Comments (8)

By Mom Unplugged, January 3, 2009 9:18 pm

For me, the New Year inspired many diverse hopes for a better 2009 and beyond. However, it was also the official start of my Selecta Mourning Period.

As I mentioned in a previous post, German toy company Selecta is the first casualty of the overly broad new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). Unable to afford the additional testing required by the CPSIA, Selecta ceased the distribution of its toys in the US market on December 31, 2008.

My prediction is that Selecta is simply the first of many high quality European toy manufacturers who will eventually succumb to the new burdens placed upon them. As for the lovely homemade toys currently available from Etsy sellers, or lesser-known “Mom and Pop” toystores such as Wood Toy Shop, Quiet Hours Toys, Down to Earth Toys, or many other favorites from my Unplugged Toystore list - their future is very uncertain.

Honestly, only mega-manufacturers such as Hasbro or Mattel and their Chinese mass-produced toys will be able to afford to jump through the added hoops. Although these toys might be deemed “safe” at the end of their journey, for the most part, they are not what I want to offer my children.

Since my newly 3 year-old daughter has a January 2nd birthday (so close to Christmas, poor thing!), I decided to buy a farewell Selecta birthday gift for her. I chose the Stellina Star Sorting Puzzle. She really likes puzzles and this is a puzzle and a sorter combined. Put the arms of the star puzzle together, choose an awake face or an asleep face for the star in the middle, and then add the pegs of assorted sizes and colors.

She loves it! At this time, there are only three left at Amazon and I don’t know about other stores. So hurry up and Google Selecta to stock up before all these wonderful German toys are gone.

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To learn more about the new CPSIA and how it affects small and foreign toymakers, read more here: Help Save Handmade Toys in the USA from the CPSIA.

For some suggested improvements: Possible Solutions to Improve the CPSIA.

What can you do to help? Write to your Congress Person or Senator to request a change to the CPSIA which would exclude toys made in the US, Canada or Europe. Here is a sample letter, or compose your own.

Useful links:

Find your Congress Person

Find your Senator

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Comments (14)

By Mom Unplugged, December 22, 2008 8:51 pm

As a child, I remember Christmas being so exciting that I could hardly sleep the night before. We’d have a tree, Christmas stockings and yummy turkey. My Dad would always design a “trail” for me - a treasure hunt with clues - to lead me to my biggest present. Dessert was always my mother’s homemade Christmas pudding with lots of thick cream, almond paste cloaked Christmas cake, and tiny, flaky mince pies (my parents were from England).

As an adult, I managed to spend most of my Christmases at home with my mother and sister (my parents were divorced by then) where it would always be the same as I remembered (minus the trail).

This will be the fourth Christmas since the death of my mother. Each year, my sister and I have struggled with how to make Christmas like we remembered. For a variety of reasons, the first two years were fairly miserable. Last year, I just ran away from it all and ignored Christmas as much as I could.

This year, I feel brave enough to try it again. It will be different. My sister and I have decided that we can’t recreate the same thing without my mother. Those days are gone. I need to do something new (but with a few old elements?).

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time (at least a year) may remember last year’s Christmas/Holidays Unplugged series, so perhaps you know of my internal struggles. I want to create lovely memories and traditions for my children, but hate the commercialism and lack of any meaning.

I think that writing that series of posts really helped me prioritize and come up with a plan. A “year off” from Christmas helped a lot too.

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The plan this year is as follows:

- Tree: Thin tree that needed to be cut from our property anyway - read more: An Ugly Christmas Tree.

- Child Presents: Christmas stockings plus one gift each for the kids from Santa, and a few from us.

NOTE: Without TV, my kids don’t really have specifics on what they want…which is wonderful and difficult at the same time. They sat on Santa’s lap at our town Christmas tree lighting and both asked for “a surprise.” I wonder how many kids do that?

- Adult Presents: Christmas stockings all around. I do the children, my sister and my husband. My sister does her significant other and me. I love the challenge of finding cool little things that they might like that would fit in the tiny space of a stocking. It seems fun and not commercially excessive.

Otherwise, we are not doing adult gifts this year. We are all in the very fortunate position (especially fortunate in light of this year’s economy) of being able to buy whatever we need, and I hate shopping out of a “need to buy something” mentality.

In lieu of gifts, each adult will do a donation to charity for each other adult (to that other adult’s favorite charity). I have even gotten a few other relatives on board with this (even for the kids) which certainly lightens the gift receiving (and giving) burden, is much more in the spirit of the season, and makes me feel that we are actually doing good for the world rather than doing good for Walmart.

- Food: I think I’ll get a small, fresh turkey from our local market (but I’d better get on that right away, especially since the weather is forecast to be lousy). I’ll try to keep it somewhat simple because I want to enjoy the day and not spend it mostly in the kitchen as I remember my mother doing.

Of course, if I can’t get to the store for food, we’ll be having leftovers for Christmas. But snowed-in with leftover pasta might actually make for a completely fun and memorable Christmas!

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This is my overall plan. It may need refining next year…or maybe I’ll just want to run away again. I don’t know. I’ll tell you all how it goes.

Good luck defining (or redefining) your celebration. Happy holidays to all!

Comments (20)

By Mom Unplugged, December 18, 2008 9:47 pm

I have been feeling very un-bloggy lately, hence my silence. Do I really have anything interesting to say? Does anyone care? Is it worth my precious time writing? Hmmm…. Big questions.

So please excuse my absence, but let me talk now about our Christmas tree. It is ugly, yet beautiful. Humble, yet profound.

First a bit of background on my eternal Christmas tree angst. I have always hated the thought of cutting down a living tree to decorate my house for a few weeks and then toss out (even if recycled into mulch). If I didn’t have kids, I wouldn’t have a tree at all. But the tree, and all the ornaments that are rediscovered year after year, are so much a fun and memorable part of a child’s Christmas, that I hate to deny them that.

Yes, we could decorate a ficus, but the idea of singing carols and sipping cocoa around the Christmas Ficus just doesn’t have the same cozy appeal to it. And since I am the kiss of death for houseplants, I’d simply be substituting a fir tree death sentence for that of a ficus.

I have done living trees before and then planted them in the yard (when I had a yard that was not packed full of pine trees already). That was lovely, but they can only be inside for a few days, are heavy, and here - pine trees grow like weeds. No room for more!

For the last 6 years I have had an artificial tree. It was easy, three pieces to put together and lights already on it, but Christmas seems artificial enough to me in so many ways, without a fake tree too. Plus, it always felt kind of nasty to touch and probably oozed all kinds of chemicals. Not very Christmassy.

This year I came up with what I think is the perfect solution, for us anyway. We have so many trees on our property and, as I said above, Ponderosa pines literally grow like weeds here. After a good rain, hundreds of seedlings miraculously appear as you can see in this picture:

Despite my aversion to tree cutting, we are in desperate need of thinning a bit. Fire safety is a HUGE issue here, especially after our close call in 2002. Plus, the smaller trees sap the meager nutrients and scarce water from the more mature trees leaving them tall, but thin and sickly looking.

I don’t want to get into a forest management lecture or debate here, but the truth is that we really need to take out some of the smaller trees that are growing close to the larger ones before a fire does it for us.

So, with that in mind, I had the idea to cut a small one down and make it our Christmas tree. It would eventually be cut anyhow, but at least this way it would go in a blaze of richly adorned glory and be much enjoyed and remembered.

We picked a thin one growing near a mature one and all went out to “help” my husband with the cutting. Despite a bad back and even worse weather that day, he got it done.

Then, “we,” as in my husband - under my direction - cut it in half. The original tree was only about three inches in diameter but probably 16 feet tall with all the branches at the top. We ended up with an 8 foot tall tree that fits nicely in our tall living room.

It was so thin and light that the kids were able to carry it into the house themselves.

The cats thought it was wonderful having their very own tree lying in the middle of the front entryway.

Here is the final result:

It is rather a spindly, thin, pathetic tree, but Ponderosas don’t have a very thick array of branches, especially when young.

However, as my daughter said: “This is my favorite tree ever because you can see the ornaments!” Yes, you can.

This is my favorite tree ever because, although it may not be perfect, we chose it and cut it ourselves, gave it a “new life,” and it cost no money!

I don’t want a perfect Christmas, I just want one the the children will remember fondly, and I hope that they might remember this.

(You can read more about Christmas tree options here: The Great Christmas Tree Dilemma)

Comments (12)

By Mom Unplugged, December 9, 2008 9:34 pm

Are bootleg toys in your future? Don’t laugh. Read on…

It was a sad moment yesterday when I learned via an email from Quiet Hours Toys (a favorite Unplugged Toystore) that one of my very favorite toy manufacturers, German company Selecta, will be leaving the U.S. market as of December 31, 2008.

The new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, passed in August 2008, prohibits phthalates and lead in toys sold in the U.S., mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys, and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.

Sounds great, especially the lead and phthalate part, but there are a few unintended consequences of this broadly-painted solution:

- A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA.
- A work-at-home mom in Minnesota who makes dolls to sell at craft fairs must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.
- A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.
- And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.

- Handmade Toy Alliance

Selecta is the first quality-toy casualty of the new law. Selecta has decided to withdraw from the U.S. market. It’s toys comply with European EN71 and ASTM standards, but meeting the new CPSIA standards would require a cost increase of at least 50%, thus pricing the toys out of the market:

Among the higher costs Selecta said were associated with meeting the CPSIA’s new guidelines were those related to testing procedures for products shipped to the U.S. that are “different than the testing procedures required for the rest of the world, resulting in separate testing for each product destined for the USA”; new shipment labeling regulations that “significantly increases the labor associated with shipping”; and product liability insurance increases “due to changing regulations and their varied interpretations.

- Selecta Exits U.S. Market Over Cost Concerns - Toy industry news: playthings.com

I leave you with an interesting summary of the situation from the email I received:

What this means is small, innovative companies that typically make niche products, will be forced out of business, or forced to narrow their product range and sell to the mass market. Product availability and selection will diminish. We will be primarily left with imported plastic toys from China. Yes, quite ironic isn’t it.

Yes, it is ironic.

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What can you do? The Handmade Toy Alliance offers some useful suggestions and contact links:

Please write to your United States Congress Person and Senator to request changes in the CPSIA to save handmade toys. Use our sample letter or write your own. You can find your Congress Person here and Senator here.

Also (from the email):

URGENT Action:
The Subcommitte that put this law together is meeting to review its implementation on Wednesday. We need to send a message to them to revise the law or its implementation in ways that will maintain the integrity of the safety standards, but will not decimate the children’s natural products market. Here are the details of the meeting:

The Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection will hold a hearing on Wednesday, December 10, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building. The hearing is entitled “Implementation of the CPSIA: Urgent Questions about Application Dates, Testing and Certification, and Protecting Children.” This is an oversight hearing examining implementation of Public Law 110-314 (H.R. 4040, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA)). Witnesses will be by invitation only.
The staff briefing for this hearing will be held on Monday, December 8, 2008, at 4:00 p.m. in room 2322 Rayburn House Office Building.

Here is a link to the list of Committee Members. Please contact your Representative of Congress. If any one of these Representatives on the Subcommittee is YOUR representative, PLEASE be sure to call & email them to voice your concerns about the provisions in the law as they affect you and the children’s products industry in general. Please do this as soon as you are able.

Here is a link to some suggestions for talking to our representatives from WAHM Solutions.

What else can you do? Pass this on in your e-newsletters, in your stores, among your friends. There is much disinformation in the market, and it is up to us to warn consumers and colleagues of the pending disappearance of the natural & specialty toys we have come to rely on in the recent years.

This is a critical time to raise our voices and be heard. Important issues that affect us will be discussed in a public way next week…NOT after Christmas.

What else can you do? Join the Handmade Toy Alliance, join the online community cpsia-central and become informed & involved. Contact the media, discuss this in forums and in your own online communities. It isn’t just small businesses that are at risk, it is the very nature of the toys & products our children & grandchildren will have access to in the future.

I really dislike alarmist statements, but it does seem that a revision of the new CPSIA regulation is essential otherwise there will be no more Unplugged Toystores, no more Etsy toy shops, no more lovely, unique, and creative toys. Made in China plastic junk might well become the only choice here in the United States.

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More information:

From the CPSC - Information on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act

Text of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (H.R. 4040)

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Comments (14)

By Mom Unplugged, December 7, 2008 8:35 pm

This week’s Unplugged Project theme (fluffy) was not premeditated, it just popped into my head.

I wanted an adventure this week so I thought long and hard all week about what to do. Cotton balls? Ordinary. Dryer lint? Flammable. Pom poms? What does one do with pom poms besides add some googly eyes? Not in the mood.

But then I found this: Pom Pom International!

Amy Lamé has a vision. She is trying to bring people of the world together. But how? With music? No. Art? No. What then? Pom poms!! What could be less politically charged and more fun and appealing to humans everywhere, than the humble pom pom! As Amy puts it:

Dealing with differences is much easier with a stress-busting pompom in your hand.

This is what it is all about:

Pom Pom International travels to areas of conflict around the globe. Together, we create whimsical,
non-political, creative balls of fluffy yarn in a gesture of peace and reconciliation. All pom poms are tagged, tracked and sewn together to make the biggest pom pom in the world.

Why not? I love this idea!! A peace pom pom!

If you can’t make it to a live pom pom making event, then you can create your pom pom at home and send it to Amy. Email her a photo of you and your pom pom and she’ll add it to her online gallery.

I remember my mother teaching me how to make pom poms and I have a distinct fondness for them, so I was quite excited to make pom poms for a higher purpose than merely a place to stick googly eyes.

Pom poms are surprisingly easy and fun to make. All you need is some sturdy cardboard (corrugated is best) and leftover yarn:

Cut two matching circles out of the cardboard. Next cut matching circles out of the middle of the original circles so you have a doughnut shape. (NOTE: Our cardboard was from an extra heavy box so I ended up using a dremel tool to cut these, but you really don’t need cardboard that is quite that tough!):

The width of the “ring” portion of your doughnut (distance between outer edge and start of inner hole) will determine the size of your pom pom (bigger band=bigger pom pom). Also, I would advise making your donuts a bit bigger than we did so that the middle hole can be bigger. A larger hole makes it easier to pass the yarn through.

Place your cardboard rings together like a sandwich.

Choose your yarn and cut a length that is several yards/meters long. Roll it into a small ball so that it can easily pass through the center hole. Pass the loose end of the yarn through the hole and hold on to it with your thumb. Wrap yarn tightly around the doughnut like this (once you start wrapping, you can let go of the loose end):

Keep wrapping all around the circle as many times as necessary to completely cover it. Keep going until you can no longer fit any yarn through the hole … or you run out of patience, whichever comes first! The more yarn you use, the thicker and puffier your pom pom will be.

When you finish your first small ball, you can easily add on more yarn by simply threading the loose end through and holding it with your thumb, just as you did before. You can change colors this way too, as I did with my blue and purple pom pom.

When you are through wrapping, cut the strands all the way around the edge of the doughnut with the scissor tips between the two cardboard pieces.

Now wrap a long strand of yarn around the pom pom, between the two sandwiched sections and tie tightly:

And finally, the really exciting part: gently pull apart the two cardboard rings to reveal your completed pom pom. Trim and fluff as necessary, and there you have it! A nice, fluffy, pom pom for peace!

In order to have your pom pom be a part of the giant peace pom pom simply print out a tag for each pom pom from the Pom Pom International website, take a photo of you and your creation for the website’s gallery (send it via email), then ship your tagged pom poms to Pom Pom International in London, England! Full instructions, tag and addresses are here.

Tomorrow after school we will be off to the post office to send our peace pom poms to England. The children are very excited!

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LINKS:

Amy’s explanation and diagram of making a pom pom - very helpful!

Pom Pom International

Pompoms Can Save the Planet - May 6, 2008, The Scotsman Newspaper

By the way, Amy also gratefully accepts donations of any leftover or recycled yarn balls and bits. Send all “orphaned or previously loved yarn” here:

NEW Pom Pom International HQ
106 Lower Marsh
London SE1 7AB
ENGLAND

It will be used for the free pom pom making events.

If you are feeling really enthusiastic, she also seeks Pom Pom International Ambassadors. Can you volunteer to organize a pom pom making booth at a crafts or art fair? How about a club event? The more pom poms, the better.

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Did you do a fluffy Unplugged Project this week? If so, then please post a link to your project post (not just your blog) in Mr. Linky below. If you didn’t participate but would like to learn more, then please do not link, but read about it here.

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The theme for next week’s Unplugged Project will be:

Curly

Have fun!

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