny, tickly contraption that sat on the bathroom counter in the 1970’s (exactly like the one seen here). And then, as far as I was concerned, the company fell off the radar (no dentist ever recommended it again)… that is until they announced the SinuSense (wrote about that here).
And now, they are “rebranding” the Waterpik as the instrument for the “Evolution of floss”. I always thought that was exactly what the Waterpik was, a water flosser, but perhaps the company was [...]

This film is not out yet, but look for it to be released this fall. It’s one of those really “important” films, like Food, Inc. and an Inconvenient Truth (same filmmaker Davis Guggenheim) “Waiting for Superman” is one of those must-see movies. Through real-life children’s stories, this documentary tells us how the U.S. school system, once the best in the world, is now utterly failing our kids – to the point of calling the schools “drop-out factories” and “academic sinkholes”. Still, it seems that the documentary offers hope as Guggenheim explores alternative, innovative approaches that could revive the system.
The current [...]

We are finally getting a wee bit smarter about our exposure to UV rays. Still , it seems that we need to refine our sunscreen applying practices. For instance, did you know that it takes a full 30 minutes for the skin to properly absorb sunscreen?  So you need to apply it BEFORE you hit the beach. And then, TWO hours is the maximum amount of time that you should go before applying sunscreen all over again. That’s valid for sunscreen of any strength because, as you know, anything over SPF 30 is of marginal added value (Source: Chatelaine Magazine, [...]

By Audrey van Petegem, Senior Editor
Connie Henderson created Amber’s Garden Ready-to-Plant Gardens because her daughter, Amber, loved to garden with her.  Being a parent to small children myself, I love to garden with them also, but the concept of spreading the seeds around evenly is lost on them.  Usually we get a clump of little sprouts and the rest void of growth.
Connie came up with this great idea of threading burlap mats with seeds.  The whole burlap mat is placed on a layer of dirt and then covered with dirt.  Each mat shows what you are planting and where.  There [...]

As a Canadian, the Tilley’s travel sportswear brand was to me as iconic as, say, Land’s End is here in the US. It’s only in doing a little research for this article that I realized that the company has only been around since 1980. Only? Yeah, that’s 30 whole years, but in my mind the Tilley Hat is legendary and in general, legends are older than 30 years old…
My husband is on his third Tilley Hat. Not because any of them have been worn out, but rather because he has been losing them in transit. No other hat will do [...]

As a marketing professional by day, I’ve really enjoyed observing how the big brands are applying themselves at  enhancing their social presence through iPhone apps (ok, and some on other smartphones too). Here, I’m not talking about the Netflix, or the NPR or the Alice.com kind of apps that simply extend online websites functionalities to the mobile world. I love and use these too. But  what I really admire, are companies that developed creative, entertaining and/or useful applications that  are not meant to create anything but a better experience with the brand and increase goodwill… for free in most cases. [...]

By Audrey van Petegem, Senior Editor
Are your kids already saying they are bored and you’re thinking, wahhhhhhh? There’s another six weeks of summer? Besides preaching the usual “only boring people get bored” singsong (not so effective on a three year old anyways), you will want to turn to woojr.com for some great easy-to-do craft ideas and printable activities to do at home or to take on the road. Woo!Jr is a network of craft sites that proposes crafts for kids aged 2 to 13. We like that this site is not only for the little ones.
If you’re like us, you [...]