August, 2014 - sparkleshinylove

Roxymandy August 29, 2014

Win 4 Passes to the Treehouse Big Day Out Festival!

On September 13th and 14th Treehouse will have their first-ever Big Day Out festival at the Molson Canadian Amphitheatre. The two-day event will be headlined by The Wiggles, but also performing will be Max and Ruby, and Splash ‘N Boots.

The Treehouse Big Day Out will offer two separate ticketed events each day – a morning show from 9:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and an afternoon show from 2:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m.

You may even find yourself on T.V. because this event will be televised on Treehouse Saturday, October 4th, at 5:00pm EST.

There will be lots of activities including:

· Meet and greet photo opportunities from Sunwing.ca with favourite Treehouse characters, including Franklin the Turtle, Mike the Knight, Peppa Pig and Elmo
· LEGOLAND® Discovery Centre building station
· Amazing animals from the Toronto Zoo
· Souvenir “Wiggle-fied” videos from HP
· Nelvana Digital app play station
· Face-painting from Treehouse Kids Supplements
· FREE kids’ haircuts and styling from Melonhead
· Play-Doh Play Centre
· My Little Pony/Equestria Girls Interactive Area

All of the kids who attend this weekend event will receive a 60-page festival program with lots of activities and colouring pages as well.

Sunwing.ca is also hosting an awesome contest that runs until September 15th! You can win a trip to the luxurious and family-friendly Royalton Punta Cana Resort and Casino in the Dominican Republic for a family of 4.

Parents can visit http://sunwing.ca/bigdayout to enter the contest or stop by the Sunwing booth at the Treehouse Big Day Out festival to enter.

Tickets for Treehouse Big Day Out may be purchased at Ticketmaster. More information about the event can be found at http://www.treehousebigdayout.com.

Or you can enter my contest to win a pack of 4 passes for the Sunday, September 14th morning event from 9:30am – 12:00pm!

All you need to do to win is head over to the sparkleshinylove Facebook page here and comment below the Win 4 Passes to the Treehouse Big Day Out Festival! post “I want to win”!

The contest begins today, Friday, August 29th at 9:00am and ends Friday, September 5th at 9:00am. The contest winner will be announced via Facebook and on the blog. The contest is open to Canadian residents.

Good luck!

Roxymandy August 27, 2014

Little Monkey Designs Giveaway!

I love having things created just for me. I’m a bit of a diva that way. Something one-of-a-kind is always better than picking up something else that is one-of-a-million copies. Especially since I had my son I’ve wanted to have everything personalized for him so it can be a keepsake later in life just to show him how special he is. And how much he rocks. I know, I will totally need to work on the whole humility thing, because I don’t want to send him into the world thinking that wherever he goes a sippy cup will magically show up with his name etched into it because there’s ALWAYS something just for him.

When it comes to these all so important keepsakes and personalized treasures, it’s best to trust a professional who can design exactly what you want and how you want it.

Little Monkey Designs is a one-stop shop for all things unique, trendy, and personalized with some serious polish! They offer personalized wall art, birth announcement prints, invitations, party printables, personalized growth charts, family tree wall art, and much more.

The options are endless! You can choose how to tweak almost all of the products in the Little Monkey Designs shop, but some of them are so perfect already you may want to purchase them as they are. The wall art is so bright and cheerful. It’s totally the spot where you can find all of your favourite Pins from Pinterest!

Dream Big Little One Wall Art

Little Monkey Designs offers colour match free of charge. You can upload a colour swatch and they will match your design colour to the swatch so it will blend in with your decor perfectly.

Their growth charts are awesome because they can be personalized with not only your child’s name, but their photo can be included as well. I feel like one of these would work much better than the Sharpie lines I have been adding to the closet doorframe in my sons room.

The growth charts are printed on either premium matte vinyl or artist grade canvas, and they come finished with wooden dowels placed through the hems on each end for a finished look, and a matching ribbon as well so hanging them is easy.

Growth Chart

I slacked on making an imprint of my sons hands and feet when he was a baby (I even had the kit – there was really no excuse) and I regretted not doing it so much. If you haven’t done it yourself, another great way to commemorate how incredibly small those tiny feet and hands are is with the Little Monkey Designs Hand & Footprint Wall Art.

The wall art that Little Monkey Designs offers can come in a print or canvas. Some of the designs are so freaking adorable! You an even take care of the printing yourself if you would like, which is a great option for all of you control freaks out there.

Little Monkey Designs can also take your images and have them printed for you on premium gallery wrapped canvases.

My favourite idea is the World Travel Map. You can customize your travel map to show everywhere you have lived and traveled in the world. It’s a really polished way to reflect where you have been!

Little Monkey Designs also offers wedding prints where you can either choose a pre-deisgned print, or have a custom one created to match your wedding theme.

You can choose to have a birth announcement customised or pre-designed with their typographic, photo or illustrative options. Another awesome idea is the chalkboard print! I think these are a great way to commemorate a milestone with personal information posted in a creative way – it’s a great keepsake.

Their invitations are pretty awesome. Much better than the standard ones you can buy in a box, and the cost of customizing them is very reasonable and comparable to buying generic ones in a store. Little Monkey Designs offers custom designed invites as well which I will totally be taking advantage of. It’s really hard to find invitations for a gossip/wine drinking/food binging/no boys allowed party.

Printable birthday decorations can be hard to find, and once you find them they can be very expensive! Little Monkey Designs has quite a few to choose from, and what I love is that they can customize for your event as well.

I think the best part about Little Monkey Designs is their creative services. Many online shops aren’t willing to change or personalize their work. What you see is what you get. Little Monkey Designs will not only give you the option of customizing the products they offer, but they provide branding solutions to companies from the ground up. They are willing to work with you to learn about the marketplace your company is in, your goals, your vision for the brand, and about your competitors to create the product you need to bring your vision to life. They can create logos, brochures, custom graphics, and anything else you need to give your company a boost creatively.

To learn more about Little Monkey Designs, and more importantly to shop the Little Monkey Designs store, check them out at www.littlemonkeydesigns.ca, or click here for their Facebook page!

You can now find Little Monkey Designs products in store at Melissa’s Bowtique in Port Hope, and in Baby World of Stoney Creek in Stoney Creek. Coming soon you will find Little Monkey Designs in a few other local shops – keep checking their Facebook page for announcements!

Now for the fun part – a giveaway! Little Monkey Designs is offering one lucky sparkleshinylove reader a $30 gift card!

To enter all you need to do is like the sparkleshinylove Facebook page here (you are still eligible if you have already liked the page – it just shows you already have great taste!), and comment below this post with what you would use the giftcard for from Little Monkey Designs.

The contest begins now, Wednesday, August 27th, 2014 at 9:00am EST, and will end on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2014 at 9:00am EST. The contest is open to residents of the US and Canada.

Good luck to everyone who enters! I will announce the winner on the blog next Wednesday!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Roxymandy August 26, 2014

Cupcake Junkie Bakery & Cafe

Who doesn’t love a good cupcake? No seriously – who? Because if you don’t, you may want to skip this post.

The Cupcake Junkie Bakery & Café is located in Whitby, and they serve all kinds of desserts – ice cream, cookies, squares, cinnamon buns, and most importantly, cupcakes!

Every day of the week there are 12 or more flavours of cupcakes available, and they range from Sticky Toffee, Maple Bacon, and Kit Kat to name a few. Cupcakes are $3.00 each, and $3.50 for cupcakes with filling. They start their baking at 5am (that is dedication!) so their cupcakes are as fresh as possible.

Chocolate Chip Cupcakes

Salted Caramel Cupcakes

Bow Tie Cookies

Kit Kat Cupcakes

Kit Kat Cupcake

I couldn’t decide which cupcake I wanted to try, and I ended up settling on a vanilla cupcake. I shouldn’t’t say settle – it was so good! Like the next time I have a party I’m ordering a dozen – that is how good it was. To be totally honest I was surprised because they had so many options for cupcakes, and to me when there are a lot of choices there may not have been a lot of care going into the creation of each one. My cupcake tasted like it was made with a lot of care, and did I mention how tasty it was? I think it was a smart move to have the word “junkie” in their name, because this place could become slightly addictive.

My tasty vanilla cupcake, which I finished in an embarrassing little amount of time!

They specialize in custom cakes as well, and they had a few on display to showcase some of their work with fondant. They take special orders, and they advertise that if you are looking for something specific, just ask because they can probably make it happen!

They have lots of gluten free options, which I think is hard to find when it comes to cupcakes and cakes. They are also a nut free kitchen as well.

The Cupcake Junkie Bakery & Café have a lot to offer besides cupcakes. The space to eat at the café is quite large so it would be great for a lunch with friends, and they boast their own home-smoked salmon, their meats are roasted on site, their coffee is locally roasted and environmentally friendly, they even pickle their own jalapenos. I don’t do or offer any of those things, so I was pretty impressed!

Even though it’s in a downtown location they have lots of parking. If you have any sort of cupcake emergency (surprise baby shower, a large birthday party, or a break-up where you need sugar to make you feel better) you can call their cupcake hotline at 905-430-3200.

The Cupcake Junkie Bakery & Café is located at 404 Brock Street South, in Whitby. For more information visit their website – www.cupcakejunkiecafe.ca. You can also follow them on Facebook here.

Roxymandy August 25, 2014

Clinique High Impact Waterproof Mascara Review

To keep up my rep of being a total beauty junkie I picked up a new mascara last week that I totally didn’t need. Well, at the time I thought I might need it since it said it was High Impact mascara. Those couple of words reminded me that I totally needed some High Impact lashes in my life, and I thought I would give it a try.

At $19 it didn’t totally break the bank either, so I spent the week willing it to replace my favourite Benefit’s They’re Real Mascara. The mascara only comes in Black or Black/Brown, so it’s really all business and no fun (usually there are a few other colour options with mascara, but it’s not like I have bought a blue or a green one lately anyway).

The claims? Instant volume and length that resists flaking, clumping, smudging. They said it could stand up to heat, humidity, and an active day.

The first thing I noticed was how smooth it went on. The consistency is a little watery so it easily smoothed onto my lashes and was easy to apply. The tips Clinique gave for the mascara was to start at the base of my lashes and then wiggle the brush up to the tip of my lashes. It said to repeat this step, and to prevent clumping to let the mascara dry between coats. I am all about following instructions so I did exactly as told. I didn’t notice any clumping at all which was great, but what I did notice was that the consistency of the mascara was so watery I had to build over and over and over again to get any “Impact”. It went on so smoothly I didn’t really see a lot of volume, and to create the volume I wanted I had to put a lot of this stuff on.

I also found that it didn’t separate my lashes as nicely as I would have liked. I had to use another want to separate my lashes the way I like them to be. It seemed to clump them together, and I think it was all the brushes fault.

It really doesn’t like it when your lashes curl. It seemed to want to straighten my lashes out which was sort of annoying. The formula just didn’t seem to be thick enough to bend your lashes in the shape you want.

Towards the end of my day, the mascara would start to flake. I find I have this issue with all of my mascara’s (probably because I like to put it on very thick!) so I wasn’t overly surprised at this. I had a very hard time getting this mascara off! It is definitely waterproof. It was hard to even smudge it. Apply this mascara very carefully since you are going to be stuck with it for a while.

So the funny thing was that after I tried this mascara for a week, I found out Clinique not only has this mascara in a non-waterproof version (not surprising), but a lash curling version, and they have a mascara just for your lower lashes as well! So they really want you to buy two mascaras – one for your upper lashes and one for your lower lashes? It seems really wasteful to me. Wouldn’t it make sense for everything to be in one mascara? I guess that is why this mascara is a little cheaper than most of the mascara’s at Sephora – technically you need two of them.

Overall I think I am done with this mascara. I gave it a week and it didn’t really work for me, and I did not feel like it lived up to it’s “High Impact” claims. I thought it worked just fine on my lower lashes (I can’t imagine buying a mascara just for those few lashes, which says a lot because I buy useless stuff all the time), but other than it being waterproof it didn’t live up to it’s claims of being “High Impact” for me.

My favourite mascara continues to be Benefit’s They’re Real Mascara! If you have one that you absolutely love and thing I should try, let me know if the comments and I will add it to my arsenal!

Roxymandy August 23, 2014

A Must Read Book – Carole Radziwill’s What Remains

I’m a total Real Housewife junkie. I watch them ALL. Ask me about any of them, and I am totally up to date on what is happening on any of the shows. I know, it’s embarrassing, but if you know me you can attest it’s totally true. Don’t let that deter you from my upcoming recommendation.

Carole Radziwill is currently a housewife on The Real Housewives of New York City. After her first season on the show I knew her husband had died of cancer, and that she had known John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy. I didn’t look into this any further, but was curious about her best selling book What Remains.

Wow – you have to read this book.

I don’t want to give too much away or review the book for you, but I couldn’t put it down. She so honestly explains her story, and at times it’s embarrassingly hard to read. She was so brave to be so brutally honest on how she felt and the ways she reacted to what she went through.

I cried. A lot. Possibly sobs? I’m a bit of a pushover as it is, so maybe you will make it without a tear. It really is an amazing story of something you may also think you know about – the lives of her very famous extended family. 15 years ago last month the plane of JFK Jr., Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren crashed into the ocean, which is something most people know. How close Carole was to all of this was surprising to me.

This memoir is absolutely worth reading, and although it is a very sad story, I found Carole to be a great storyteller, adding enough details to paint the picture of exactly what was happening so you could see it yourself. And the life Carole led before her marriage and friendship with the Kennedy’s? She was impressively successful, and it’s amazing I watched her on a reality T.V. show and still didn’t realize how accomplished she really was.

Trust me – read it!