Shopping Sunday

Well, I just finished my syllabus and its not pretty... the professor for the course I'm TAing for is brand new at teaching the lecture course and so he's basically testing the waters. He wants the students to take 10 quizzes over the course of the semester (usually it's six, max) and he originally wanted all of them to be essays. For teachers, essays are much harder to grade because they take so much time; you literally have to read essays (all of them) a number of times to get an idea of a grade spread and how you can suggest improvement in writing/ thought organization. We talked him out of all 10 essays, but still, its not going to be a fun semester; all the books he wants the students to read are extremely old and extremely dry... and he just lectures (no slideshows, no pictures, nothing!) so very, very boring. Actually, it's probably a typical history class... way to reinforce the stereotype about history professor! (I think my version of history is a little bit more Indiana Jones/anthropology than history).

On the bright side, I've been trying to prolong my summer (school starts Monday) by surfing the internet, so I thought I'd share some of my great finds with you all! I've added them to the resources column on the left of my blog, so they'll be there for you in the future. Here they are!

• fabrictales: a great website with cute traditional and some kawaii fabric, craft books, purse patterns and hardware (such as pinch clasps for pouches).
  

Photos from fabric tales

• strapya: so many cute keychains! Shipping isn't bad and they have a great variety of really kawaii things!
  

Photos from strapya

• japangiftmarket: A great place for decollelo, cram cream items and super cute deco tapes

I really want these mugs:

Photos from Japangiftmarket

And finally from etsy seller Washicreations, based right here in Honolulu with free shipping to US addresses (with a discount for international buyers too!). They specialize in kawaii memo pads and sticker sacks (no picture because my order is still on the way!)