With Valentine’s Day just around the corner I hope that you’ll all started to feel a little romantic. Whether you’re loved up or you’ll be spending Valentine’s evening curled up on the sofa on your own with a DVD and some treats, the Heart Shaped Cushtie is perfect for you. Unlike a broken heart, this fabulous pillow can be treated any which way and it simply pops back into shape. It’s so squidgey, squashy and comfy, that you can’t fail to wait to cuddle into it (unlike some people you may know!) I’m a big fan of cushties and have had mine for a good few years, so I think this heart shaped version is the best present you could treat yourself or your loved one to for Valentine’s Day. Flowers die, chocolates make you fat and perfume runs out, but the Heart Shaped Cushtie will always be around to snuggle into. So if you’re in love and want to decorate your room with some heart shaped trinkets or you’re sad and lonely in need of a bit of comfort, try this smooth, squishy, gorgeous cushion for size. You may be struggling to decide who your heart belongs to, but the Heart Shaped Cushtie can belong to you - forever!

If you fancy yourself as a bit of a Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay or Delia Smith and you’re always on the lookout for new kitchen gizmos and gadgets then this is a real treat! My husband loves kitchen tools and accessories as he likes to play at being Chef (luckily I enjoy sampling the results!) The problem is with his birthday following Christmas so closely, people take advantage of his love of all things kitchen (well, you know how difficult it can be to choose presents for men) and he ends of with so many different devices for the kitchen that we’re fast running out of space. Which is why I was delighted to discover the Folding Colander from JosephJoseph. For something that performs such a basic function, a Colander certainly takes up a lot of cupboard space. Not this one! It folds completely flat for easy storage and uses 12 hinges to take shape. It may have been a long time in development, but I for one think it was well worth the wait. While your Colander may be designed to drain, you don’t want it to put a strain on space. So, chuck out your old Colander and invest in this one (available in a range of funky colours) and you’ll have a bit more space to accommodate the next must-have kitchen gadget!

Dear, oh dear. Celebs may be able to get their hands on anything that money can buy, but what’s the point in having all the latest gadgets if you can’t even use them. Take a look at Mr Sheen getting it wrong. I bet he felt a right Charlie!

Digital photo frames are big news these days and I love them. I just think it’s a great idea that you don’t have to decide which pictures to frame, because you’re pushed for space. Now you can put a selection in your frame and watch as they change. I also think people are more likely to stop and take a look if the image keeps changing and surely that’s the whole point of having your pics on display? As with everything, Digital Frames are getting more and more sophisticated as technology moves on. Now, not only can you display your favourite photos, but you can also set them to your favourite tunes, creating your own personal soundtrack and even show off your home videos. Take a look at the MV-1500 Digital Picture Frame, which is a photo frame, MP3 Music Player AND video player. Ok, at over £300 it’s not exactly cheap, but with a high resolution 15” TFT screen that displays your digital photos and video clips in vivid colour and compatibility with a huge range of media cards, it’s a great investment if you want to show off your photos and video clips. Let’s face it, it makes looking through someone else’s holiday snaps a bit more interesting!

As anyone with a knack for clichés knows, necessity is the mother of invention. However, it could also be said that while good inventions are often the product of necessity, great inventions are accidental. To demonstrate the importance of serendipity, we’ve put together a list of 10 examples of unintentional discoveries that too often we find ourselves taking for granted. In no particular order.

1. Penicillin
Everybody knows the story – or at least, should – the brilliant yet notoriously absent-minded biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so threw it away. It wasn’t until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould.

Fleming didn’t even hold out much hope for his discovery: it wasn’t given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was slow-acting – it wasn’t until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.

2. The Microwave
In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer and inventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons, the devices used to produce the microwave radio signals that were integral to early radar use. Radar was an incredibly important innovation during the time of war, but microwave cooking was a purely accidental discovery.

While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His keen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves that had caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have told him from mischievous childhood ‘experiments’), exploded.

The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was about the size of a fridge.

3. Ice Cream Cones
This story is a perfect example of serendipity, and a single chance encounter leading to worldwide repercussions. It’s also rather sweet.

Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together.

At this particularly sweltering 1904 World’s Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were quickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn’t doing so well, selling Zalabia – a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia – and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into cone shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born – and it doesn’t look like dying out any time soon.

4. Champagne
While many know that Dom Pierre Pérignon is credited for the invention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictine monk’s intention to make a wine with bubbles in it – in fact, he had spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was considered a sure sign of poor winemaking.

Pérignon’s original wish was to cater for the French court’s preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to grow in the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white juice from them. But since Champagne’s climate was relatively cold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spending the second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Pérignon tried but failed to eradicate. Happily, the new wine was a big hit with the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.

5. Post-It Notes
The invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidental collaboration between second-rate science and a frustrated church-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the large American corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but nobody took any notice.

4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver, leading to an epiphany – the church being a good a place as any to have one, I suppose – and later applied some of Silver’s weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today you’d find it hard to imagine life without them.

6. Potato chips/crisps
In 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, a particularly fussy diner (railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had been served with his meal, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy. After he had sent back several plates of increasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decided to get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato in grease and sending them out.

Vanderbilt initially protested that the chef’s latest efforts were too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody in the restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipe appearing on the menu as “Saratoga Chips”, before later being sold all over the world.

7. The Slinky
What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound? Well, originally it was just a spring falling off a desk. To be more precise, it was the desk belonging to marine engineer Richard James, who sometime in 1940 noticed that when the spring fell, it stumbled and tumbled across the floor for a while before laying to rest. After a few prototypes, the Slinky was ready to be introduced to toy stores in 1948, where it became one of the most popular and iconic toys of all time.

James’ wife Betty was the one who came up with the name “Slinky”, and has been CEO of the company since 1960. Over 250 million Slinkies have been sold worldwide, and they were even used as mobile radio antennae during the Vietnam war.

8. The Pacemaker
Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker.

Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patient’s body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.

9. Superglue
More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value, unlike Silver’s Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldn’t work, so research moved on.

6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (or “Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition”, to give it its full name) was born.

It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam – the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.

10. LSD
The unintentional discovery of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-LSD-25 led to a cultural revolution – nobody today can deny that the hallucinogen uncovered by Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman in 1938 helped shape the hippy movement of the 1960s and sparked worldwide interest, having a massive impact on neuroscience research and treatment.

The actual discovery of LSD as a hallucinogen occurred when Dr Hoffman was involved in pharmaceutical research in Basel, Switzerland, hoping to produce drugs that would help ease the pain of childbirth. Having synthesized what would later become known as LSD; Hoffman catalogued the untested substance and placed it in storage, after finding nothing particularly interesting about it during the initial analysis. It wasn’t until a Friday afternoon in April 1943 when Hoffman discovered the true properties of the compound, inadvertently absorbing a healthy dose of it when handling the chemical at work without wearing gloves. On his bicycle ride back home he observed “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors”.

Criminalized throughout the USA in 1966 (and most others following suit soon after), further research into LSD was (and still is) constantly hampered by its illegal status. Early researcher Dr Richard Alpert claimed to have administered LSD to 200 test subjects by 1961, and reported that 85% of his test subjects said that the experience was the “most educational” of their lives.

Here are a few other accidental innovations that deserve at least a mention: saccharin (artificial sweetener), Scotchguard (aka Sellotape), Teflon, the band-aid, the frisbee, the sandwich, the popsicle, Silly Putty, x-rays, vulcanized rubber, velcro, and safety glass.

If you see the New Year as the perfect time to clear out the clutter and have a bit of a revamp of your home, then you may be interested in this funky shelving. I love the Spiral wall-mounted shelf from Dwell, as to me it makes a statement without being too in your face. I think it would look great in a number of different styles of homes and whether you choose to have it in the bedroom or downstairs to show it off to anyone who visits, it’s also got the benefit of being highly functional. It will hold up to 100 CDS, allowing you to easily view your collection and select the CD you want or, you could keep your books on it or if that’s all a bit too dull for you, then pop whatever you want to show off on this fab shelving unit. With a classic design of wood and metal, it would look great on a plain wall and make a real statement. So if you can’t afford to splash out on modern art to brighten up your home, for under £60, you can still make a stylish statement that is bound to attract attention and compliments from your friends. Who knew shelving could be so exciting!

Anyone in the market for a new Flash Drive should take a look at these bargains. After all, January is a time for snapping up as many bargains as you can!

These days we have so many gadgets that we really do take them for granted - until they run out of power that is! If our mobile phone, PDA, iPod or PSPs, runs out of power when we‘re out and about we‘re suddenly savage and cursing modern technology (well, you are if you‘re anything like me!)

If the January Blues and a lack of cash are causing you to curse, then you should really check out this great money box. Not only will you keep your language in check, but you’ll be saving money which you can then use to treat yourself in the last of the sales!

If you’re keen to get 2008 off to the best start and increase your general fitness, then using a punch bag could be a fun way to give yourself a fighting chance at fitness. You can improve your boxing fitness and have a punch up without causing injury to anyone or getting yourself arrested! The Everlast Power Tower is an awesome inflatable boxer which provides the perfect way to release all your tension and burn off those calories. Lots of Boxing equipment is designed to increase strength and endurance and this inflatable punch bag certainly hits the mark! It’s a knock-out for improving coordination and flexibility. The inflatable punching pillar rocks back and forth with every punch, providing the knock- down/instant-up motion that builds endurance and sharpens your reflexes. The Everlast Inflatable Power Tower is also ideal for kick-boxing workouts too (without shoes), so why not take up an enjoyable new hobby that will also keep you fit and healthy?