#Fableists Fortnight Continues with Another T-Shirt to be Won!

To celebrate our launch, we’re giving away one of our artist-designed t-shirts every day for a fortnight – #FableistsFortnight.

Mimi wears ‘Happy Factory’ by Anthony Peters

The winner can choose their design and the size (sizes available are 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 or 9-10) and we’ll ship them all out at the end of #FableistsFortnight. That’s 10 t-shirts up for grabs in total.

We will post a status update on Facebook and a tweet on twitter each week day for the 10 week days from our launch date of October 29th. To be in the draw, you have to either share the #FableistsFortnight post from our Facebook page or tweet the hashtag #FableistsFortnight on twitter. Please note that if you share from someone else’s page, we won’t be able to track that. You’ll also have to check your FB privacy settings or we might not be able to see your share.

Each day the competition begins at 9:01 am UTC/GMT and ends the following 9:00 am. The last draw will be on the morning of Tuesday November 12th.

Good luck!

Follow us on our social media channels to be the first to know about new collections, competitions and other cool stuff.

~ The Fableists

Play hard, live forever.

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Behind the Scenes Video at Our Look Book Photo Shoot

While fashion photographer Sam Robinson was shooting the kids, we caught a little behind the scenes footage of our young Fableists exploring the set.

What Can you do with Your Pumpkin After Halloween?

With Halloween only a day away, we are all about pumpkins here. Pumpkin is a great source of vitamins A, C and D, as well as potassium and other minerals. They are low in fat and calories but are dense and therefore very filling. The seeds are rich in vitamin D and zinc and are a great anti-oxidant. Best of all, you can use the whole pumpkin! So, after you are finished with your Jack-O-Lantern be sure to try out some of these great recipes.

The first step in pumpkin carving is to remove the seeds. You can rinse them and pat them dry, or roast them in their pumpkin-y goodness. Toss them in olive oil and some salt, or the seasoning of your choice, spread them on parchment paper on an oven tray and roast in the oven at 140C/285F for about 15 minutes.

Once you’ve closed up shop on Halloween, you can use your pumpkin in all sorts of great ways. A quick search on Google or Pinterest will turn up hundreds of recipes. I’ve included some suggestions below. The first step, however, is to remove the pumpkin flesh from the skin. You can take a knife to it, but roasting it at 180C/350F for 15 minutes will make this a lot easier. If your recipe requires pureed pumpkin, then roast it for 30-40 minutes and it will be ready to use. Once you’ve cooked and mashed your pumpkin, it can be frozen and used later in the year.

Pumpkin pie and bread/muffins are terrific uses for your pumpkin but why not try something a bit different?

This one, for a delicious pumpkin pie smoothie comes from Caroline Hurley’s beautiful blog site Taste, Love and Nourish. She is passionate about creating recipes that are unique, flavourful and healthy. At The Fableists, we are smoothie fans and we love pumpkin pie, so this got our attention. And it’s super easy. You can use canned pumpkin puree as indicated in Caroline’s measurements, or make your own as instructed above.

Photo Credit: Taste, Love and Nourish

For the measurements, visit Taste, Love and Nourish:

ice cubes
pumpkin puree (reduce amount for a thinner smoothie)
frozen banana
golden flaxseed meal (or almond meal)
honey (or stevia for vegan)
almond milk (or milk you prefer is fine)
vanilla extract
cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom and sea salt
Combine all of the ingredients in a blender. Blend on high speed until smooth.
Serve in tall glasses with a straw or a spoon.
Makes 2 large smoothies

Next up is Pumpkin Korma Soup. Another easy recipe that leaves you lots of room to experiment with different flavours.

Start by sautéing 5 chopped shallots in some olive oil until they are soft
Add two chopped cloves of garlic for the final 30 seconds
Toss in chopped pumpkin (I’ve used the flesh of a medium pumpkin)
Add 750 ml of stock (chicken, veg or other) and cook until the pumpkin is soft
Then blend, add one tin of coconut milk and a couple of tablespoons of korma paste
Season to taste and serve.

Our final pumpkin recipe, for Pumpkin Fettuccine Alfredo comes via Forgiving Martha for CamilleStyles.com. Camille Styles, Inc. is a full service event planning company in Austin, Texas. As well as being an online destination for entertaining enthusiasts around the world, they also provide full creative service for brands from promo videos, to blog posts, to styling and shooting.

Photo Credit: Forgiving Martha for CamilleStyles.com

Ingredients:

1 teaspoon olive oil
2 tablespoons butter
4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup pumpkin puree
1 teaspoon herbs de provence
salt and pepper, to taste
8 ounces fettuccine, cooked
freshly grated parmesan, to garnish
fresh sage, julienne, to garnish

Instructions:

Heat oil and butter in a sauce pan with minced garlic and cook until lightly golden and fragrant.
Whisk in cream, pumpkin and spices and let simmer until thoroughly heated and smooth.
Toss with cooked pasta, garnish with parmesan and sage.

Happy Halloween!

The Fableists Launches Today with a Chance to Win a Free T-Shirt

The day has finally come and our web shop is open for business. Please come and check it out! All of our clothes are produced in small quantities, so if you’ve seen anything you like, you’d better snap it up quickly.

The Fableists’ T-Shirts Designed by Gregori Saavedra

What better way to launch than with a t-shirt giveaway? Over the next two weeks, we will be celebrating #FableistsFortnight on our social media channels Facebook and twitter. Each day during #FableistsFortnight we’ll give away one t-shirt. The winner can choose their design and the size (sizes available are 3-4, 5-6, 7-8 or 9-10) and we’ll ship it to you. That’s 10 shirts up for grabs!

We will post a status update on Facebook and a tweet on twitter each week day for 10 days beginning October 29th. To be in the draw, you have to either share the post on Facebook with #FableistsFortnight in it or you can tweet the hashtag #FableistsFortnight on twitter.

Each day the competition begins at 9:01 am UTC/GMT and ends the following 9:00 am. The last draw will be on the morning of Tuesday November 12th.

Geddit?

If not, get in touch.

Follow us on our social media channels to be the first to know about new collections, competitions and other cool stuff.

The Fableists

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The Fableists is Launching Tomorrow – October 29th!

Come and see what we’ve been up to at TheFableists.com

The Warehouse Has Been One Happening Place of Late

Daf is really enjoying himself numbering the clothing passports

It’s not all clothing design, photo shoots and canapes around here, you know! This past week, The Fableists headed to the warehouse to check over our first shipment of the artist-designed t-shirts.

What was initially billed as ‘a couple of hours’ of work quickly became two full days. After individually labelling the clothing passports with the print number of the t-shirt by hand, we had to put them in to the bags with the tees.

Ruby and Daf in their high vis vests

Each t-shirt has now been carefully unpacked, had the size and print checked, been labelled with a bar code, had its passport assigned, been counted and re-packed. What a labour of love! And it was dangerous work – at any minute we could have been run over by a forklift moving a pallet of boxes around. Fortunately we had our high vis vests on so we could be spotted from the moon. We have handled so many t-shirts that this Fableist can now tell the size of a tee with her eyes closed just by the weight and feel of the thing. That is skill.

T-Shirts: unpacked, inspected, labelled, counted, passport inserted and re-packed.

Now they are all ready and waiting to be shipped off all over the world to their first owners. Don’t you just want to take one home?

The Wild Network Launches with ‘Project Wild Thing’ Documentary

If you are a parent who is trying to raise happy, healthy and active kids into interesting and interested human beings, you are no doubt concerned with the amount of time your kids – and indeed all kids – are spending outdoors. We certainly are. The Fableists’ clothes are made to live in, to play in and to explore in. We want to see our clothes up trees and rolling down hills. While all kids love being outdoors and running free, convincing them to get out there isn’t always easy. And more and more, competing with the ‘screen time’ your kids crave is to blame.

The newly formed Wild Network is launching the biggest ever campaign to reconnect kids with nature and outdoor play. Their goal is to get parents to swap their kids’ screen time for ‘wild time’: playing outdoors and spending time in the natural world. The Wild Network is made up of more than 370 organisations, including RSPB, the NHS, Wildlife Trust, Scout Association and The National Trust, whose fabulous ’50 Things to do Before You’re 11 3/4’ campaign, was our intro to this current project.

This campaign is probably long overdue. As Andy Simpson, Chair of the Wild Network, said: “The tragic truth is that kids have lost touch with nature and the outdoors in just one generation. Time spent outdoors is down, roaming ranges have fallen drastically, activity levels are declining and the ability to identify common species has been lost.” This is worrying stuff that needs to be front and centre of our parenting agenda.

The Wild Network is advocating the ‘re-wilding’ of our kids with more wild time, and encouraging a swap of 30 minutes of screen time a day for an equal amount of outdoor time. The health and wellbeing benefits of more time spent outside are well documented and the campaign is “all about finding wildness on your doorstep and discovering the sights, sounds and smells of nature, whether in a back garden, local park or green space at the end of the road”.

The centrepiece of the campaign launch is the new, feature length documentary film, ‘Project Wild Thing’. Patrick Barkham of The Guardian claims that “this film will change your life” and it is hoped that it will help to bring about real and lasting change.

In the documentary, filmmaker David Bond takes a look at this modern challenge of getting kids into the natural world. Three years in the making, the film began as a personal journey when Bond realised his own children were living a vastly different childhood from his own, spending just 4% of their lives outdoors. In an effort to get his kids off the sofa, he appointed himself ‘Marketing Director for Nature’ in order to help his brand – nature – compete for a share of his kids’ attention.

Harnessing the power of marketing, which he blames for commercializing childhood, Bond embarks on a campaign to sell nature. The outdoors is the ‘ultimate, free wonder-product’, the one gift you can give your kids that won’t cost a penny. The film follows Bond’s journey to re-brand nature to recapture the imagination of our kids so that they can rediscover the joys of a childhood lived with fresh air and no boundaries.

Ultimately, every parent needs to market nature to their own kids by exposing them to the world outdoors and to show them how to enjoy it. The fondest memories any child will carry with them into adulthood are of time spent outside, on adventures with the people closest to them. What the film urges is that this can be in a garden or city green space; it can be on the walk to school or to the shops; it can be jumping in puddles after a heavy rain or collecting conkers. All we need is to take the time to introduce our children to nature because all kids love being outside. As Bond says in the film: “you’re guaranteed to love nature, or your money back.”

You won’t find ‘Project Wild Thing’ preachy or nostalgic. It is funny and fresh, modern and moving. See it this weekend in the UK. It is being shown in over fifty cinemas across the UK from the 25 October (https://projectwildthing.com/film). The whole family will love it.

Follow the discussion on the twitter feed @wearewildthing and using the hashtag #wildtime or #projectwildthing. Download the new ‘Wild Time’ app, which shows how technology can help give time-pressed families a bucket list of ideas to help get their kids outdoors.

The Wild Network is Here and Ready to Make Some Noise

Andy Simpson is the Chairman of the newly-formed Wild Network, an association of organisations who are committed to getting kids outside and interacting with nature. We covered the launch of the ‘Project Wild Thing’ documentary, with which The Wild Network is involved. Here, Mr Simpson shares some of his motivation for encouraging kids to ‘Roam Free. Play Wild’.It is hard to imagine a great childhood that would not involve being outdoors, being active and exploring natural places. From playing conkers and wading through fallen leaves in the Autumn to discovering the magic of a rockpool at the seaside, those are the memories of glorious days we want our children to have.

I have spent my working life introducing children to nature – with the The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, but mostly with RSPB. To a certain extent I was successful. I was responsible for Wildlife Explorers, RSPB’s junior club with over 200,000 members. Yet no matter how much effort the conservation movement put into working with children, the big picture was depressing. Year on year research showed that children were spending less time outside in nature.

So what has gone wrong? Like so many other problems, this has happened through people acting reasonably and with the best of intentions. The first duty of any parent or carer of children is to keep them safe. Our natural reaction when faced with threats such as traffic, stranger danger or harmful accidents is to keep our children away from the threats. Job done!

Well not quite. At this point it’s important to look at the other side of the coin. What have we lost? What are the consequences of our decisions? All experts agree that children and nature belong together. At its simplest there is the huge amount of fun to be had exploring, discovering, climbing and digging – the endlessly fascinating world of nature. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Active engagement with nature is good for children’s health. We all now know that a sedentary lifestyle for children is a health time bomb with dire consequences in later life. Equally importantly, regular contact with nature is good for children’s mental well-being with benefits for social development and decision making. Many education experts argue that the natural environment is the very best place for children to learn and instinctively all parents know that being in nature is good for the whole family.

The problem seems to be, that while everyone agrees that being in nature is good for children, we have failed to get absence from nature recognised as a real problem that needs to be surmounted. Perhaps nature professionals have made the natural world seem complicated and out of reach. Perhaps we have talked too much about the threats to nature and not enough about the joy of it. Whatever the reason, it is now time for a change.

If we are to stop and ideally reverse the trend of children spending less time outside, we have to convince people that this is a big problem which needs big solutions.

But there is hope. The creation of the ‘The Wild Network’ and its first product, the feature length documentary film ‘Project Wild Thing’ is all about bringing about real and last change – beginning the journey to reconnect kids with nature.

‘Project wild Thing’ takes a fresh look at this modern challenge of getting kids reconnected with playing in the natural world. Expect to laugh and be moved as the director and star, David Bond discovers just how important time in nature should be for his own children. It is impossible to see this film without concluding that this is an important issue which we all, individually and collectively as a society need to address.

This is only the start. The Wild Network has enormous ambitions. We want to put children’s disconnection with nature firmly on the national agenda, working with people and organisations to help get children outdoors and into nature. We want to make it as easy as possible for parents to get their children outside in fun, safe and local green spaces.

I am incurable optimist. The Wild Network already has hundreds of organisations and thousands of people signed up. These organisations and individuals recognise that this is a problem bigger than any of us. It is only if we can build real momentum that we have a chance to make a difference.

So please do three things. See ‘Project Wild Thing’ .I know that you will enjoy it. Go to the Project Wild Thing web site and sign up as an individual or an organisation – it’s completely free. But most of all if you are looking after a child – go outside and have fun.

Andy Simpson
Chairman
Wild Network

The Clothing Passports

Every item of clothing we produce comes with its own ‘passport’. This isn’t to help it cross international borders but rather to record who has owned it.

We’ve told you a bit about the passports before. They are made of recycled post-consumer paper, mixed with rhinoceros dung. They have a lovely, rough texture and we promise they do not smell of poo!As our t-shirts are all limited edition printings, they are issued a print number from 1 to 500. For our first run of t-shirt, the team at The Fableists have hand written the name of the artist and the print number on each passport. Talk about a personal touch! Inside is space to record the owners of the items, so that you can trace where the clothes have been. We can’t wait to see these filled in over time and hope they’ll come back to us with the clothes when they are finished with.

The passports are packed in with the clothes, for you to keep.

Our T-Shirts Numbered 1 Through 5 Have Shipped Out!

You may recall that last week we ran our first competition on Facebook. Five winners were selected to receive a pack of our first collection of THIRTEEN artist-designed t-shirts. Wow! That is a lot of t-shirts, people. Interestingly, a full pack of size 5-6 t-shirts weighs over 100g more than a full pack of 3-4 shirts. Not interesting, you say? Probably not but check back tomorrow to read the story about our days spent at the warehouse and you’ll understand how well acquainted we are with these t-shirts and their exact weights!

It was sad to see the tees go but we know they’ve gone to good homes:

1 – The Cool Heads, Amsterdam
2 – Danny Dryden, London, UK
3 – Kelsey Blackwell, Toronto, Canada
4 – Emma J. Lowe, Nottinghamshire, UK
5 – Joshua Griffiths, New York, USA

And their packages should be well on their way to them by now:

We can’t wait to hear what they think about their numbered print tees! For the rest of you, there will be more chances to win our fab tees next week for #FableistsFortnight when we launch. Keep you eyes on our twitter and Facebook feeds and bag yourself a free t-shirt!