Saturday Show & Tell – First Edition

Scarborough Renaissance Fair. Photo by Tui Cameron

Welcome to the very first Saturday Show & Tell blog carnival here at Mental Mosaic: Food for Your Muse.

This week’s edition features 6 posts. That’s 5 more than I was expecting since I popped this idea on everyone at the last minute. (Full disclosure: I got 2 more submissions through the Blog Carnival site itself, but they were both rather spammy, so I have not included them.)

First up is a post entitled, Messy Imperfect Funny Love-Filled Life, which comes from Kyra, who wrote,

“I couldn’t decide which post to send to you but I settled on one that I wrote recently about life and change and not waiting for the good stuff because there’s good stuff in all of it.”

Kyra’s lighthearted stream-of-thought style post explains how she shifted her mindset from one that was preventing her from connecting deeply to her daily life, to a healthier mindset that embraces her current situation, flaws and all.

Kyra also made a suggestion for future Saturday Show & Tell carnivals:

Just an idea – maybe an occasional broad topic for Saturday – maybe even like one Saturday a month you give us a topic…. What do you think?

I think that’s a great idea, as did Cherrye Moore, who suggested International Women’s Day as next week’s theme, since it is coming right up (March 8th.)

Speaking of, Cherrye Moore, she poses the following question: Are You Smarter than an Italian 5th Grader?

I don’t want to give anything away, but I once got into an argument over the exact same question Cherrye brings up in her post. While watching an Italian gameshow on TV, I blurted out the correct answer – correct by American standards – only to have a room full of Italians tell me how wrong I was. In fact, they nearly had me convinced I was wrong, until I remembered how many spikes are on the Statue of Liberty’s crown…

I’ve been reading Cherrye’s blog for years, and I always get a kick out of posts in which she addresses cultural assumptions, whether they be American or Italian. (I already have one in mind for a future Saturday Show & Tell, actually!)

3 minutes before this post was set to automatically publish, I received a submission from Michelle Fabio, another American expat who lives in Italy. Luckily, she included a wonderful intro:

“Malocchio: Conquering Evil One Plastic Red Horn at a Time — Living in southern Italy, I simply can’t escape malocchio, the Evil Eye, i.e., the belief that others can cause you physical harm and other bad luck just by harboring envy towards you. Are you living under the “maloik” as some Italian-Americans call it? Read on.”

Paula Puffer decided to ‘show’ more than ‘tell’ by submitting a photo she describes as:

“My favorite picture from Paula’s Polaroid Project so far. It took my breath away after I saw it because the color and the subjects were just so right and came together so well.”

I was going to ask Paula if I could post the photo here, but I think it’s better if you check it out directly at Paula’s Polaroid Project: Day 48. That way, you can browse around and enjoy other shots she has up. Paula is a talented photographer who decided to post at least one photo each day in 2011. All photos have been taken with Polaroids and, aside from being scanned, are unaltered.

As Paula explains:

“The aim of the project isn’t perfection in the pictures — its the doing. It’s about seeing what I can do with a variety of Polaroid Cameras. There will be good pictures and there will be bad pictures and, yes, some days I may have more than one picture. But the goal is simple – at least one picture a day for 365 days.”

The next Saturday Show & Tell submission comes from Kathryn Vercillo who is so passionate about crochet that she calls her blog, Crochet Concupiscience. (Full disclosure: I had to look up, ‘concupiscience.’) Kathryn’s post 25 Yarn and Crochet Apps came as a surprise. I am an iPhone newbie, having just gotten one last week, so I am just now discovering the world of apps and had no idea there were apps related to stitchery. Check ‘em out!

Lastly, I chose a photo feature I did for iStopOver Magazine last year about the Scarborough Renaissance Festival in Waxahachie, Texas. I had so much fun at the fair, in fact, that I’m getting married there this year.

The photo at the top of this post is one that I liked, but didn’t quite fit in with the article. I don’t think there were too many Indians traipsing around England in 1533, but every time I saw that couple, they looked happy.

That wraps up the first edition of Saturday Show & Tell, a brand new weekly blog carnival featuring older blog posts from around the web.

The theme for next week’s Saturday Show and Tell is:

International Women’s Day

If you want to join in, here are 2 ways to submit your post. Send the link directly to me via tui [at] mentalmosaic.com, or submit it through the Blog Carnival site via this link.

Thanks to all who participated this week, either by submitting a post, or by leaving comments below. See you next time!