Favourite things - Christmas gift guides

I don't want to be alarmist, but there are less than five weeks left until Christmas. *Insert horrified yell here.* If I have to even consider another one of those repackaged-to-look-vintage pointless office nicknacks and ye olde board games that they stack in dump bins around the entrances of department stores as gifts for the hard-to-buy-for friend, I may cry. So, as much for my sake as yours, I've gathered together today what I think are the best five gift guides floating around the Internet. In these you'll find unique, one-of-a-kind and affordable gifts, as well as gifts you can make and gifts you can bake, PLUS some discount codes. 1. Good stuff

Pip Lincoln's (of Meet Me at Mike's) fabulous 'good stuff' guide is out again, and it's chock full, with 125 pages of things to make and things to make and things to read.

2. IHOD holiday gift guide

Anna from In Honor of Design (IHOD) has scoured the Internet for affordable gift options and handmade ideas, and includes exclusive discount codes in her 2012 holiday gift guide.

3. For book lovers

This is a cute list of the season's best gifts for book lovers from Design Mom. It will be particularly useful if those book lovers are also foodies, crafters, teenagers, parents, little ones or artists.

4. Hip and handmade

Get your craft on with the girls from Craft Pack's digital book, A Hip, Handmade Holiday. It costs just $10 to download, and includes more than 18 projects and 100 printable stickers, patterns, gift tags and more.

5. Affordable art

Recently I published a little post about 20x200, a wonderful and ever-changing collection of affordable art for the masses. They've put together a little guide with art for everyone on your list, from geeks to wanderers, and sports fans to fashionistas.

ps. Here are some more great gift lists from Etsy:

* 25 gifts under $25 * Editor's picks * Gifts for difficult dads

Aaaaaaand more lists of five favourite things.

Everything is amazing and nobody's happy

This clip just gave me a big ole belly-laugh. It made my morning and I hope it makes yours, too.

"Everything is amazing and nobody is happy" by Meowbay

"Everybody on every plane should constantly be going 'Oh my god! Wow!'... You're sitting on a chair in the air."

ps. Simpler days. Photograph by Charles W. Chushman is of New York in 1942, looking up 4th Ave from Astor Place with Cooper Union at right, from here. More about this incredible collection here.

Looking for love again

I was living in New York when the global financial crisis hit in 2008. The impact was almost immediate, and very tangible. A couple of months into the crash I took a walk with the dog around my neighbourhood and took photos of the shops that had recently closed down. It was one of the saddest series I'd ever made. Some of these places were New York icons. I would think to myself, "Imagine what those walls have witnessed. The conversations, the secrets, the stories."

Then recently I came across artist Candy Chang's Looking for Love Again interactive art project, and it reminded me of that walk.

The project focused on a building in Fairbanks, Alaska, which had stood vacant and silent for more than a decade. But once upon a time, this building had pulsated with life. It had been both an apartment complex and a hotel, and it housed a lot of memories.

Chang wrapped the building in a giant plea, "Looking for Love Again," and invited the people of Fairbanks to share their memories of the building on two big blackboards that were nailed around its walls.

"A lot of family memories stayed here for 30 day! Waiting to have my son who will be 17 years," someone wrote.

And another: "In memory of my grandparents Rudy and Mary Hill Dad Jay Hill Uncle Jack Hill who built this building with lots of love and hard work."

And this one: "Remember when the Pipeline Club was on top & women could be 'guests' but not 'members'?"

And simply: "A place 4 ppl to live their dreams and be happy."

Buildings play such an integral part in our lives. There's a reason we have a saying in English, "if these walls could talk..." Just imagine, for a moment, if they could. Oh the stories they could tell!

All images from Candy Chang's project used with permission, from Civic Center.

Meals on wheels - Mr Burger

I need to preface this by admitting that I'm no burger aficionado. But I think I may actually have discovered burger nirvana. That, or I've seriously been underestimating this meal-choice over the years. Recently I decided to eat my way through the menus of all the food trucks in Melbourne. It's a tough job, but I'm willing to make the sacrifice for you guys. You're welcome.

So today when I found out that the Mr Burger truck was only a couple of kilometres away, at the Barkly Square shopping centre in Brunswick, I strapped Madeleine into the pram and we hit the pavement together (not literally, you understand).

The car park of a shopping centre under heavy construction wasn't exactly the most picturesque or comfortable place for lunch, but oh my goodness that was one good burger. The unpleasant memories of all my previous burger experiences just seemed to melt away.

This patty wasn't sloppy, it wasn't fatty, it wasn't dry: it was just super tasty. This bun wasn't too sweet, it wasn't stale, it wasn't soggy: it was just the perfect book-end to all the fresh fillings. Next, add pickles, and mustard, and tomatoes, and lettuce, and and and...

Five minutes later:

Madeleine slept through the entire experience, blissfully unaware that her mother was undergoing a culinary conversion moment. As I walked away licking my fingers, she woke up singing to herself, which is her new thing. It was super cute.

Dear future me

Madeleine and I took a stroll through Chinatown last week. Apparently, Melbourne's Chinatown is the longest continuous Chinese settlement in the western world. What does that mean, do you think? Do other Chinese settlements stop being Chinese and then start again? I am confused. But I digress. On Little Bourke Street, we came across this masked lady and her little wooden caravan. She invited me to sit down, and handed me an iPod with headphones. Madeleine slept. Around me, the hustle and crowds of Chinatown softly receded. Instead, there was music. And a little girl's voice.

"I am eight," she said. "In 20 years, I will be the same age as the lady you met here." The little girl went on to dream about what her 28-year-old self would be like. What she would do. Who she would be.

The masked lady held Madeleine's pram for me while I crawled inside the caravan.

Inside was a typewriter, and a lot of white. White walls, white paper, and a ceiling adorned with white detritus. Little scraps of white paper covered the white walls, and on each of them was a message. A wish, an instruction, a question. There were no fortune cookies, but there were plenty of fortunes.

The little girl still spoke in my ear. What would I tell my self of 20 years in the future, she asked me, if I could? She invited me to use the typewriter to write a message for future me, and pin it to the wall with all the others.

Many had been there before me.

Outside, Madeleine dreamed on. The masked lady greeted a friend. Chinatown hurried past. I tried to think about what I would tell future me. I considered and rejected all kinds of semi-profound ideas. But in the end, it came down to this:

"Don't forget to laugh, love."

Because sometimes, I need to have a sense of humour about life. I hope my future self holds on to that. And because I always want to remember to actively love, never to take those I love the most - and who love me the most - for granted.

Then Madeleine woke up so I crawled out of the caravan, handed the ghostly voice of the eight-year-old girl back to the masked lady, and re-entered the present.

What would you tell future you, if you could?

UPDATE: the masked lady gave me a tiny white scroll as I left, with more information about this project, but I managed to lose it before I even opened it! But after some extensive Internet searching (with a host of strange keywords - I got there in the end via "future caravan melbourne art"), I found the source.

Dumb ways to die

Melbourne's train network, Metro Trains, has produced this kinda cute and kinda disturbing song to discourage people from doing silly, dangerous things around trains (like jumping the tracks, standing near the edge of the platform, driving around barriers at level crossings: apparently people do all these things!). The song is called Dumb Ways to Die. There is also a website, here. And a bunch of gifs on Tumblr, here. What do you think? Will it work?

Daisy chains

Please pardon this proud (step) mama post. When Em turned 14 in July this year, she asked us for a ukelele as her present. She taught herself to play it. She wrote a song. So, to take you into the weekend, here is some sweet music from Madeleine's very beautiful big sister.

Happy weekend. xo

Favourite things - go green

Back after a six-month hiatus, I bring you: Favourite Things Friday, a themed collection of clever, inspiring and beautiful things seen around the Internet during the week. Ta da! Today's collection celebrates spring and all things green and growing. Have a wonderful weekend, dear friend. I'm off to pot some herbs.

1. Macramé memories

Everyone had macramé in their homes when I was growing up. Owls, plant-hangers and abstract patterns were all popular. We'd learn macramé for craft in school, carefully knotting the rope together and selecting wooden beads to decorate the tails that dangled down. I wonder how many mothers out there received macramé plant-hangers for Mothers Day. It must be millions.

Anyhoo, it's kind of nostalgic and nice to think they're coming back, don't you agree? I certainly wouldn't say no to any of these beautiful neon-hued hangers from Kitiya Palaskas in Sydney, first seen on the Etsy blog.

2. The greenhouse

I recently discovered the blog of fellow Melbourne mama Jody, Lemon Rhodes. Jody and I have seen one another around the traps, in blog forums on Facebook, on Instagram etc, and I met her briefly at a dinner the other night - just long enough to say "hello my name is" as I ran out the door to feed Madeleine - but didn't realise who she was until later. Her family and her blog are just beautiful. During the Melbourne Cup holiday, they all got planting in a greenhouse. This post made me wish all over again that I had more than a postage stamp's worth of space outside my house.

3. Colourful clay pots

I see DIY tutorials on the Internet all the time, and so often I think they look exactly right. Beautiful, nostalgic, handmade. Then I try them and they look like they were made by a three-year-old. Which would be really cute if they WERE made by a three-year-old, but not so cute from the hands of a grown-up. Still, I am rather tempted to try my hands at making these Polymer clay pot-holders. They are just so darned pretty and they would look so lovely hanging above the window in our bedroom. Alternatively, I could wait until Madeleine turns three...

4. Succulent shelves

Aren't these shelves beautiful? Given my general DIY-challenged state of being (see above), I'm not even going to consider making them. But I had to share them because they were so lovely. And maybe you have more crafty carpent-y skills than I do.

5. Botanical notebooks

I have a weakness for vintage botanical prints. There are vintage botanical prints in frames in our bedroom. More on cards and paper I have collected. I like to go to antique print stores and look through the original botanical prints (that I could never afford to buy). If I had botanical-printed notebooks like these, I would have to call them "field books" instead, and pretend I was an explorer. Jolly good, old chap.

ps. Go here for more favourite things collections

Let's talk about pen pals

A year ago or maybe a bit longer I picked up a book in a second-hand store. According to the pencil marks inside, I paid $10 for it. I had never heard of the book, and the only reason it caught my eye was because the cover was remarkably similar to that of my own book Airmail, which had just been published. The book was called 84 Charing Cross Road, by Helene Hanff. I thought at the time it was fiction, but it turned out to be so much more.

It was a book of letters, spanning 20 years, between Helene Hanff, a kind-hearted, sharp-witted, book-loving writer living in New York, and various members of staff (and in time their families) of Marks & Co Booksellers, a London dealer in rare out-of-print and antiquarian books.

"Dear Madam," the Marks & Co manager wrote to Helene on 25 October, 1949, "The three Hazlitt essays you want are contained in the Nonesuch Press edition of his Selected Essays and the Stevenson is found in Virginibus Puerisque. We are sending nice copies of both these by Book Post and we trust they will arrive safely in due course..." All very formal and proper.

Then on November 3, Helene replied:

"The books arrived safely, the Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves, I'm almost afraid to handle such soft vellum and heavy cream-colored pages... I never knew a book could be such a joy to the touch... A Britisher whose girl lives upstairs translated the £1/17/6 for me and says I owe you $5.30 for the two books. I hope he got it right... Will you please translate your prices hereafter? I don't add too well in plain American, I haven't a prayer of ever mastering bilingual arithmetic."

In a postscript she added, "I hope 'madam' doesn't mean over there what it does here."

And so a friendship was born.

A month later on 8 December 1949, still not even knowing the name of the person to whom she wrote, Helene sent a letter enclosing payment for another order, and added:

"Now then. Brian [British boy friend of Kay upstairs] told me you are all rationed to 2 ounces of meat per family per week and one egg per person per month and I am simply appalled. He has a catalogue from a British firm here which flies food from Denmark to his mother, so I am sending a small Christmas present to Marks & Co. I hope there will be enough to go round, he says the Charing Cross Road bookshops are 'all quite small.'"

What a thoughtful woman Helene must have been. Can you imagine? But wait, there's more. Turn the page: 9 December, 1949.

"CRISIS! I sent that package off. The chief item in it was a 6-pound ham, I figured you could take it to a butcher and get it sliced up so everybody would have some to take home. But I just noticed on your last invoice it says. 'B. Marks. M. Cohen.' Props. ARE THEY KOSHER? I could rush a tongue over. ADVISE PLEASE!"

Anyway, the book is adorable. Inspiring. Heartwarming. When it ended, somewhat abruptly and sadly, I discovered there was a second story in my little paperback. Called The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, this is Helene's diary from when, in 1971, she finally made it to London to set foot on the old streets she had longed walk all her life, and meet some of the friends she had made after 20 years of being pen pals.

If you love books, love snail mail, love friendship, try to find yourself a copy. You'll thank me.

Meanwhile, these photographs are from a package I received in the mail yesterday from my own pen pal, Astrid (of Etsy shop Flora Likes Soap), who lives in Germany. She writes to me about her life, her studies, her travels in Italy and Switzerland and Sweden, the books she loves, and how her family celebrates at various times of year. I love receiving these letters, and slowly getting to know Astrid as a person through her words and thoughtful gifts.

Do you have any pen pals? Tell me your snail mail stories!

Dreams about flying

Aren't they the best? And isn't it a little bit heartbreaking when they end?

GRAVITY // UN RÊVE DE DEMAIN from Filip Piskorzynski on Vimeo.