Month: December 2015

Festive decorations

Xmas treeIt’s that time of year when school is finished and kids are on holiday. The first few days are fun because you don’t have to get up early and can spend more time in bed in the morning, but if you are anything like me – after a few days you start to get a bit bored.

Some friends are lucky and go away on holiday for the festive season, but lots don’t. The thing to do is to find ways of keeping busy.

One way is to make cool decorations for your room or house.

If you get a group of friends together – it’s even more fun. Plus sometimes you can pool your resources and then share – like buying spray paint, glitter and stuff like that.

Try making a bowl of popcorn – either on the stove or in the microwave (yes – you can eat some of it). Obviously you don’t put any salt or butter on the popcorn that you are going to use for your decorations. Ask your mom for a needle and some thread and string up length of about 60cm of popcorn.  Make sure to secure it properly at both ends so that it does not fall off. You can also spray these with some gold or silver spray paint to make them look even prettier on your Christmas tree.

Other easy and cheap decorations to make are paper chains. Find an old magazine or use crepe paper and cut strips of paper (about 2cm wide x 15cm long). You can either staple them or glue them together to make a long chain. You can experiment making them wider or thinner and see which ones you prefer. Have a competition with your friends to see who can make the longest chain.

Paper beads are also fun to make. Take a strip of paper (2cm wide x about 7cm long) – roll it up tight into a tiny skinny little tube (you can use a tooth pick to roll it around) and then stick it down with a dab of glue. Once the glue is dry you can paint your paper beads different colours and string them all together to make your room or tree look pretty. You can even sprinkle some glitter on them whilst the glue is wet – to make them all shiny.

Remember – you can make your own glue by mixing flour and water into a paste (not too runny and not too thick).

Have fun,

Sibo

Crowdfunding for Sibo Looks Right.

Sibo cutie face

A couple of months ago (sjoe – so long – time really does fly) I told you I’d found out about a weird way to make money.

Called crowdfunding – remember?

When lots of people give small amounts of money towards a project in order to make it happen.

My friend Ginny is actually doing one of these campaigns and so far they have raised R47,450 towards our book on road safety. That’s not too shabby hey?

Their tipping point – this is the amount of money that you have to raise to be able to keep all the money that you have already raised towards the project – has long since been passed.

In their case, they want to raise R140,000 in order to print 3000 “Sibo Looks Right” books on road safety and give them out free to schools and libraries around South Africa. Their tipping point was R25,000. When they reached that amount they knew they would be able to make an e-book which they will be able to share with many kids and their parents around the world – never mind only in South Africa.

Thanks to an incredibly generous donation from Nash Nissan in Alberton they passed this tipping point in just three days of starting their campaign. How awesome. These guys really care about kids and road safety.

You could donate too – if you wanted to. They call them “rewards” and for just R100 you could get your name written in the back of the book to show that you care. You’d also get the e-link to the book to read and share.

This is cool – another of the “rewards” is if, for instance, you had a motor dealership – you could have your logo in the book. And maybe challenge other dealers that you know to also contribute towards the project. It’s only R300 – not that much to show that you really care about road safety. Hey? These are great marketing opportunities.  Even if we only reach the R80,000 mark – we’ll be printing 1000 books. Then you could have some of the real books to distribute to your local school – with your logo on it.

Check it out. You might also want to raise funds like this one day.

Remember, in the meantime… look right, look left and look right again before crossing the road.

Be safe,

Sibo