Saturday Gift Post--Rainbow Recycled Leather Journals, 3D Puzzles, and Monkeys.

I'm back from the Chicago gift show, now down another floor that was leased to Google. That said, there were still a lot of potentially good lines for Boswell. I tend not to purchase too much impulsively. One day I'll tell you about the fight I had with a vendor over the metal mice. We lost about $300 on that one.

I wound up ordering several lines that I'd been thinking about for a while, like this journal assortment from Paperthinks. The leather covers are recycled, and the assortment comes in 24 different colors. It's got me written all over it. Who knew the difference between tangerine and tangelo? Now I do--tangelo has more of pastel hue. Another interesting thing about this vendor is that it is warehoused on the northwest side of Milwaukee.

January is not just time for gift show; it's also when a lot of vendors release their catalog. Our jigsaw puzzle table was wiped out by the holidays, so we restocked with Ravensberger. We are trying out some 3D monument puzzles and as a bonus, we got a sample Eiffel Tower. It artistically is missing a few pieces.

I was particularly amused by the barnyard band puzzle for kids. I remembered that we have a new IPop (those are the magnets from various acontemporary artists) called Monkey Band from Matthew Porter. They really rock out together

Speaking of monkeys, we just received our now annual assortment of sock monkey stuff from Schylling. This year we brought in the coin purses and the baby sock monkeys (brown, not rainbow). And when winter ends, we'll have some umbrellas. And you can get them wrapped in our monkey paper. We will probably sell out of these quickly (I should have doubled the order) and then they'll be out of stock for months.