I’ve been a volunteer with Creative Mornings Vancouver for about two years, and some of my duties include running the Instagram account, and coming up with the icebreaker question related to the monthly theme. The global theme in March is Ink, and I decided to ask people to decorate their nametags instead of asking them to answer a question.

I doodled these fancy name tags for our volunteers to wear to Martin Jackson’s talk on March 6th, but also to use as samples to promote the idea.

I made about fifteen, and it was so fun to doodle and play with the colourful markers. I wish we could do this every month, but maybe I just need an on-going doodle project.

I’m about to show you my feet in this blog post, but it’s for a very good reason. I bought new socks yesterday, and while they are wonderful because of the bright colours and dazzling patterns (just what I like in a sock), I love them even more for the package design.

The brand of sock is HS, a company based in Sweden making exciting high quality combed cotton socks. Their packaging is the same basic concept of all socks, with a tiny plastic hanger, an attachment keeping the toes together, and an attachment binding the paper label to the top of the sock.

Thread used to attach the label to the sock

Tiny sticker at the sock toe

When I was taking the socks apart yesterday I was thrilled to realize they use a small sticker instead of a metal clip or a tiny piece of plastic at the toe. The same goes for the label attachment. The piece of plastic used with other socks has been replaced with thread. I hate these tiny pieces of plastic so much when I buy socks and all the brands seem to have them except HS Socks.

The plastic sock hanger

The socks still have the tiny plastic hanger for retail display purposes, maybe because they haven’t figured out a way around this yet. This is important to me because I don’t want to contribute to more tiny bits of plastic ending up in the environment just for the sake of new socks.

HS socks are a good product on many levels, and my feet are happy wearing them. I can tell these are going to be distracting because look how mesmerizing my feet are in them!

The weather was sunny, beautiful and cold during the week we were on Bowen Island for Christmas. I walked in the forest every day, and took many photos.

Walking the city streets every day seems pretty dull compared to walking in the forest on Bowen.

The usual series of lovely scenes from Bowen Island. It rained heavily but when the weather cleared we had blue skies, bright sun, and colder weather. It feels like winter now.

The Anna’s Hummingbird was a frequent visitor to the three feeders Anne has positioned around the windows of the house. I feel lucky to have gotten a few good photos with my iPhone while he was feeding. Most of the time these birds are too speedy to photograph with a camera phone.