Travel tips: Marking the map

So this is an awesome tip courtesy of my mom. It's also the last of the tips for the week. Super easy but I don't know why I had never thought of it before. Just get a map of the place you're going and mark all the places you want to check out.

As you can see this is the Manhattan bus map. We put all the places from a travel book we bought (and Aveda because I needed some shampoo) so that we could see where they were in relation to each other. This map also has the Subway stops just in case. But I like to take the bus while we're in the city so that I can check out all the cool architecture from the windows. I'm also a spatial person and I get super turned around using the Subway. I'd much rather walk than go underground.

I used this trick on our more recent trip to NYC and noted all the shops I wanted to check out in the Garment District. I just printed out a map image from the Google maps search I did of the most central location and made sure it had all the other streets on it. When the day was over, I just recycled the paper.

This little tip also worked exceptionally well when we spent a day in Old San Juan in Puerto Rico. There is a lot going on in that small area but with the toddler in tow, we couldn't check out everything so I mapped it all out beforehand so we could make more informed decisions once there. For that day trip, I just used a trolley map that I found online. I actually think this is a brilliant idea and now you can see where I got my smarts from.

Summer NYC: M & J Trimmings

So this is the last of the haul from our trip to New York City: all from M & J Trimmings. I first heard of this awesome shop from a cute little book called The Curious Shopper's Guide to New York City that I bought for my mom before one of our visits. The book is full of lovely little tidbits and I'm hoping to steal it from my mom next time I'm home but the store itself is full of so many more lovely tidbits that I was a bit overwhelmed.

As you can see, the wild child loved it too. She loves helping me sew so she actually wasn't even that wild in there. She was super good and chose well.

I picked up some beautiful grosgrain ribbon for the dress (still can't decide but I think that one at the top is getting 86'ed) and that cool raspberry trim because I couldn't resist it. The salespeople were super nice and very helpful. They were also great with the kid being in the store. It was getting late and we were all hungry so I didn't get to check out the entire room of buttons but that was probably a good thing.

NYC Summer: Tinsel Trading

During my lunch hour at work, I read blogs and follow links and just get lost in it all sometimes. Back in April I read this post over at the Colette blog about Tinsel Trading and I just had to go there. Unfortunately, I don't have any good photos of the shop but Mr. Lemon kept the wild child occupied while I shopped around. She had a blast looking at all the bins full of bits. We bought her a sparkly letter Z for the alphabet in her room. I could have spent a million dollars.

Luckily, I didn't. But I did pick up some gorgeous ribbon. The striped grosgrain is to go with what I'll show you tomorrow. The yellow velvet on the far left is to spruce up some binders in my office. The wide brown velvet was just too gorgeous to pass up, the yellow striped velvety ribbon was really cheap, and who can see super wide orange ric rack and not buy it? Panda is in the shot because my little helper thought it was important. But can you see my yellow theme? How weird, huh? I've never really been into that color much before but I picked up a good bit of it on the trip.

Overall, I just loved this shop and will try to pop in every time I'm in Manhattan.

Stalk us in Manhattan

We'll be at Vida's Market on Saturday. It's at PS41 in Greenwich Village. If it's nice the show be at the playground on the corner of Greenwich and Charles.

This market is only for kids stuff only so the screenprinted yeti tees are staying here but I've been hard at work on lots of new stuff. There are some great vendors and I'm really looking forward to picking up so cute stuff for Baby Lemon.