At Soft Star we are lucky in many ways... one of which is that we live in a great community. For Halloween most of the businesses in downtown Corvallis open their doors for trick-or-treating. It's a great, safe way for the kids of the community to enjoy Halloween. And the businesses love seeing the kids and their creative costumes. Above...

Yes - really. Strange but true. "Hypermilers" are groups of people fiendishly devoted to improving their gas mileage - sometimes by 2X simply by changing their driving habits. NPR has a fun audio report you can listen to (click here) where passionate hypermileage devotees to all extremes of rolling through stop signs, avoiding hills, eschewing heat/air conditioning and installing miles-per-gallon...

When Art Instructor Tonya Gaineystopped by looking for leather scraps - we had no idea what a treat she and her students had in store! Fifty-four students from local Corvallis-area schools poured their artistic energies into creating beautiful leather baskets like the one photographed here! The students participated from: Mountain View Elementary 2nd - 5th grade Hoover Elementary Kindergarten...

This week the National Geographic magazine published a story by Cathy Newman: "Every Shoe Tells a Story". The article spans the most extreme luxury Manolo Blahnik heels to the most primitive fiber-woven sandals found in Oregon from 8500BC. (It was nice to see that Oregon was always a mecca for shoe-making -- they found hundreds of pairs stacked in the...