Mother Goose is a favorite in our house. Both my two- and four-year-old girls keep taking out our Mother Goose nursery rhyme books, and can recite their favorites. I’ve realized that nursery rhymes fill each and every day of preschoolers. When putting on shoes, it’s “One shoe on and one shoe off, Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son John.” At the park, it’s “See Saw Margery Daw.” When brushing teeth, it’s “One two buckle my shoe” all the way up to “Nine ten a big fat hen” so I can keep their attention long enough to brush all the top and bottom teeth. When learning to jump into the swimming pool, it’s “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.” At nighttime, it’s “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” or “Wee Willie Winkie.”

We recently discovered Mother Goose Club which has produced some fantastic videos of the classic children’s nursery rhymes. They include lively characters like Jack B. Nimble, Mary Quite Contrary, Little Bo Peep, and Baa Baa Sheep. Their renditions of the nursery rhymes include lively music, engaging singing and dancing, wonderfully creative costumes, and colorful graphics. Their website also includes all the lyrics, printable coloring pages, and some fun activities to do with preschoolers. Mother Goose Club was produced by Sona Jho, a former PBS producer, educator, and mom of three.

Caroline

Decorating for the holidays was big business in my house growing up. I have fond, albeit cold, memories of trekking down to the local tree lot in the Massachusetts winter snow to find the perfect tree.

Even though many years have passed, it still just doesn’t feel like the holidays to me unless I have a Christmas tree in my house. My husband, who grew up in India and Africa, doesn’t have quite the same appreciation for my Christmas tree escapades. To him, it is another year that he has to brave the cold (we live in San Francisco!!) and watch idly by as I inspect every tree in the lot in search of the perfect specimen. I inevitably choose one that is too tall for our ceiling, at which point, we must hack the top of the tree off with a bread knife (because we don’t have a saw and also, because I never learn).

This year, however, he turned over a new leaf and promised to try and get into the holiday spirit. Instead of a Christmas party, we decided to host a French Laundry party (in which I will attempt to make recipes from the French Laundry cookbook) for a few of our friends. Unfortunately our fancy dinner party upped the ante for our tree decor this year.

Over the Thanksgiving break, I spent countless hours combing the web for beautiful and innovative holiday decorating ideas and I am shocked to say that I found very few. In the end, I loaded up on supplies from Paper Source, Arch and Target and spent a day locked in a room hallucinating to the fumes of spray mount. When I emerged, I was covered in a pound of glitter, my socks were sticking to the carpet, but I had a whole new set of ornaments for my tree. I should mention that my husband thinks I’m crazy.

Tips for Decorating a Christmas Tree

Try and choose a tree that is symmetrical
Check for large holes, broken or dead branches.

Tie branches to close up bare spots
I have never found a tree that doesn’t have at least one or two bare spots. To fix this, I will often use fishing line or florist wire to secure branches so that they fill the empty spots.

Plan your color scheme
I usually have a color scheme in mind for my tree. In the past I have done various shades of orange, gold and pink, but this year I wanted a slightly colder looking tree, so I chose silver, white and pink.

I still love this faux tree pictured on the cover of Blueprint Magazine a few years back:

Another lovely fake tree via Apartment Therapy:

Choose some consistent ornaments
I usually pick 3-4 different ornament styles that will be my base and mis in unexpected ornaments at the end. This gives the tree a kind of consistency.

Treat it like a design project
If you are decorating with children, this is a hard one. I often decorate in color groups — all the silver, all the pink, all the white, for example, so that I can make sure that there isn’t an over-abundance of one color or one style on any particular part of my tree.

Match your presents to your tree
Once you have a color scheme, wrap your presents to pull out the colors in your tree.

Make your own ornaments
This year I used ordinary silk flowers that I picked up at Michaels Craft Store. I gave these a little extra shimmer by spraying them with spray mount and dusting them with glitter. Other ornaments on my tree include collaged pieces, snowflakes, and cardboard letters covered in glitter.

Happy Holidays!
Duck Duck Moose

Baby shower finds

I love Etsy (I mean, who doesn’t?) I recently read an article about how it was started as a hobby by a guy who wanted to provide his crafty-type friends a place to post their beautiful creations — and then it grew and grew beyond his wildest expectations. Now you can pretty much find anything on Etsy and once you start searching, you’ll find it is an addictive time-suck. As an avowed knitter of cat-sweaters, I have often thought of creating my own shop (except for the fact that I pretty much think I am the only person on the planet insane enough to kit sweaters for her cats :)

Anyway, I digress. I recently came across these adorable cut out/pop up place mats that I wanted to share. Inspired by children’s pop-up books, these laser-cut, eco-friendly place mats are beautifully designed.

We at Duck Duck Moose had much to celebrate this weekend — not only did Duck Duck Moose turn 1 year old this week, but our newest app, Itsy Bitsy Spider, broke into the top 50 paid apps in the App Store! When we started Duck Duck Moose a year ago, we never could have imagined that we would have three apps in the top 300 of all paid apps. It is times like these that make me want to quote one of the greatest cult classics of all time — “our little baby is all growns up, and grows up and grows up!”

Itsy bitsy Spider on the AppStore:
http://tinyurl.com/itsyspider

Old MacDonald on the AppStore:
http://tinyurl.com/oldmacdonald

Wheels on the Bus on the AppStore:
http://tinyurl.com/wheelsonbus

K, I have to admit that this is a bit of a shameless plug, but we are kind of over the moon excited about being nominated for the iPod/iPhone Developer of the Year Award! (!!!!) If you have enjoyed our iPhone apps, please consider voting for us online (click the button below to vote). It takes less than a few seconds and will bring you loads of good karma!

When we started our little company over a year ago we began with nothing more than a strong desire to create quality products and a keen excitement to work with each other. In the past year we have learned a lot, our ambition has grown as has our dedication to developing high quality and engaging products. The most rewarding aspect of our our work at Duck Duck Moose has been working with children.

Thanks to all those who have helped us along the way and to the parents and educators who have contacted us with feedback and praise. Keep it coming, we love to hear from you!

We have had a lot going on at Duck Duck Moose in the past two months. C and M’s older daughter recently turned 4 years old (how fast time goes) — Happy birthday Elizabeth! Michael has been burning the candle at both ends by juggling his job at a start-up, concerts with his trio and a full time job at Duck Duck Moose. Caroline has been handling a full schedule with her usual grace — raising two little ones by day and working on DDM at night (sometimes until 2-3am) and I have been freelancing and illustrating combined with a 6 week trip to India (you wouldn’t believe the scarcity of working wifi!). Amid all this craziness (and with little sleep) we somehow managed to create Itsy Bitsy Spider — a new musical iPhone app for kids.

Itsy is a bit different than our other two apps. The illustration style has more depth — the artwork was drawn in Illustrator and all of the gradients, textures and shadows were added manually in Photoshop. In addition, Itsy functions more like an interactive movie of sorts with panning from screen to screen that is initiated by touching the star character — the spider, all to the tune of the popular children’s classic.

Everything on the screen is interactive. We added many new elements to engage little ones in a variety of learning activities:

- Count from 1 to 10 as a squirrel builds his house
- Find hidden eggs on a scavenger hunt
- Make music with musical eggs that play 12 notes
- Stack hats on the spider’s head
- Listen to classical music with violin and cello
- Record your own singing!

For more screen captures and information on our new app, please visit our website: duckduckmoosedesign.com

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, please try it out and let us know what you think. We have gotten so much great feedback (and creative ideas) from our customers!

ccording to Greystripe, a mobile ad network, 29.5% of all iPhone users are “iPhone Moms”. It is no wonder, when there has been an explosion of apps marketed towards Moms from educational apps for kids to apps that help you track feedings, diapers and sleep schedules. Read the original article on Tech Crunch: Is The iPhone Mom The New Soccer Mom?

I just discovered this really cool site called Personas where you can search your name on the web and it will return a profile of what it finds. I searched my own name and it found my professional affiliations, illustrations and other various things.

Here is the profile for Duck Duck Moose:

What is it?
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

am *finally* getting around to blogging about some of the beautiful things I saw at the Renegade Craft Fair last month. We have been flat out crazed the past month finishing up our new Old MacDonald iPhone app for kids and that’s my excuse (or at least that’s what I am going with anyway).

So, back to the Renegade Craft Fair — it was a great turn out this year with loads of beautiful stuff and more vendors than ever. I bought lots of lovely little items — a knitted neck cozy with pom poms (an item that I felt I would surely whither up and die if I did not own) and a butterfly necklace (which I am wearing as I type this entry). There was a lot of great stuff for little ones, but one of my favs was the Dee&Lala letterpress wall art for nurseries. The illustration is fresh and modern and she has lots of different designs (more than what is on her site).

She also has some lovely letterpressed clocks for sale.

Happy Friday!

Nicci

wo years ago when my closest friend was pregnant with her daughter, another friend and I decided to host her baby shower. It is a recognized fact among all my friends that I am kind of a stickler for details and I don’t really know how to do anything half way (I once spend 4 hours sorting mini colored gobstobbers for an Alice in Wonderland launch party because I didn’t like the way the red and yellow gobstobbers looked with the blue and green). Luckily, my co-host, not only loves good design, but was also endowed with an incredible amount of patience.

We met early on to lay down the ground rules – no cheezy games, no pink and blue baby stuff — we wanted Cheryl’s baby shower to be modern and hip. We were inspired by a recent article in Blueprint Magazine and decided that the theme of the shower would be Modern Tea. We made small finger sandwiches, shopped at thrift stores for mismatched tea cups and spend a few hilarious nights over bottles of wine making tissue paper pom poms and folding origami cranes which we suspended from the ceiling in my living room. All in all, the shower was a success and it is an event I look back on fondly for two girls (my friend and her daughter) that I really love.

INSPIRATION

Modern Baby Shower article in Blueprint Magazine
There are lots of great ideas here. We actually made a version of the mobile to hang over the table.

Beautiful source of inspiration from Thoughtful Day

Luscious Lemon Baby Shower Invites — gorgeous and creative! Via Design Mom

There is lots of beautiful inspiration to be had by theme on Martha Stewart. I particularly like the French Country theme.

La Tartine Gourmande
I love, love, LOVE this site by foodie and photographer Bea. Every time I throw a dinner party, I find a way to work in at least one of her recipes.

For Cheryl’s baby shower we made the Chocolate cupcakes with Lavender Chantilly (I made mini versions with raspberries instead of strawberries on the chantilly) and the Raspberry and Black Sesame Tuiles to complement some of our tea selections (be aware that these need to be made the day of the event or they become soft).

Chicago-based Cake Girls makes the most beautiful cakes I have ever seen. I noticed them several years ago when they started making these purse-shaped architectural cakes (amazing). They now have a line of cakes specifically for Baby showers.

In keeping with our theme, we bought our cake from the famed Miette Bakery in San Francisco, which makes beautiful and heavenly cakes.

We found an incredible selection of tea sandwiches on epicurious. For other great places to find creative recipes check Fresh365 and Dana Treat.

We purchased most of the papers for the pompoms, invites, mobiles and other items at PaperSource

Cool wine glass lamp shades by Charles + Marie add ambiance to any table.

Pom poms are easy to make with a little tissue paper and enough time. You can find pretty good instructions on Martha Stewart’s website or if you don’t trust you cutting skills you can buy a kit on Etsy.

A few beautiful baby shower invites from TinyPrints

Minted.com has such beautiful invites that I had trouble picking which ones to feature

I adore the modern design of these baby shower games by Cluster Design.