Sonse Home Design is a store that offers so much tucked into a small space. It’s lovely having a shop open in uptown New Westminster that offers what she offers – from small gifts to furniture to art and accessories.

Everyone has their shopping weakness, and mine is a well stocked pet boutique. Not the kind selling doggie strollers and puppy sweaters – although my pit bull does look cute in pink – but a place with knowledgeable staff, natural foods, and well-made equipment and toys.

Cadeaux Gifts in Sapperton never ceases to impress and entice. It is “a trendy boutique and gift store providing the best in essential indulgences” and is easily one of the Lower Mainland’s best-kept secrets.

Piccolo World Gifts is a small Sapperton storefront with a global worldview. Inside, you’ll find an assortment of bright, beautiful, and sometimes random treasures from around the world. It’s interesting enough on its own, but chatting with store owner Nancy Patrick brings a whole new appreciation to her collection.

As the Christmas shopping season arrives with Black Friday in the US, I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than camping outside of a store in order to buy stuff. Except for shooting, trampling or pepper-spraying your fellow shoppers in order to get at said stuff, of which there were many reported instances this year.

I have a confession. I have a Thrifty Foods problem. I grew up in Mill Bay BC (home of one of the first Thrifty Foods) so it holds a special place in my heart. I dream about the cheese scones and I wax philosophically about the marinated meats. It’s grocery nirvana.

Sonse Home Design is full of beautiful finds. I heard about Sonse Home Design from Sheila Keenan whom I follow on Twitter (she writes a great blog about shopping locally in New West) a week or so ago. Promptly forgot about it, but caught a glimpse of Sonse today as I exited London Drugs and decided I’d better check it out before I forgot again!

With summer beginning, families are starting to enjoy Downtown New Westminster and the Waterfront and exploring the River Market. A very friendly family at Emilio’s Deli is really making people smile, reintroducing them to the Market and starting to introduce themselves. People smell the fresh variety of cheeses and meats, but the also see and hear the friendly father and his sons getting to know people.

Downtown New Westminster has it going on. Well, it could have it going on if it could once again capture the vitality of its once historic past. From an urban planning perspective you could not wish for a better template; you’ve got history, great public transit, a waterfront, shopping, density. So what happened, why did the city turn its back on the downtown?

Tucked back off Columbia Street, sharing a cozy retail space with quirky Arundel Mansion is Aroka Vintage, a recently opened vintage décor wedding shop. Owned and run by Dawna Graham, a resident of New West, Aroka specializes in the sale and rental of niche décor items and dresses. Not sure what qualifies as niche décor? Think ornate tea cups and saucers, glass dessert cups, finely decorated china, pewter candle sticks, brass clocks, lamps and more. It’s like stepping into a beautifully curated antique shop minus the dust.

Thinking about the coming blog posts I’m preparing about Aroka Vintage and Red Brick gets me wondering about what undiscovered little shops around New West I may have missed. This week, let’s share a little love with the shopkeepers of New West. Share your picks for great local boutique shopping in the comments, via Twitter or on Facebook. Gotta love a good excuse to go shopping!

The Army & Navy Shoe Sale is always a sure sign of spring. It brings back memories of our annual shopping excursions to the New West store when I was a kid. When my sister and I were young, Mom started the tradition of annual shoe shopping, just us girls, wide eyed at the rows upon rows of shoes, so many options it was overwhelming. This year’s Army & Navy shoe sale starts Wednesday, April 27 at 8 a.m

The $5-million reno of the dilapidated old Quay is unquestionably beautiful. But since the shiny new River Market opened with much fanfare last November, many New Westminster folk whocame to see the new building were disappointed to find only a grocery store, a circus school and a lot of empty storefronts. Others (like me) were more willing to give River Market some time to find its feet. I’m happy to say River Market’s got some welcome news: coffee is coming, and a lot more too.

Tucked away next to the escalators inside River Market, Great Wall Tea packs a lot of taste into a tiny space. While initially I was disappointed not to have a coffee shop open at the Quay, the silver lining is that this has encouraged me to expand my hot drink habits and try tea instead.

I like Christmas presents that get used up or used often. My husband just brought up the Christmas decorations from our crawl space and somehow we’ve become the kind of people who have 13 Rubbermaid containers full of them. (13!) Trying to find room for everything made me realize how cluttered our house is getting, so I’m not into giving or receiving gifts that are just going to take up more space. Since I’ve committed to shopping locally for a year, I’m also interested in finding gifts that are made as locally as possible. Here are some of the places I will be doing my Christmas shopping this year.

Today was the big reveal of Donald’s Market at River Market. On the first day of snow at the beginning of the great winter of 2010/2011, more than half way through November, we all finally got to see what Mark and his team from River Market have been building.

One of my favourite local shops is Pedagogy Toys.  As a graduate of the Small Business program at Douglas College, owner Karen Smecher loves what she does and is committed to providing high quality toys and other kid items. She recently went on the hunt for a harmonica just for me and we are still toot-tooting our way around the house with our awesome green harmonica.
I was really impressed with her new exclusive to Pedagogy line of reusable lunch and snack bags lined with Tyvek! Ingenious! She’s also designed play items …

Poor Sapperton. In the past few years, the area seemed to be improving. There was the start of a kids’ district in New West, with Pedagogy Toys, Kids Kloset and Dimpleskins, a few neat boutiques (Opulence & Cadeaux), a few good bakeries (Bella Cakes & Farm Cottage, which relocated from the Quay), and of course the new Starbucks (hey, I like my lattes). Now it’s looking like Sapperton’s apparent revitalization was more fragile than it seemed.

New Westminster writer Sheila Keenan is committing to do all her shopping locally for the next year – and will blog about it to boot.

New West gets its thrift on this weekend at the 4th Annual Quayside Boardwalk Festival & Sale. On Saturday, August 21 from 10am to 3pm, the boardwalk at the Quay will bustle with bargain-hunters seeking their treasures.

This has been reposted from my personal blog. I’d like to invite you to add your favorite local “someones” to the comments! Tell us what makes them your go-to person or business.
Here at the Arbolog, we work hard to try and practice reducing, reusing, refusing, and repairing before we get to recycling, because as far as I am concerned, the jury is out on whether recycling really does lower my carbon footprint. To that end, I’ve spent a long time finding people capable of repairing things. When you live …

Mother’s Day is coming up. While thoughtful, free gifts of breakfast in bed and family outings to special places are always a great idea for mums, it also feels good to have someone splurge on you. Shop locally, and you can find a great gift for mum while also supporting our community. Here are my New Westminster gift picks for Mother’s Day.

By now we’ve all heard the big news; Donald’s Market is coming to the River Market at the Quay. However if you’re like me (and everyone else I’ve spoken to except one person), your first reaction was, “What’s Donald’s Market?” I had to take a field trip to answer this question. So over the past two weekends I jumped on the Skytrain, shopping bags in hand, to visit each of the Donald’s locations. First up, Commercial & 8th Avenue.

River Market just sent out the following information, via its e-newsletter. I’m copying the text here, for our readers who are not subscribed

New Westminster may soon have the distinction of having the most large grocery stores per capita in the Lower Mainland. Wal-Mart has applied to open a new grocery supercentre in its Queensborough store. Thrifty Foods has just been announced as an anchor tenant in Sapperton’s coming Brewery District mixed-retail/residential complex next to SkyTrain and Royal Columbian Hospital. A new Safeway is coming to the Plaza 88 development at New Westminster SkyTrain. And of course, the River Market will open this summer as a newly food-focused destination with an as-yet-unnamed anchor grocer.