Gifts for Musicians and Music Teachers 🎁

Three middle school kids can result in a flurry of activities. Weekends are filled with soccer and little league baseball games. Week nights are busy with choir, band and orchestra rehearsals and performances. Last weekend, we had the pleasure to be blown away by the Highland Middle School musical “Hello Dolly” and “The Sound of Music” at the Chicago Lyric Opera. It’s also a season when it’s time to come up with fun, clever and personal gifts for dedicated teachers and hard working graduates.

Awesome Gifts for Music Teachers and Musicians

We’ve collected a few gifts for music teachers, music graduates and music directors. The treble clef safety reflector is something all music lovers need as concerts and rehearsals often end long after sunset. Pair that with the most perfect thank you note and you are all set.

Treble clef funflector® safety reflector - thoughtful gift for musicians, music teachers and music lovers!
Treble clef funflector® safety reflector – thoughtful gift for musicians, music teachers and music lovers!

Heavy Metal Rock Band

How fun isn’t this heavy metal rock band, and we love that it is made with reused pieces!

Heavy metal rock band - available at uncommon goods.com
Heavy metal rock band – available at uncommon goods.com

A T-shirt every Cellist Needs

Silly questions require silly answers. Here is the T-shirt every cellist needs.

Do you play the cello? Nope... - T-shirt can be found at cafe press.com
Do you play the cello? Nope… – T-shirt can be found at cafe press.com

Cosy Tea Mugs for Musicians

Big handmade mugs for coffee, tea or soup. There are even musical designs at the bottom of the mugs. Great for a slow breakfast after performance nights or to cuddle up with in the couch and your favorite music.

Colorful handmade mugs with musical notes from notonthehighstreet.com
Colorful handmade mugs with musical notes from notonthehighstreet.com

 Gift card

A gift card is not as personal, but sometimes a better option than filling peoples’ homes with “stuff”. Consider a a gift card from a local music venue to be used towards conserts, or one from you local music store to be used towards instrument repairs or sheet music. In addition to being a useful gift, it gives much needed support to organizations and small businesses in your community.

A gift certificate is always a welcomed gift for music teachers and musicians.
A gift certificate is always a welcomed gift for music teachers and musicians.

The Most Perfect Thank You Note!!!

The other day, we found the most perfect thank-you note!  When shopping at  our favorite gift store for musical gifts, the CSO gift store in Chicago (On East Adams, just around the corner from the Symphony Center on 220 S Michigan Ave), we also help support a phenomenal orchestra. The cute card is perfect as is or with a gift card and/or a funflector® treble-clef reflector!

Thank you note with funflector G-clef reflector goes with any gift for music teachers and musicians.
Thank you note from the CSO gift shop with funflector treble clef reflector


 Elisabeth
# ps.  almost forgot the footnote for those of you who want to look sharp… 😉  🎶

Foot Notes socks from The Music Gifts Company
Foot Notes socks from The Music Gifts Company

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2014 funflector® Wholesale Catalog!

We are so excited that the 2014 funflector® wholesale catalog is off the press! We hope you are too! It has all our new (and old) designs and our first licensed line of reflectors from the Particle Zoo. New for this year is also an online flip book, (you just need a little bit of patience while it downloads) but we have stocked up with envelopes and stamps and will gladly mail a copy to your store! You can order it here or shoot us an emailfunflector safety reflector catalog 2014

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A Poem for Your Pocket

April 24th is Poem In Your Pocket Day, one of our favorite days! Put a poem in your pocket – or a poem in each pocket – and share with people you meet!portable superhero safety reflector poem by funflector

Portable Superhero

It glimmers and it shines
As traffic passes by
A portable superhero
So many places to hang it from
Backpacks and strollers and bags
Oh my
When you’re out at night
There’s no need to fret
With your portable superhero
So many shapes
So many colors
Which ones to choose?!?
Even ninjas want to be seen
When they’re out late at night
Their portable superheroes can help
A funflector can’t fly
But it can still stop
The unsuspecting villain
Behind the wheel
Alice

Poem in your pocket day 2014
April 24, 2014 #pocketpoem

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Totally Confused?

Not really, we just needed to figure out what to do with a leftover IKEA  gingerbread kit and the Lindt chocolate bunnies, chicks, lambs. frogs and bugs.

Bunny gingerbread house by funflector.com
Bunny gingerbread house by funflector.com

Happy Easter to all our readers!!!
The funflector team

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Sharing Bikes

Divvy Bikeshare in Chicago photo by the funflector BlogThe first web browser I ever used, had no clickable links. Instead the user had to type in the link that was displayed in the text. It was at CERN (where the world wide web was invented) in the early 1990’s and although it wasn’t super practical, we saw the potential and jumped right into it with excitement. Five years later, I found myself working on the 3G Mobile Network standards and had to explain to friends why it would be handy to have internet access on a cell phone. “Can’t people wait until they get home?!?” was a common comment by most, who only saw Internet as entertainment. Fast forward almost 20 years …

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Walking

Every day, more people discover walking as an easy way to get moving. Did you know that
– 30 minutes of daily walking lowers the risk for diabetes, heart attacks, stroke, cancer and much more.
– Kids walking to school perform better than when getting rides.
– Home prices in walkable neighborhoods increase faster than others.
– Commerce flourish where people walk.
There are an overwhelming amount of information on the benefits of walking for you as an individual and for society.  The two videos below condense the information very well and explain why you need to walk and how it all is interlaced:
“The benefits of walking are so good, they are hard to believe”. Listen to Kaiser Permanente Chairman and CEO George C. Halvorson explain the benefits of walking in a 6 minute video.

Urbanist Jeff Speck explains in his TED talk “how America can be more economically resilient, how America can be healthier and how America can be more environmentally sustainable”. You’ll be surprised about how a walkable infrastructure improves health, quality of life and the local economy and how it is all correlated!

Jeff mentions that Portland, Oregon is far ahead of other cities in the US on planning around people, but there is activities in many places. Learn about what’s going on in  Oklahoma City, New York, Dallas and Chicago and more generally with redevelopment of urban centers.
As mentioned in the intro, kids who walk to school perform better than when getting rides. Here are the results of some studies:
– Let kids walk to school by University of Buffalo medical school and
– Exercise before school improves concentration in the class room, a joint study by researchers at the universities in Copenhagen and Aarhus in Denmark, also reported by the Atlantic Cities.
– Check out these fascinating MRI scans by the University of Illinois of kids’ brains after sitting still and walking for 20 minutes respectively!
If your kid’s school doesn’t have a walk-to-school program, consider organizing one!
Walking is good, however, when dusk comes around, the risk of fatal pedestrian-vehicle accidents increases significantly. In the Scandinavian countries, pedestrian reflectors have saved lives for over 40 year. If you are looking for thoughtful and useful giveaways, check out our American-made logo reflectors! Together we can make a difference and we hope you want to join us.
The funflector team

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The Higgs Boson


Last December, the Nobel prize in physics was awarded to François Englert and Peter Higgs for the prediction of the Higgs boson. We are cheering on this big physics event by introducing our next funflector® from the Particle Zoo: The very happy Higgs Boson!

Higgs boson safety reflector by Particle Zoo and funflector
Higgs boson safety reflector by Particle Zoo and funflector


The existence of the Higgs field was predicted 50 years ago to provide an explanation for the origins of mass. It was hypothesized to fill space and interact with the most basic particles in a way that gives them mass when otherwise they would have none.
An invisible field that fills all of space might seem odd, but right now there is an invisible gravitational field keeping you from floating away. There is also an invisible electromagnetic field that keeps you from simply passing straight through the floor. Find a way to put some extra energy into a field and you can “shake loose” particles. We do that all the time with electromagnetic fields, for example in a light bulb. We call he result light and the particles that emerge are photons, bearers of light.

After years of trying, an international team of physicists managed to show that the Higgs field exists. Instead of turning on a light bulb and observing the light, they smashed protons together in the LHC at CERN and “shook loose” some of those long-sought Higgs particles, which were recorded by huge particle detectors to, after quite some work, be observed on computer screens.

We know of no better way to visualize the Higgs field than this beautiful animation by Nigel Holmes:

Congratulations to François Englert and Peter Higgs and to all our friends and former colleagues, who tirelessly have kept building and tweaking the LHC and the Atlas and CMS detectors, long after our careers headed elsewhere!

Dan & Elisabeth

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Cosmic Rose & Dark Matter

The Rosette Nebula is Red, The Pleiades Star Cluster is BlueThis cute but geeky Valentine’s poem is a good reason for us to introduce one of our new elementary particle reflectors with Particle Zoo design: DARK MATTER!
Scientists believe the universe is expanding due to Dark Energy, which makes up as much as 68% of the universe. Only 5% is matter that we know and the rest, 27% is dark matter. Dark matter cannot be seen, does not absorb or emit light. So how do we know it’s there? Astronomers have noticed that the behavior of large astronomical objects could not be explained with the gravitational forces between all known objects, so a mysterious dark matter with plenty of weight was added to explain the gravitational pull. Guesses to what dark matter is range from never seen elementary particles to heavier objects although as late as November 2013, it was ruled out that they were large primordial black holes. So maybe fun-sized primordial black holes?
In the early universe, dark matter was evenly distributed but the passage of time has left its mark and gravity has pulled it into clumps and empty spaces. Our Dark Matter funflector thinks life is good!

Happy Valentine's day from Particle Zoo and funflectors - fun pedestrian reflectors make gifts filled with love and care!
Happy Valentine’s day from Particle Zoo and funflector!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

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On Skates

Having grown up in Sweden, I would have loved a skate safety reflector instead of a boring hard circular reflector. Even in the very south, skating and skiing was an obvious part of most winters.  No classes or fancy outfits, just hanging out at the neighborhood soccer field which had been turned into an good-enough ice to skate on. We skated, we cross-country skied on the fields and had snowball fights – and watched winter sports, especially the Olympics.
After 4 days of the Sochi games, the Canadian and the US hockey women are looking good! We have also already been blessed with some spectacular figure skating performances. 15 year old Yulia Lipnitskaya stunned us all with a perfect performance. Equally amazing and mezmerizing was Meryl Davis and Charlie White’s ice dance!
Do you know we now have both a black hockey skate reflector and a white figure skate reflector? Order yours here>

Figure skate and hockey skate safety reflector
Figure skate and hockey skate safety reflector


Elisabeth
SaveSave
SaveSave

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The Quiet Tomte

The Swedish hustomte (house elf/gnome) is a quiet little guy, dressed mostly in gray and red, living at your house or farmsted helping out by taking care of things around the house and keep everyone safe. You better be nice and serve him rice pudding on Christmas eve!” That’s the intro text to our pinterest board “Tomtar“. In the mid 17th century, the quiet Swedish tomte also took on the role as Father Christmas and became the Tomte with capital T. At dusk on Christmas Eve, the Tomte walks around to deliver gifts – in person! – to all nice kids.

Tomte with cat by Swedish artist Rolf Lidberg
A tomte and his son enjoying quiet company of the cat. Illustration by Rolf Lidberg.

The other day, I looked at our Pinterest tomte board just after putting down the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain.  (If you haven’t read the book, you should, or at least listen to Susan’s TED talk. Whether extrovert or introvert, it will give you an additional set of glasses through which to see the world and your near and dear through.) All of a sudden a lightbulb went off as I realized that the Swedish tomte is introvert while Santa is a fine example of the American extrovert ideal.
Search for images of “Santa” and you will find an abundance of photos and drawings of Santa where he looks straight into the camera, happily smiling and waving. He loves to be the center of the universe and knows all his power poses.

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