Last Day Shipping…

Last Day for International Shipping is Dec 8th, so get your order in quick. These maps are great for little explorers, durable and washable, ready for all kinds of adventures!

Grab your beautiful Treasure Map HERE

Villa Carton Review & Giveaway

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a great new (to me) site called, Villa Carton. If you love ideas to help your children grow their imagination, you will LOVE this site.

Dutch artists Manon and Ruud van den Broek set up Villa Carton with the intention to design toys that stimulate the imagination, have educational value and are fun to play with. So as you can see, they are right up my alley!

Manon kindly send us one of the great colouring costumes to try out and two others to give away!

Not only do they have great dress up outfits, there are also storage boxes (I am so in love with this kitchen set!), flip dolls and building blocks.

Ebi-kun has had a couple of days off sick this week so it was a great activity to keep him busy. I showed him the kits and said he could pick one, he got really excited and exclaimed that it was a brilliant idea! The costumes are printed on 100% cotton and come with 4 fabric markers. Ebi-kun chose the pirate outfit and got busy.

Ebi-kun said "I think these are really great because kids can pick their favourite colours and colour the outfit in their own design. You can still play in it, even if you don't finish colouring it in all in one day, then you can do some more colouring another day"

The outfits are multi-size aimed at kids from 3-8 years old, they fasten under the arms and at the neck with a ties so they are adjustable depending on the size of the child. There are lots of different styles to choose from, I will keep it a secret the two that I have to give away, that way it will be a nice surprise!

So, how would you like to win an outfit? They would make a perfect socking filler! All you have to do is go over to the Villa Carton website and take a look at their products then come back and tell me which specific item you think your child would like the most. Fill in the form below and I will pick two winners by random generator December 5th, 9am EST. Open worldwide.

If you would like to double you chance at winning, you can enter again over at My Organized Chaos.

The story of a map...

Once upon a time there was a pirate, no I think it was a ninja, noooo maybe it was a knight. Anyway the pirate-ninja-knight would often go on adventures, sailing the high seas, battling baddies, slaying dragons and hunting for treasure. The pirate-ninja-knight would never leave home without his sword and map, the problem was his map was forever getting ripped and damaged and slightly singed by dragon breath.

The pirate-ninja-knight mommy thought about making a more durable map, she suggested a plastic coated map but the pirate-ninja-knight scoffed in her face, as if pirate-ninja-knight's used plastic maps. So the mommy pirate-ninja-knight had another think and decided that what was needed was a cloth map. Something durable, believable and could be washed if the pirate-ninja-knight fell in a swamp on his adventures.

So, the mommy pirate-ninja-knight got to work, first she aged some paper using a combined technique of coffee stains, tea stains and lighter flames. To get a really good ancient look she stained the paper three times, leaving it to dry each time. Then she hand drew the different parts of the map and scanned them into her computer along with a scanned copy of the aged paper. Next she spent several hours conjuring up some Photoshop magic putting the map together and adding the colour. She deliberated for sometime about labelling the islands and other parts of the map but decided against it. She thought (and rightly so, if you don't mind me butting in) that the map should be left blank of names so that the pirate-ninja-knight could make up his own names and that if a copy of the map should fall into non English speaking pirate-ninja-knight's they would be able to use it too.

Once the drawing of the map was finished it was printed out with eco-friendly inks on a nice sturdy linen cotton fabric. But then a problem! the fabric, lovely as it was, was prone to fraying, it is bad enough that the islands were shrinking due to global warming never mind map fraying. So, the mommy pirate-ninja-knight rustled up some anti-fray to coat the edges of the map with and rigged up a special map drying rack. Once the map was dry she set to and hand stitched a ribbon to the map so it could be rolled up and tied when not being used.

The map was such a big hit with the pirate-ninja-knight and his friends that the mommy pirate-ninja-knight didn't think it was fair that only one pirate-ninja-knight should have a map so she got cracking and made lots of them.

If you would like a copy of the map for you little pirate-ninja-knight then you can get one by clicking on any of the words map in the story.

And you don't have to take the word of the mommy-ninja-pirate that they are great, listen to what the little  treasure hunters around the of the world have to say.....

"I love my pirate map because it came with treasure"  

                                                           Kanai (6) Texas

 "We had the boat, the eye patch and the cutlass; all we needed was a real treasure map and now we have one"  

                                                            H & N (6 & 8) Japan
                                                       

"Me and my sister use my map to help us find pirate treasure. We love it!"                                                

                                                            George (5) Lancashire, UK
                                                       

"My little pirates have had many happy hours of treasure hunting with this map. It is a wonderful idea for imaginative play, well made and a great addition to their dressing up box" 

                                                             Lesley Robertson, Manchester
                                                
And, because now you know how much time and effort went into creating this very special map and because the mommy pirate-ninja-knight thinks you are lovely, she is offering a 10% discount until the end of the month. Just put pirateninjaknight into the coupon code box when you check out.

The End