Here are two great competitions that encourage children to improve their reading and writing skills.

First is The Times Spelling Bee - this is the UK’s first national spelling bee and it’s bound to be wildly popular.  Schools will compete in local knockout rounds before reaching a national final in June next year.  There’s still plenty of time to enter your school, so check out the Spelling Bee info page now!

The second competition is Off By Heart - it’s a poetry recital competition for children aged from 7 - 11.  The later stages of this national competition will be shown on BBC TV, and the final will be compered by Jeremy Paxman.  There’s plenty of information on how to enter at the BBC’s Off By Heart competition page.  Closing date is 19th December 2008.

Even today, more than 30 years later, I can still recite the poem I learned by heart for a primary school review. There’s something about learning poetry by heart that’s amazingly satisfying, and there’s something about young children that means they are usually exceptionally good at it.

We’ve been very quiet on our blog over the past couple of months. Silent, in fact.  That’s because we’ve been busy relocating to Bristol.  

We’re now fully installed in a new warehouse here in Bristol, and we’re loving life and work in the city.  Expect more blog posts detailing the fabulous sights and sounds, culture, people and places that make Bristol such a great place to be!

Normal blog service is now resumed!

Maybe you have to be a certain kind of typography geek to enjoy this video, but it makes me laugh so much….

We all know that recycled paper is used paper that has been reprocessed into fresh new paper, but what about rescued paper?  

Put simply, rescued paper is paper that has had one life but is retrieved and re-used without being processed into new paper.  If you use a scrap of used paper to take a phone message on the clean side, then you’ve rescued that paper and squeezed an extra use out of it before it goes into the recycling!

Sukie are pioneers of rescued paper stationery - their clever rescued paper notebooks are made in India using all sorts of discarded paper - office paper, envelopes, packaging papers etc.  The paper sheets are folded double so that any printed area is hidden, leaving blank paper pages to write on.

Recycled paper is obviously a great thing, but if we can squeeze an extra use out of used paper before it goes for recycling, then even better!

Anyone can rescue paper - from the smallest scrap to huge quantities.  We’ve recently rescued literally a tonne of paper from a local printing firm which was closing down - they were planning to dump their entire paper stocks before we offered to take it!   We’ve got lots of plans on what to do with all that lovely paper (watch this space…), and we’ve already given some of it away via Freecycle, to be used in children’s activity projects in our local area.

One of our favourite suppliers, Hello! Lucky were recently interviewed for US craft site, craftzine.com.  It’s a great video describing how founder Eunice Moyle got into the letterpress business, and detailing what their typical day is like - letterpress printing their gorgeous stationery, creating new designs and apparently having lots of fun doing it!

This week sees the start of the new football season. You’re probably already wondering what this has got to do with stationery and the things that interest us here at Papernation! 

Well, one of the things we care about is finding ways to interest kids in activities that promote reading and writing.  One idea is to encourage kids to become autograph-hunters.  Keeping an autograph book and documenting who the autograph is from and when and where the autograph was collected is great for kids.  The discipline of keeping a neat book is bound up with the excitement of getting new autographs.

And don’t worry if you don’t live anywhere near a Premership club - your kids will be just as thrilled to get the autograph of a player from your local bottom-of-the-league club.  And who knows - maybe one day that player from the youth team who carefully signed your son’s or daughter’s autograph book for may become the next Rooney!

Just a very quick post to say that we’re thrilled to announce the arrival of the absolutely fabulous Cavallini calendars and diaries for 2009. 

This year, we’re stocking every design in both the wall calendars and the easel calendars, as well as every colour of the super-chic Moderno diaries.

It might seem hard to believe, but these calendars and diaries are already selling - even though it’s only early August.  They are so sought-after, we expect that we’ll sell them all well before the end of the year - if last year is anything to go by.  So if there’s a particular design that’s your absolute favourite, be sure to buy early.

When they’re gone, they’re gone!

View all Cavallini Calendars

View all Cavallini Diaries

I imagine that this little poem won’t appeal to all, but for those who like words here’s something that has stayed in mind years after I heard it for the first time.

I lately lost a preposition
It hid, I thought, beneath my chair
And angrily I cried, “Perdition!
Up from out of in under there.”

Correctness is my vade mecum,
And straggling phrases I abhor,
And yet I wondered, “What should he come
Up from out of in under for?”

Morris Bishop, New Yorker, 1947

We love quality writing paper here at Papernation, so we’re particularly excited to have a new brand on board - Crown Mill of Belgium.  They’ve been making luxurious writing paper since 1870 and they’ve stuck to traditional standards through to today. If you enjoy fine stationery, you’re bound to appreciate the craftsmanship and quality that goes into Crown Mill papers.

This picture shows one of the luxury stationery boxes that we now stock, but we also have simple pads of paper and packs of envelopes, as well as coloured card stock and coloured envelopes.  Watch this space, as the range we carry is likely to expand quickly…

Now, this is just so creative….everyone has heard of origami, and I’d imagine most people have had a go at making a swan or something like that at some stage.  But folding banknotes origami-style - and making use of what’s printed on them is an artform in its own right.

This pic is from Fun Fever where they have some great face-themed moneygami.  Over at Commongate, they have a whole gallery of incredible dollar-bill moneygami examples.