Make your own moss world: Kokedama Tutorial

Antoine de Saint Exupéry's Little Prince came from a planet scarcely any larger than a house. He shared his little planet with good plants, bad plants, a couple of vulcanos and one beautiful rose.

The image of this small asteroid covered in green with one magnificent flower sticking out of it, has always made me smile: wouldn't it be magical to live on such a planet?
One day, while on an urban exploration of Amsterdam, there it was, my first string garden: a little ball of soil, covered in moss, with one, tiny plant growing on top. I wrote about the moss ball, or Kokedama as it is called in Japan, in a previous post but I have waited the whole winter before venturing on making one. In the end I even turned this event into something special by inviting friends and teaching them too how to add a bit of magic to the world: because that is truly what they do. That's why I want to teach this to you too.

What you will need

1. a tiny plant; moss can't stand direct sunlight so choose a shadow loving plant. I have used baby ferns, grass and another lovely plant with violet flowers of which I can't recall the name.

2. a 7:3 ratio of peat soil and akedama or bonsai soil.

3. dry moss (you can buy a whole bag at most plant shops).

4. scissors.

5. cotton thread.

6. nice packing string like twine, hemp or sissal. Mine is from the wonderful London household shop Labour and Wait.

7. gloves. Yes, it WILL get messy.

8. a jar of water.

9. moss, which you can either buy in a large box or pick yourself in the woods.

Instructions

1. Remove as much soil as possible from your tiny plant so that its roots get exposed. Be very thorough but gentle!

2. Mix your peat and akedama soil together. You know the consistency is right when you are able to make a small ball from the earth without it breaking apart.

3. Now that your soil is mixed, start shaping it into a small ball the size of an orange. Use a little bit of water if needed. Think 'clay' or 'pizza dough'.

4. Et voilá!
5. Make sure each ball has enough room to accomodate the roots of your plant.

6. Take a bunch of dry moss and wrap it carefully around the roots, making a circular and compact shape. Then tie the cotton string several times around it. This will eventually dissolve.

8. Make a small hole in your soil ball and gently press the plant inside it. Be careful to 'close' the shape back to a sphere.

9. Now it's time for the fun part: take small sheets of moss and press them firmly into the soil. Don't leave any open spaces. Wrap the twine string around the ball as if you are packing a present and leave the long sides as long as needed.

10. Choose a nice, shady place, install a hook and hang your wonderful planet of moss.


xx
Mimimou

PS Two other very important ingredients which I have forgotten to put on my list are a vacuum cleaner to clean your clothes after all the work is done and straws to drink your coffee with dirty hands...

As the world turns... green

Urban Green
A plant takes up space. Which is fine if you have space but more complicated if you live in a Harry Potter-style broom closet. But plants are even being used as purifiers by Nasa so it might be worth throwing a few pair of shoes away in favour of a green friend. Unless you are as lucky as I am to live near the just opened (and AMAZING) shop Urban Green. If they would serve coffee, I would move there.
In this shop I have discovered something which they call string gardens. Small planets with grass growing all around except at the top where you have a different plant sprouting, like a cherry blossom or an olive tree. Apparently they are all over the web but I am thankful Urban Green showed them to me. Sometimes it's nicer to discover something yourself than have a blogger pointing it to you.

The inspiration for these string gardens can be found in the kokedama, an ancient form of bonsai, and is fairly easy to reproduce:
1. Roll clay-heavy soil into balls;
2. Cover the soil in moss, or stick grass seeds in it;
3. Inserting a plant into the soil;
4. Use some lovely string to keep everything together;
5. Attach one or more strings to the ball and hang them where you want.

But you could also drop by Urban Green and just buy one for 19 euros...

Terra Plana
Walking away from the shop with a wonderful Bergamot plant I was asked a few times where I had bought my shoes from. These were from Terra Plana, a wonderful brand with Dutch origins which tries hard to use a variety of eco-friendly materials and innovative minimal glue constructions. All their shoes are made from recycled materials! So I am walking on other people' stories and it feels so soft...

What I particularly love about the shoes is the box. On it you will find a small instruction: either re-use the box to store the shoes, or turn it inside out which leaves you with a wonderfully printed box or bring it to a paper bin and let others recycle it for you.

There are so many brands which do not understand the difference between really be and mean who you are, and just say it for the sake of marketing and sales.

Luxirare
Another great example of meaning who you say you are, is Luxirare, a weekly webzine dedicated to clothing and cuisine. Luxury to them is not a price, it's a personal experience which depends on the time and amount of thinking it took to create something.

One of the luxury things they have created, has stolen my heart completely: I am a crayons lover. I used to drink sweet ink from my uni-ball pens. I love fruit and am addicted to colors.
Luxirare has shaken all my addictions and created something amazing: edible crayons.

All crayons were made of a variety of edible ingredients from nuts to fruity pebbles to dried blueberries. Most of the ingredients that were used were of the healthy variety, but a few colours, such as blue, achieved better results with more sugar and candy. But who cares if you think of the disgusting things we humans tend to eat?
That being said, each crayon was made with color divisions. So the flavour is based on colours, not actual flavours so I am not sure if eating your red crayon after drawing would taste as good as eating a red apple...

Friday 3 September
On each walk I now make, I take seeds from plants along the path and distribute them elsewhere.

Are you broken? I can fix you

Wednesday 1 September
I had parked my bike next to someone else's when I noticed one thing missing: the other bike only had one pedal. 'How uncomfortable for the riders' right foot!' I thought.

My grocery shop was across the street so I started walking towards it. I can never walk in one straight line so I was sort of zigzagging on the road when I noticed a familiar object lying on the tram rail: a bike pedal! It wasn't the right color nor the right size but it was a bike pedal. So I ran back and carefully pushed the pedal in the metal pin. It fitted! The cinderella bike had found its almost perfectly fitting shoe. I smiled and left. Little things can change the world too.

The End.

Oh. I can change the world

Floods, another oil spill, giant hail, food riots... OK. Yes. I understand. A lot of things are not going very well in the world and there are many reasons to be sad. But at the same time... should I be sad because I can't do much about it?

A week ago I have decided to change the world and I am making one step a day towards my destination. At least.
The great thing is that there are no rules and it's not really important where you start. Which means you could do ANYTHING, ANYTIME. For example, you could make a complete stranger smile, just by saying something nice or sharing a moment ('look at that rainbow'). Or you could make seed bombs and drop them in desolated areas of your city. Or you might embellish the street with a few crayons and the help of some children.
Take a few things into consideration: it's important to stick to your believes as much as possible, to mean what you do and to act impulsively.

Monday 30 August
My boyfriend and I have named this week the 'no plastic week'. This means:
We will not buy anything with a plastic container, if we can avoid it.
We will bring our own bags to the shops.
We will re-use all containers and plastic we already have.
We won't 'take-away' in plastic: either bring your own containter or take the time and sit in.

So far the results have been great. Not only did we both get great reactions from other people, but we got to eat better food, spent less, bought more consciously and we had no left-over food we had to throw away. I was already in love with glass jars but now they have found their way to... practically everywhere, from plant pot to food jar (as we have no plastic ones left).

Therefore I have decided to continue with a no plastic month. My next project involves a lunch bag made from coffee bean bags and I have contacted my local authorities and requested a plastic container bin for my neighboorhood.

Have a lovely day,

MM

A poodle under my bed: a post about monsters

At exactly 02.47 PM on 3rd October 2007 in Central Park, New York, I discovered poodles scare me.

At that moment in time a perfectly trimmed, white poodle was walking majestically towards me and I swear the pavement cracked underneath his paws: he was so big, he was able to look me in the eye.
I used to beg my parents to get me a poodle when I was a little girl, but from that day on, my conception of a 'poodle' had changed. All information in our mind is stored in little boxes, which we then label with a name and fill with a memory, a rough concept and an emotion. My poodle box said 'cuddly; small and fluffy; happiness' but when I saw the poodle mentioned previously, my mind and my senses conflicted with what I thought a poodle to be and I was forced to renew my information box. I changed that into 'scary; BIG and fluffy; fear'. Then I realized there was another box which information was very similar to the giant poodle's, its label read 'monster'.
Monster? Was this experience enough to turn a poodle into a monster???

There I was, standing in the middle of New York City in my most glamorous dress, trying to define the difference between a poodle and a monster. Our conception of what we consider to be a monster, has its roots somewhere in our babyhood and rarely gets an update in adult life. Meaning we end up dying with the same concept of what a monster is, as we used to have as a kid.

Some monsters are furry, others have shiny scales, most of them are blessed with a long row of pointy teeth - which have usually all sorts of disgusting things sticking between them - and practically all of our monsters are BIG. Really BIG. That's the thing about monsters: although we all have very different ideas on how he is supposed to look like, we all recognize a monster when we see one. But do they still scare us when we are grown-up?

As monsters are such a big part of our childhood, we tend to loose our fear over the years. We put them in a perspective ('You are just one of the ten thousand things I should be scared of') and they get smaller. Sometimes, we even start loving them.

I do. Many other grown-ups obviously do too...

Ray Harryhausen is an American film producer and a special effects creator most famous for his stop-motion monster animation. You might have never heard of him but does King Kong or the amazing fight between a man and seven skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts ring a bell? He is responsible for almost every monster you have seen in a 50s, 60s and 70s movies. Nice: The Pixar film Monsters Inc. pays homage to Harryhausen in a scene where Mike and Celia visit a restaurant named "Harryhausen's".


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Twenty years after he had drawn them, Italian illustrator Ericailcane’s parents showed him his first childhood drawings featuring monsters and fantastic creatures. He then simply redrew them and published them side by side in the wonderful book Potente di fuoco.

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Isn't this the most accurate definition of a monster? I love this illustration, no words could ever achieve this image. Visual artist and writer Matteo Gubellini has just become a dad and I am slightly jealous of the fantastic world he will create for his child. But I am sure this experience will sparkle his own imagination even more.

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Relleno de Mono, a talented illustrator from Chile, literally proves that monsters are not evil creatures. They are actually quite friendly as of all of his wonderfully manipulated Polaroids show. Wouldn't you love having a monster in your pool?



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The hand of amazing, wonderful Canadian illustrator Carson Ellis is
easy to discern: a subtle color palette, gentle line work and silent storytelling. Her monsters seem to have stepped out of a Brueghel's painting, with their mix matched bodies but how could someone with such elegant feet harm anyone?


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Italian Camilla Falsini's favourite subjects for artworks and illustrations are fantastic creatures and mean human like figures, usually represented with big heads and tiny bodies. Or simply with sharp eyes and pointy teeth...


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This book is a small collection of some of the work visual artist Geoff McFetridge has done for Spike Jonze’s film adaptation of the book Where the Wild Things Are. Like with all of his work, Geoff's attempts to manipulate with irony and imagination the way people look at things. You can see this is a monster but when you look at him closely, it becomes hard to see any monstrosity in him. So is he a monster?

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Joshua Ben Longo has an obsession with monsters and comic book heroes. That is a good thing: have a look at its portfolio and although sometimes slightly disconcerting, his work is so much fun! I want a house full of monster furniture too.


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Nobody could have said it better than Picasso: All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Just keep checking under your bed every once in a while, ok?

MM

The importance of looking carefully

It was rush hour at the Amsterdam railway station and I was on my way to Brussels. The train was running late and as a consequence everybody was walking up and down the platform impatiently, moving in coordinated blocks. That's how I saw her: at one point the mass left a huge gap right where she was standing. At first she seemed motionless like a statue: an elderly lade, somewhere in her eighties, with wavy hair, a soft suede coat, a mohair turtleneck sweater, wonderfully cut pants and lovely flats. All of which was in the purest shade of white. She looked as if she had stepped right out of a Vogue winter fairytale. But the lady was conscious of everybody staring at her: young girls with their mocking smiles, young boys rolling their eyes in disbelief. The white lady's hands clutched more and more to the bag she had pushed in front of her like a shield.
I thought she looked amazing. I went up to her and said 'Madame, you look beautiful'.
A lovely smile broke her face in thousand wrinkles. She lowered her arms and thanked me.

The train arrived and we lost each other in the mass. I found an empty seat, took off my coat and waited for the train to leave. Suddenly I saw her bony hand holding a carefully wrapped sweet before my eyes. The lady was towering over me. 'Take this, please, and enjoy. I am sure it has been a long time since someone has offered you a sweet. Just as long as someone has said to me I looked beautiful.'
She smiled again and left.

That moment was magical to me. I think of her words very often and while many people were there at that exact moment, none of them carries this memory with him or her. Not just beauty is in the eye of the beholder, life is as well.

My Italian grandmother had a special way of dressing up: on important occasions she applied a hint of deep red Chanel lipstick with her index finger and sprayed a hint of No5 on her wrists. After that she was ready to be taken out by grandfather and indeed, although the changes remained unnoticed for the untrained eye, I could see her metamorphosis: she had shed her worker's coat and felt like a woman.

It's important to train our heart to see things as they are, not as they look.

Flickr is a endless source of poignant tales for people like me. Some are speculative, others aren't. Like this old lady sitting on a bench from Ed Yourdon. She is wearing a nice blue dress and pearls, which shows she has carefully dressed up for shopping. But she is holding her groceries and bag so close to her body, that it's clear she is not feeling entirely safe in the world. Her gaze isn't very trusty either. Her hand is resting next to her, obviously reserving that seat for no-one. In the comment the photographer notes that he bumped into the lady one week later, wearing the exact same clothes and pearls and carrying the exact same plastic bag...

Most of us have heard of Jonathan Harris. To me he was the pioneer of online story collectors. He is perhaps best known for We feel fine, a website which measures emotions through blog analysis. Another great project he did is I want you to want me, which gathers its data from online dating websites. The data is presented as an interactive installation showing a sky whose weather (sunny, cloudy, rainy, snowy, etc.) can be controlled by the viewer. Hundreds of blue and pink balloons float through the sky, each representing a single dating profile.


Larry Sultan spent a decade photographing his mother and father, both retired, in a series of colour-rich and hyper-realistic portraits. Nearly all images were staged. Sultan was fascinated with fiction and suggested narrative. He depicted his parents as if they were lost in life, dressed up for no reason, waiting for things not to come. An example of how you shouldn't always trust what you see through the eyes of someone else.

FOUND Magazine is a wonderful collection of found objects, love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, telephone bills, doodles. Memento's of someone else's life which sparkle the imagination of its finder.
In this case, the finder is juist as intriguing. The photo shows an unsettling image of a laughing girl with a horrible fire in the background. The founder was a guy working at a photo lab who made copies of all the pictures he liked.

Flip through the pictures of William Eggleston and you will see mailboxes, fast food restaurants, convenience stores. But however common these places seem to be, in every picture he manages to capture a glimpse of a beautiful and colourful story everybody seems to overlook. This old lady sitting on the swing bench embodies fifties coolness: cigarette in one hand, her striking patterned dress trying not to blend in with the background. Her legs are elegantly aligned which reminds me of Audrey Hepburn. When I look at her I see someone who would give everything to escape her own life.

Rob from the.found.object is someone who started collecting found photos after finding a run over camera and developing its film. Why don't we all do this? Imaging having a photo album full of people you don't know: you could invent everything about them. Ted, 37, toothpaste tester. Mia, 25, hates flies and loves saying hello to people in the street.






Mark Clarke’s Cabinets of Cures is a series of mismatched cabinets enriched with fascinating stories about its character. Each cabinet is created from found fabrics and everyday objects, and represents a series of surreal moments in medical history. This lady is the Countess of Chinchon, the wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru. When court physicians were unable to treat her malarial fever, she turned to an alternative native remedy: Cinchona bark.





Another photographer, another picture I love, from Juliana Beasley. In the obviously staggering heat, three dressed up ladies in their golden age are having a snack-moment. At least one lady is wearing a bra underneath her bathing suit and at least one other has curlers in her hair, but they all have perfectly manicured hands and are wearing make-up. Isn't it wonderfully obvious that these ladies love being themselves?




I tend to collect little broken objects. Or other things with no purpose. At one point a flatmate lost his coolness about this and commanded me to throw all the useless crap out of the house. But I didn't wanted to. So I started making hanging mobiles with all the little bits I had. The objects were still useless but by being part of something bigger, they had turned into pages of a wonderful book.

Be amazing,

MM

Background image train station: Claudio.ar

Imaginary safari chasing art

I was born on an island shaped like a three-legged monster and rugged like an old fisherman's forehead. The sea has always been renowned for its abundance in marine life, especially sword fish and tuna. But the land was poor of animals, except from the usual fauna you can see anywhere: mice, swallows, pigeons, sparrows, lizards and many insects.

When I hit the magical age of eight, a zoo opened its gates on our island. I loved animals and could spend hours reading my Animal Kingdom encyclopedia, so my parents took me there on a lovely Sunday morning. We were the first people entering. Trembling with excitement I walked around its cages. Unfortunately the zoo hadn't managed the funding to get enough animals to fill them so most of the structures were empty. Outside the cages mice, swallows, pigeons, sparrows and lizards seemed to prosper, just like on the rest of the island.

The largest cage of all was situated next to the play area (one slider and two see-saws). At first glance it appeared to be sort of empty too. Then I noticed one animal I had only seen in my Animal Kingdom encyclopedia so far: a praying mantis. I didn't dare to breathe or move and sat there motionlessly on my knees observing the little creature observing me. Suddenly she started moving towards the bars. Gently and elegantly she hopped out of the iron cage and hid under a waste basket. There I was, standing in a zoo, surrounded by free animals and empty cages. Had the world itself become a zoo?

Context changes meaning. A chair looks weird in the middle of the street but normal at home. And how can you call a zoo a 'zoo' when it has more animals outside than inside his cages? Let's say we let art run free of context. What will we find when we go on an imaginary safari chasing art?

1. Reuben Margolin grew up making things with his father's tools. One day he saw a caterpillar move and spent months researching how he could emulate its crawling movement with wood. This was the beginning of something special: Reuben creates extraordinarily complex kinetic sculptures. A fusions of technology and high art inspired by simple movements he found while observing nature. Please watch this video and feel the same enchantment I felt when discovering his work:



2. Jarbas Agnelli is a wonderful filmmaker from Brazil and the creator of Birds on the Wires. On a magical life-changing day he spotted a picture of birds on electric wires in a newspaper and noticed they were arranged like notes on a musical score: 'I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.'
He then sent the music to the photographer, Paulo Pinto, who he had Googled. Pinto told his editor, who told a reporter and the story ended up as an interview in the very same newspaper. I can assure you will end up telling everyone you know about it too.



3. Walking along the windy Dutch coast, you might find many things on your way like wiggly jellyfish, thousands of grey-coloured shells and beautifully washed wood. But chances are you could also find yourself staring at a herd of enormous plastic animals. These 'strandbeesten', beach animals, are given life by Theo Jansen.
Jansen is a physicist who once invented a painting machine after which he dedicated himself to creating a new species: giant skeletons resembling dream animals and are able to walk on the wind, their life source. Some of these creatures can capture and store the wind. Others have the ability to anchor themselves in the sand when the wind threatens to blow them away. All of the animals are set free.
Strandbeesten is a wonderful example of engineering being kissed by art.



4. Have you ever watched Jim Henson's Labyrinth? Ron Mueck was one of its model and puppet makers. This Australian hyperrealist sculptor works in London creating perfect human figures using fiberglass resin or silicone. The only unreal aspect of his work is its scale, all his figures are either oversized or undersized giving YOU the feeling of being undersized or oversized.
The first time I saw his work I simply stopped blinking. Afraid I would miss a furtive, tiny movement from the sculpture I was looking at.



5. It's not just humans who can create art based nature, engineering and imagination. A rare species of solitary bees found in the Middle East, called Osmia avoseta, constructs its beautiful nests from petals, creating pink, yellow, blue, and purple chambers for its larvae.



6. Our imaginary safari ends on the shores of Zadar, in Croatia. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built here on the quayside: underneath you will find thirty-five organ pipes. Day and night sea waves push air through them, playing strange and unworldly musical chords, resembling a whale cry.


Isn't the world amazing?

Have a lovely day,

Miss Moussetache

{Background image Zoo: Life.com}

Urban Storytellers: the world as a drawing sheet

When we are little, grown-ups are always telling us off when we extend our drawing surface to anything that isn't paper: walls, human legs and let's not forget the living room's antique table. So we learn how to not use walls, human legs and antique tables as drawing paper.
By the time we have restricted ourselves to a paper sheet, grown-ups our telling us off for coloring outside the 'lines'. Only a face should be pink and not its surrounding sky, dress, house, etc... So we learn how to stick our colored crayon in between the pre-drawn lines.
But then WE become a grown-up too. And sometimes we go back to our instinct of coloring outside lines and using the world as a drawing sheet. When that happens... the world becomes a wonderful storyteller who we never want to stop telling its stories.

Have you ever heard about knitgraffiti? Small, usually rectangular, pieces from leftover yarns are knitted together and sawn around trees, abandoned gas stations, light poles, doorhandles and even buses... Just type knitgraffiti, yarn bombing, urban embroidery and you will find thousands of amazing images. Isn't this the best way to brighten up everyone's day?
{image: Maskerade}

Well, it definitely isn't the only way. Walls is a really cool art gallery in Amsterdam, which offers artists the opportunity to rent a strip of their wall for two months on one of the city's best locations. This is where I discovered the work of José van Tilburg. She uses words from old love letters, lyrics, poems and picked-up dialogues which she then translates into images made out of fabric or paper, stitched together with thread. Like three-dimensional memories. Just imagine how it would be to wander around the city surrounded by beautiful and touching sentences sawn and stitched across grubby walls.
{image: Walls}

Another way of decorating the urban landscape has been coined by UK artist filthyluker. He creates large scale inflatable limbs, like the tentacles of a giant octopus, which emerge from buildings, making it appear as if the whole building has been devoured by a massive creature. Have a look at his work: it's like walking into a real life horror B-movie...
Oh, I almost forgot to tell you about the eyes. He dots urban nature with peering eyes as if they are wondering themselves what on earth they are doing in between all the concrete. Do try this at home, the effect is strangely eerie and surreal.
{image: filthyluker}

The other day my Love and I were walking in our neighborhood when suddenly I noticed our feet were surrounded by birds. Literally, as they happened to be drawn on to the pavement tiles. After inspecting the area, we noticed more floor graffiti like the ones with the birds and it didn't turn out to be just art: by placing stencils on the floor and turning a high-pressure sprayer on, it's possible to clean selectively thus making this a very cheap option for advertising. But as long as you have a high-pressure sprayer at hand, you could turn every square in the world into a giant canvas. Or why not use this to show off your portfolio?
{image: Croasters}

When photography meets urban coloring meets an amazing creative personality, you get Katie Sokoler. This freelance photographer and street artist from Brooklyn isn't just someone we would secretly all want to be. She is an inspiration volcano of urban intervention. What about giant pacmans trying to eat humans? Or small hearts coming out of pipes? Her biggest invention (largely copied but nobody does it better than Color Me Katie) is the thought bubble. Katie sticks large thought bubbles on a wall and waits around the corner just till the moment someone walks by... creating a life-size cartoon. Wouldn't you ever wish to know what other people were thinking? Her latest project involves miniature, playing silhouettes which she places on 'shadows' creating a playground of the world.
{image: Color Me Katie}

Today I have bought an old box of crayons...

... and no paper.

Have a lovely day,

Miss Moussetache

Excuse me, there is a pigeon in my living room

Something interrupted me while listening to music and writing away this morning. That something was flapping vigorously in my living room, making it impossible for me to go in. It was a lovely morning so I had opened all the windows and somehow a very fat pigeon had flown into the house.

From the glass doors I saw this pompous pigeon flying around and sitting on almost every item of the room: the couch, the vintage piano, my collection of staplers, my boyfriend's selfmade lamps. The beast was also leaving a trace of its body dust on everything. You could easily trace its contours with a pencil and get featured in a biology book.

After half an hour I knew something had to happen, it was me or the bird. So I went into the kitchen and broke off a delicious piece of bread. Things went really quickly afterwards. The pigeon immediately saw the bread and started flying in my direction but I was very quick and threw that piece of scrumptious bread outside the window. The pigeon u-turned and grabbed the bread while flying into the sunny sky.



What did I learn from this?
A. Never open your window on a sunny day.
B. Never run out of bread just in case you forget you weren't supposed to open the window.
C. We need fountains in a city to make sure birds get a bath every now and then.

Have a lovely day,

Miss Moussetache

Music for your moods

How are you feeling today? I woke up insanely happy and after my first coffee the melancholy swept me off my feet. Undoubtedly some other mood will knock me down soon.

You know what I hate most about mood swings? I have to walk to my iPod and change the tracks every time. I simply can't listen to happy music when I am feeling sad.

Probably you feel the same about this. But our sighs and moans have been heard... and inspired someone to create Stereomood, an extremely accurate playlist based on your moods. It's perfect and works amazingly well. My next wish? A genius playlist which automatically tags the moods on my iPod too...

PS Talking about mood swings, did you ever hear about emotionally-activated lip gloss? Yes, it does exist, it's called Mood Swing (really?) and it's an easy way to show the world whether you are feeling sassy, sexy or deliriously happy. Gosh, didn't we all need that?
And if the gloss doesn't work - there is always the mood swing pin...