With my new business of selling Thirty-One Gifts as an Independent Consultant I have not had as much time and energy to put into Crafty Moms Share. Over the summer I thought and prayed and discussed what to do. Hazel really wants me to keep it going. I considered stopping it. When I started this blog in 2011 I was sharing things I was doing with Hazel and she was only 2.5 years-old. Now she is 10.5 and does a lot on her own. We stopped Sharing Saturday because of the low participation and Crafty Weekends is also dwindling. I love having others share their crafts and ideas but link parties seem to be a bit of a thing of the past. Then I also feel pressure to work on book reviews and I realized I have been getting too many books to review and many do not motivate me to review them, so we decided to cut back on book reviews as well as how many we accept. We also discussed what we would do with Crafty Moms Share. One of our most popular series ever has been Fairy Tales in Different Cultures. While we looked at a few fairy tales we really focused on Cinderella. She was Hazel's favorite princess at the time and there are so many different versions easily available and most are in picture books which were perfect for Hazel at the time. Now she has a few different favorite princesses. Sleeping Beauty (Aurora) and the Frog Princess (Tiana) are among the top ones. So we are going to restart this series and look at some of the other fairy tales a bit more. I even gave our button a new look for it. What do you think?
While I love fairy tales and love that Hazel still enjoys them I also feel it is important to look at real life and how to make the world a better place. So we are introducing a new series, Real Life Princesses.
In 2017 there were around 50 live princesses in the world. And of course there are ones who have passed away. Many of these princesses are not well known outside of their countries but have done wonderful things. We are going to take a look at them and share about their lives in this series as well as resources to learn more about them.
Another new series I want to start I am calling the Hawaii Challenge. Awhile ago on Facebook I saw a post about how native Hawaiians are trying to protect the wildlife of and around the islands. The post challenged the reader to learn more about the history of native Hawaiians. Now we did a series called Hawaiian Dreamin' as well as some other posts about Hawaiian things, but we haven't studied the long history of Hawaii and its people. So challenge on and we are going to share with you what we learn!!
And of course we will have some reviews and we are aiming our book reviews more to middle grades through adult. We will continue Crafty Weekends for now with hopes that more people will come share with us! If you would like to see anything else return or have other ideas for us to explore, please let us know in the comments!! (For example if you would participate in Sharing Saturday and want to see it return.) I can't wait to hear what you have to say!! Have a great day and weekend!!
