Published Oct 5, 2011 When you were little did you play in card table tents or forts?  I sure did. When I was wandering around the house complaining of being bored on a rainy day, my mom would pull out the old folding table used for card games, throw an old blanket over it, pull out some old pots and pans and hand them to me and tell me to go play house.  Something magical seemed to happen when I crawled under the fabric walls.  My imagination would let loose and I could happily play for hours.  So I’ve decided to create a special card table house / fort for my grandson Davy.     Davy loves the old TV show "Blue’s Clues" which was hugely popular here in the U.S. when my kids were little.  Nowadays the only place I seem to be able to find it is on Netflix and YouTube.  Blue is a dog and she lives in an adorable little yellow house with a red roof with her friend Steve who follows her clues.    Last week I headed to the fabric store with my trusty iPad full of photos I found online of the inside and outside of the Blue’s Clues house, and I spent two hours up and down the aisles looking for the closest matching fabrics I could find.    Each side of the house is double sided – the outside fabric is the bright yellow and the inside is one that looks like the wall paper in blue’s house.  And of course it will have the windows and curtains, and  flowers and lizards and frogs on the outside and I even found a little unfinished wooden mailbox at the fabric store that will be transformed into the purple mailbox outside Blue’s house.  If Davy has half the fun playing in his Blue’s Clues house as I am having making it then it will be a big success!   In addition to creating The “Blue’s Clues fort” for Davy’s birthday which is in December, I also still need to come up with Christmas present for the family.  Last year I did calendars for everyone in the Cooke family that sported images for events related to each month.   This year I’m thinking about framing charts.  It’s amazing I haven’t gotten around to this already, but I think it’s about time. My friend Janet Hovorka just happens to own the company Family ChartMasters and she’s going to be here in a day or two for the Family History Expo being held in my area (Northern California) this weekend.  So I will be picking her brain and spending a good deal of time on their website. She told me that I have there are loads of new styles of charts to choose from.   If you’re looking for Christmas present ideas for the family this year, why not consider a family tree chart? Hopefully you’ve got your genealogy data in a database so you can just export your gedcom and make it gorgeous for a gift they can enjoy for years to come.    If you decide you’d like to check out Family ChartMasters– which of course I highly recommend – I’d really appreciate it if you would click the image above to visit their website because when you do you are also supporting this podcast and making it possible for me to keep the free podcast episodes coming.  So thank you very much!   And by the way, many of you have asked what happened to our Amazon links on the website which were another way that you were helping to support the podcast. Well, Amazon dropped their California affiliate producers because of some recent tax law changes.  But I just got an email saying they are reversing that. This is awesome news because I just can’t get through  all my Christmas shopping without Amazon, and I know that many of you shop online too. So I’m going to get that reinstated asap – keep an eye out for the Amazon links on the homepage at genealogygems.com and I will also return it to the toolbar. (UPDATE: The Genealogy Gems Toolbar has been discontinued)  Thanks for being patient and being such incredible supporters of this little old podcast!   NEWS:   WDYTYA Entertainment Weekly website is reporting that Marisa Tomei has just been added to the roster of celebrities who will be featured on the new season of W