I think one of the greatest art forms there is, is the art of story telling. A story can be told in so many ways. They can be written, spoken, acted or drawn. I love watching my son make up stories from the pictures in his books (I think he tells us more stories than we tell him). I found some wonderful myths and fairytale collection books from Usborne for Santa to put in his stocking. The illustrations are gorgeous, and I can’t wait for him to see them.
The items I sought out today are meant to hold onto the idea of telling a story.
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- Playing Foxes Paper Theater – $16
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- Handmade Paper Journal – $40
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- Doorway Puppet Theaters – $39
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- Fairyland Theater Digital Collage Sheet – $3.50
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- Secret Story Book Box – $19
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- How to Write a Story Brooch – $15
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- Silver Book Necklace – $123
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- The Tempest Bookmark – $4.50
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- Little Red Riding Hood Finger Puppet Set – $32
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- He Promised Pen – $44
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- Antique Music Journal – $35
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- Where the Wild Things Are Pendant – $5.50
If you know me at all you know I’m a story addict. For about the last year or so though I haven’t had much time for reading, so audio has been a life saver.
I rent a lot of audiobooks from Audiobooks.com, which works a lot like NetFlix but with audiobooks. I really like Audiobooks.com for renting audiobooks, especially since they have a request option and have got me books they didn’t have in stock previously on a number of occasions.
I’ve bought some from Audible, but as fast as I go through audiobooks it’s not really affordable enough for me so I tend to only buy favorites that I’ll listen to over and over.
We got into a finacial bind last year when my boyfriend started having big gaps in work at his job as a painter I had to give up my subscription to Audiobooks.com for a while as part of our household budget cuts. That’s when I discovered that there are people podcasting their books. Free audio fiction! There’s even a site that collects all these great books call Podiobooks.com. I’ve found tons of new favorite authors through them.
That isn’t where my podio fiction addiction began however. The first fiction podcast I found was EscapePod, which is a sci-fi anthology podcast. From the same people there is also a fantasy podcast and a horror podcast called PodCastle and PseudoPod. All three are made by Escape Artists and it was a promo on EscapePod that led me to Podiobooks, The Metamor City Podcast, Scott Sigler, Tee Morris, Philippa Ballantine, and P.G. Holyfield‘s writings. From those I found J.D. Sawyer and Mur Lafferty‘s stuff as well as a really funny book called Nina Kimberly the Merciless and many others. As you can see each one kind of causes a chain reaction of finding another one, and there’s new authors releasing they’re books on podcasts all the time. A lot of these authors have their books published too. I actually knocked off about half my gift list with their books because I know a lot of people who don’t really like audio books, but would love the stories.
Rock Out Edgar Allen Poe iPod Case - $9.99.
I think another great gift would be loading a couple CDs with some episodes from these (many are under Creative Commons copyright that allow you to copy them to share with others) and a case for their player of choice.
The Etsy artists featured in this gift guide are:
allthosethrees, TillyBloom, claraclips, HappyHaven, faerieworks, immortallongings, kylallon, redpumpkinstudio, Talula, CountingBunnies, UnderTheStairStudios, AlteredArtifacts, and sweetheartsinner
Tomorrow’s guide: Take Flight
Lotus's Workshop 