All The Cool Stuff You Can Expect From Fred And Friends In Spring 2013

Chill, Baby Pacifiers – I’m not a big fan of dressing your babies in ridiculous gear. I mean, wait until they’re 13 — they’ll be weird enough without any help from you, guaranteed. Then again, if you need to make your baby look funny to help ease the stress of parenthood, these Chill, Baby pacifiers should do the trick.

Just like all good baby pacifiers, these should provide the comfort your babies crave, hopefully keeping them from throwing another tantrum. What makes them special, though, are the unique designs out front that are bound to give you a light chuckle even in the midst of a messy diaper change.

Chill, Baby’s designs include Volume (puts a volume knob on your baby’s mouth — very appropriate), Lips (thick luscious lips), Panic (lol, a PANIC button), Goatee, and Moustache. All pacifiers are PVC-free and BPH-free, of course, apart from meeting all child safety standards. Expected retail price is around $10.

Talk Bubble iPhone 5 Case – Bubble wrap is great for stress relief. But it’s even better at protecting fragile items in boxes. So why not take the bubble-encrusted design and apply it to a gadget case? That’s exactly what they did with the Talk Bubble.

An iPhone 5 case, it comes covered in dozens of bubbles similar to those found in bubble wrap. And, no, they didn’t use real bubble wrap, so you can’t actually bust the bubbles and render the whole thing useless.

The Talk Bubble is made from “soft, resilient and durable” silicone, enclosing your indispensable gadget in an multiple soft, bouncy half-spheres. They are real bubbles too (not just printed graphics), so they will protect your phone from bumps and scratches just like plain old bubble wrap.

Poppin Hot Bubblepack Oven Mitt – Popping bubble wraps has to be one of the greatest stress relief activities ever devised. Wearable bubble wraps? Even greater. And that’s why somebody came up with the Poppin Hot Bubblepack Oven Mitt.

I know what you’re thinking — bubble wrap for grabbing onto hot cookware is a stupid idea. Well, it is, that’s why this one isn’t really meant for popping. Instead, it’s only styled like bubble packs, but is actually constructed using a robust silicone material. That way, you can pay bubble packaging the props it deserves without actually burning your hands while whipping up a stew.

Slinky Drinks Sipping Straws – When I first read the description for Slinky Drinks, “turn a gummy worm into a reusable straw,” I nearly jumped up off my seat. A gummy worm. With a hole down the middle. For sipping juice. But, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Instead, it’s a bendy straw that’s been styled to look and behave like a gummy worm, complete with colorful bright translucent colors and practically unlimited bending options. Which may not be as awesome as a real gummy worm straw, but will probably suffice for all your whimsical sipping needs.

The Slinky Drinks straws are made from food-safe silicone, with dozens of ridges along the body to allow for a heck of a lot of bending combinations. It comes in packs of three, each one with different color combinations.

Say Cheese Cutting Board – You eat stinky cheese in your household like my household downs hamburgers. We’re uncultured that way. Pun intended. Anyway, if you’re going to eat cheese, might as well get cheesy about it and the Say Cheese cheese board definitely qualifies in that category.

When you eat so much cheese that you need a cheese board to serve it, we can’t imagine anything better. A cheesily-named cutting board shaped as a cheesy smile simply completes the cheese circle.

Say Cheese is made from bamboo with a natural finish, with the edges covered in pure virgin silicone. It measures 12 x 6.5 inches.

[box type=”download”]Tons of more pics of the products below are in the gallery at the bottom.[/box]

Chitchats Drink Markers – Drink markers are great for providing instant icebreakers during parties. A standard “HELLO MY NAME IS” drink marker, however, can only go so far to get people socializing. If you want something that can really break the ice and spur conversation, you’ll probably want something like ChitChats.

Billed as “conversation-starting drink markers,” the cling stickers are styled as text bubbles with a variety of incomplete phrases pre-written on them, such as “I am open to,” “Ask me about my” and “I was fired for.” Your job is to fill in the blanks with an interesting tidbit and you’ve got a customized drink marker that should make it easier for that cute redhead who’s beeing eyeing you all night to walk up and make small talk. Or for your boss to make fun of you. Or something like that.

The Chitchats can stick onto glass, ceramic and smooth plastic, all while removing instantly so there’s no trouble cleaning up. They’re reusable, too, with 48 different text bubbles in a single pack.

Feedme! Feeding Spoons – Having a hard time getting Junior to eat his mashed baby food? Yeah, you knew that airplane spoon trick can only work for so long. If you need a better way to engage him for dinnertime, the Feedme! baby feeder should do the trick.

A feeding spoon attached to a cute critter head, it looks like a friendly animal staring straight at your baby and sticking its tongue out playfully. With big button eyes and a bright color, it’s almost certain to grab your child’s attention, making the whole job of stuffing his fat baby cheeks full of mashed apples, avocados and sweet potatoes an easier affair.

Designed by Brody Hartman, Feedme! comes with two components: a silicone doll face and a removable plastic spoon. Both are PVC-free, BPA-free and guaranteed kid-safe, so your child can play with it while getting his meals with no problem.

Bites & Pieces Crust Cutter – Don’t like crust? Get a crust cutter. Don’t like crust and like playing with your sandwiches? Get the Bites & Pieces instead.

A crust-cutting mold, it goes one further, slicing up the sandwich into multiple bite sized pieces in a variety of shapes. That way, you can use your resulting mini-sandwiches to play a real-life game of Tetris or something similar.

While intended to get your kids to play a puzzle while enjoying a sandwich, Bites & Pieces, pretty much, ends up turning erstwhile boring sandwiches into fun-looking bite-sized food — even without the puzzle part. Plus, it leaves your bread with no crust, which is always a plus. It’s made from food-safe, dishwasher-safe plastic.

Manatea Tea Infuser – Bored with your lot of novelty tea infusers? If you like half-cute, half-ugly marine creatures, you’ll probably love the Manatea Tea Infusers, which is clad in the likeness of the sirenian mammal.

Designed by Liz Goulet-Dubois, the food-safe silicone tea infuser has the bottom half of the aquatic mammal serving as a container for your leaves. Hook it to the side of the mug using its flippers and smile at that ridiculously adorable face while waiting for your warm, tasty beverage to finish.

Mr. Romano Cheese Grater – Sometimes, you just want to grate your cheese on a guy’s extra-long chin. No, really, you do? I mean, I was only kidding. Seriously, if you think doing that will give you the giggles, you’ll love Mr. Romano, a cheese grater styled in the likeness of some dude with an excess of protrution along the lower jaw.

Designed by Ignacio Pilotto, the idea is to make the raised cutting holes look like the stubbles on an unshaven dude. Which makes me wonder: who the heck wants to grate their cheese on some guy’s 5’0-clock shadow. Anyone?

Mr. Romano is molded in high-quality plastic (no rust) that will supposedly manage to keep its edge even after many uses. Just be careful not to let your kids turn it into a mask or something.

Teatanic Tea Infuser – Ironically billed as “the unsinkable tea infuser,” the Teatanic is designed to do nothing but sink when it is dumped into your tea mug. Can it boat around a couple of hours before succumbing to the whims of the ocean? No. Can it float? Heck, no. Can it capsize into your mug while holding your tea leaves and filling it with flavor? Definitely.

Billed as tribute to the legendary ocean liner that couldn’t (disclaimer: the last part was my addition — can’t resist), the contraption uses the hull of the ship as the container for the tea leaves, steeping tea onto your hot water as it plummets into its demise. Or something like that. When done brewing, just salvage the Teatanic and haul it back to shore. It’s made from pure silicone.

Birds on a Wire Clips – You like peeking out the window and watching all the birds perched on electric wires, waiting until one of the gets electrocuted or something. You’re psychopathic like that. Now that you’ve been moved into an insane criminal asylum, you can’t help but miss that sight. Well, you can enjoy it from the comfort of your prison cell with Birds on a Wire.

More than a decorative piece, each blackbird is actually a clip, allowing you to display printed matter along the length of a suspended cord. Using it, you can hang photographs of your former victims to help relive your glory days, insane drawings you make to express your inner turmoil and all the love letters you receive from your female pen pals. Each set of Birds on a Wire includes eight blackbird clips and a 36-inch cord (it’s flimsy, so you can’t strangle anyone with it — sorry).

Prime Cuts Serving Board – The Prime Cuts serving board is, essentially, the one Ron Swanson will be using to serve steaks, sausages and cold cuts in his home if he was a real person. Why? Because nothing serves meat better to a horde of carnivores than a board shaped like a slab of steak.

Design by Carl Mitsch, the board measures 10 x 9 inches. It features “perfectly marbled bamboo” construction, with the edges decked in “durable food-safe silicone.” Will the meat taste better when served in this? Probably not. But that’s only because meat already tastes better. Boom.

RoBottle Corkscrew – In the future, we’ll have robot butlers opening our wines for us. In the meantime, you can take the cork off yourself with the Robottle, a novelty corkscrew clad in the form of a futuristic plastic robot.

To use, simply fit RoBottle over the wine bottle’s mouth, and begin turning the wind-up key to get its hidden complex gears working. It comes with both a hidden blade for stripping off foil and a partly-visible corkscrew for taking that stopper off.

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