If you are getting tired of hearing from me (that’s me, Maria, who is always babbling away over here), today is your lucky day: we have a brand new columnist (her socks and feet, pictured above)! Not only is her first Stickers & Donuts post today (pencil cases!), but she has tons more coming up (more school supplies! interviews! etc!). I admit to being jealous of her very cute and well-thought-out posts, which feature the same kind of humor she presents on her personal blog, Marmalade Skies and Marshmallow Pies.

(More bio after jump!) (more…)

Some of my favorites from last week! (Links in the list below; right click to open in new window.)

• A book of a guy comparing his silhouettes to famous silhouettes (via SwissMiss).
• A hysterical inscription on The Book Inscriptions Project blog from a book entitled “Doktor Bey’s Suicide Guidebook.”
• I really just want to put my feet into these rugs from the Dolder Grand Hotel in Zurich (via Cool Hunter).
• I love, love, love Chris Benz’s colorful clothing lines, and his web-site is pretty cool, too! (via Oh Joy!)
• A pretty awesome chair, good for seat crunchers, via Smashing Magazine. (I’m not sure that you can buy this; it has made its way around the blogs, but I think it was originally part of a show.)
• An awesome flea market guide from Design*Sponge, listing all of the flea markets in a variety of my very favorite states (Connecticut, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, and Massachussetts)!
• Cool photographs of naked Olympians! (via Crap We Like)
• Another cool Smashing Magazine find — a retro phone that you talk into instead of your cell phone.
• I love this ASL (American Sign Language) pattern (and the tank top, which isn’t availible for sale, unfortunately!) in a book which includes designs from Julia Rothman (from Julia’s book design blog, Book By Its Cover).

I’ll be gone for a long(ish) weekend in lovely Cape Cod, Mass, but I will get a few little things up for you to read early next week. Next week will also be the debut of a guest blogger — I’ve gotten a sneak peak at her post, and I’m pretty excited!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Just had to let everyone know about researchers’ progress on that invisibility cloak. Really. It’s made of really, really small metal fishnet or wires, and it bends light to produce negative refraction — or, something like that — it’s probably best you read the article yourself!

“We are not actually cloaking anything,” Valentine said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think we have to worry about invisible people walking around any time soon. To be honest, we are just at the beginning of doing anything like that” (Reuters).

I hope to get one of these as a gift with in the next five years… what do you think?!

I’ll be doing a short series of posts on Flushing this week, from food to the World’s Fair, and they will all be tagged with the label Flushing, reachable by clicking here!

I just love these pretty glasses from wrapables.com. Not only do these non-sweating glasses obviate the need for coasters, but they hold both hot and cold liquids and look pretty while doing it! I’ll take that coffee on the left with all of the foam, thank you.

(Set of 2 $17-33, depending on size)

1. Beets are making a comeback — this week at least, since the NY Times is posting a new beet recipe every day this week. I managed to concoct a beet salad and beet omelet (from beets in jars) and am feeling rather healthy & pink.
2. Books from Boxes is an amazing song by Maximo Park. On repeat all this week in my cubicle/car/ipod.
3. The new Dole Pina Colada juice is SPECTACULAR, and usually I’m not even a big juice fan. It’s 100% juice and 8oz is 120 calories and counts for two servings of fruits (though you are still supposed to get most of your fruit servings from whole fruits). I like to mix 1/3 juice with 2/3 plain seltzer. Yum!
4. Everyone is obsessed with Mad Men (availible on DVD) because it was nominated for, like, a billion Emmy’s. Now I’m obsessed, too. I wasn’t won over right away, but eventually became intrigued by the early 1960s ad world (mAD men, get it!), and especially love that they also have a female character who is trying to make her way in a man’s world (although almost all of the other females are secretaries or housewives). Anyway, I netflixed the entire first season this week.
5. Now that I have a brand-y new prescription from my eye doctor, I’m super-excited about the blog Glassy Eyes, which explains how to purchase prescription glasses online for about $10-$50. I love these particularly ugly glasses from eyebuydirect.com. They’re so ugly they’re fashionable! (There are a lot of not-ugly glasses at these sites, too, by the way. And you can even print out glasses or “try them on” online by uploading your picture!)
6. Fredflare.com was recently featured in an NY Times article about band-aids (they happen to have sausage and egg band-aids, by the way). Anyway, after even seeing the web-site’s name listed in the NY Times article I got all nostalgic about my fashion-forward, bright-colored friend. I now want everything on the web-site! Someone want to lend me a few bucks?

Since it’s book week and since this blog prides itself on finding creative things, I had to share the latest release from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Hamlet (Facebook Newsfeed Edition). This just gets funnier and funnier as it goes. Read the whole thing here.

Stickers & Donuts Book Week starts today (once things get underway, that link will take you to all Book Week related posts)! As a former English major, I’m very excited, but we’re still going to do all of the things we’re not supposed to do with books. We are going to cut them up. We are going to judge them by their covers. We are going to analyze their page layout. We’re going to find fashionable contact cases so we can see the books we are destroying (or, reading). It’s going to be fun. Now, I’m off to bring you a really exciting post about Thomas Allen’s photography. See you soon!

(Image above from a vintage book Flickr set found through Veer’s blog.)

S&D NEWS ALERT: I’m so excited for a post I’m doing tomorrow about Thomas Allen, who takes amazing photos of books, that I’m conducting an entire art/design Book Week here at Stickers & Donuts. The Thomas Allen post is going to contain some exclusive photos that were not included in the final cut for his work with Oprah Magazine. I’m super-excited about this post and can’t wait to share these pictures with you!

So, Book Week starts tomorrow (see italicized paragraph above) and I hope you stop by! In the meantime, here are a few not-necessarily-art-and-design-related things I am currently obsessed with to help get you through your Sunday.

Sometimes, I get stuck on repeat like a kindergartner who watches the same episode of Blues Clues everyday in a single week. Suddenly, I’m obsessed with movie/artist/tv show/outfit X and I can’t get off of it for a week or two.

1. American Movie, a documentary about a guy with a mullet from Milwaukee making a horror film. Hysterical. Watch the trailer on youtube.
2. Fight Test, a song by the Flaming Lips.
3. Plain T-shirts in bright colors. This one is from American Apparel, but I’m really loving the cheap ones at H&M.
4. Shorts. With summer in full swing, I suddenly realized I owned only one pair of shorts. So I went out and bought five more. (But I need to get them all tailored… preferably by a sewing relative, and by then the summer might already be over.) The ones pictured are from Old Navy.
5. House MD, the TV series about a charmingly arrogant and asshole-ish doctor. The show is on hiatus right now, but I just got caught up with all of Season 3 on the DVD and some Season 4 (which you can watch free online). I also love this printable poster from the House website!
6. Mattinator lets you stay signed in to multiple Twitter accounts at once and update them in unison or individually. The web-page also has a cute, cartoonish design! (By the way, you can follow Stickers and Donuts on Twitter!)
7. I’ve been craving cupcakes all week, but only had a can of frosting availible. A few bites of this did the trick.
8. I managed to get through over sixteen years of school, SATs, calc, statistics, algebra, and geometry without knowing my multiplication tables. I thought it was about time I learned. So I got $1 flashcards at Target and studied away. Phew.