Tuesday 28 June 2011

Blogged!

Thanks to Mel Stringer and her plastic camera for her blog on my products in Oatmeal, Milk & Honey that she tried out and posted about it on her blog! I just love seeing people use and enjoy my handmade goodies, so that made my day! Go check it out and post a comment, or even better, add a link to your facebook and start some grass roots promotion, that would be super cool of you!

Today I'm off to go to my storage shed and see if my oils got somehow put in there by mistake during the move. Hopefully fingers crossed I'll find them and be able to start work on a new wedding favours range and a new salt bar that I can't wait to try. So lets hope we are able to get out soap on! More later once I get some new soaps to photograph! :D

Sunday 26 June 2011

Anyone seen a 20lb barrel of olive oil?

How on earth can I have lost a BARREL of olive oil!? Not a little bottle, or a bucket, but a giant barrel!? So big I had to keep it out on my balcony when I lived in my apartment because it simply would not fit anywhere else! This is why I hate moving. Just when I'm about to get into some serious soaping, my first in ages and I was super excited, I loose one of my major ingredients? Bah!! This requires a serious scavenge. More posts later once I hopefully find my olive oil. Grr!
And on the plus side the 'R' key on my laptop is starting to die on me now too. This is after the enter key, up and down arrows and my right hand shift key have all died. Never put your laptop on top of the microwave while soaping cause it makes it easier to read the recipe and then turn the damn thing on. Its never been the same since. Yay me!

Wednesday 22 June 2011

Business meeting

So yesterday I caught up with my homegirl and fellow Etsy shop owner Emma from Eclare designs to have a bit of a catch up and to talk about new different ways to get our fabulous products out to our wonderful to be customers! That's where things seem to get a bit difficult. We have the products, we have the shop, we're ready to sell sell sell! ...but then what? How do we get the word out to people? I've tried Google Adwords and Facebook advertising, it seems to cost a fair bit, and so far doesn't seem to get much traffic that actually leads to sales. Mail drops are time consuming and if other people are anything like me, just throw out the bulk of junk mail if its not addressed to them. Markets are a good start, but sadly here in Perth, WA markets are far and few between, and the ones we do have seem to have ridiculous stall prices. $120 - $150 dollars for 1 stall for a one day market seems pretty high to me. I would have to sell around 20 bars of soap just to cover the cost of the stall! Gah. Hopefully others out there in our soapy little universe know a bit about what I'm saying, and maybe even have some out of the box suggestions. I like things outside the box. Boxes schmoxes I say! That's about it really. If I have the chance today I'm going to try and make a cp salt bar in some random scent which I haven't quite figured out yet... :P

On non soapy dealings Dave and I went to the bank today and got pre-approval for a loan for the house we've been looking at, so double yay!! Hopefully we'll go round this weekend for a second look and to chat to the real estate agent and suss out all of the details. Fingers crossed! :D

Monday 20 June 2011

The good, the bad and the pretty...

The Good - I have totally finished moving and handed back my keys to the rental agency today. Five hours of solid cleaning, vacuuming, mopping, packing and scrubbing and I'm rental free. Now if only we get on the bounce and get this house we've been looking at I will be one happy camper!

The Bad - I might or might not have broken into a friends house on Saturday when I needed to drop off a mattress at her house and she forgot to leave her keys out for me... and she's a tad bit unimpressed with my criminal activities towards my moving. To my credit I did used to live there with her and knew one of the windows that never locks or has any screen on it, and I didn't do any damage, just hopped through it and opened the door... but I guess that doesn't really make up for it. Whoops. Sorry bout that. My bad.

The Pretty - Moving on from my entire lack of ethics to these really cool soaps I found at Milk & Cookeez these lollipop soaps made my day when I was feeling pretty damn sorry for myself. How cool are these?? I love the colours and just the fact that they even have little matching bows! These really are so awesome I feel like I want to make something similar in my line only using a cold process method if I can suss one out.... experimentation's to come!

Yeah, lets all hope tomorrow is a better day, and I think wine and grovelling is soon the be blogged about in the near future. Stay tuned for more shameless embarrassments from me.

Saturday 18 June 2011

Moving...still.

So exams finished Friday. Yesterday was Saturday. I worked a ten hour shift at Little Creatures which is a cool place to work but after ten hours on my feet I'm wiped. Got up extra early today to finish moving the very last of my belongings from my apartment into Dave's place until we find a house of our own (exciting!!). Working again today after moving my stuff. ...And the keys have to be back by Tuesday. So much for a relaxing creative weekend. I think it might be a few weeks before this place is in any shape to allow me the space needed for soaping. Its starting to look more and more like a sardine tin crammed full of housewares. :P Can't wait til we find a house of our own with SPACE glorious glorious space. Ahhhh... *deep breath* we'll get there.

Thursday 16 June 2011

Exams are done!!

Just finished my last exam for this semester! Thank god! :) Next semester I start my nursing degree at ECU and really looking forward to it! Only bummer is that I've met a made lots of friends with awesome people this semester, and its sad to see us all going our separate ways and into our chosen courses. But we'll have to have regular uni people catch ups to keep each other up to date with whats happening.

But now that uni is over for this semester, it leaves me more time to work and play around on my soap! I've been needing some serious creative time as I have been flat out with uni, work, moving, and just general everyday life lately I haven't had any time for my creative side!
I saw this tutorial on a new soaping technique first on The Soap Queen blog and it looks super duper cool! I can't wait to try it, and I might just try with a new fragrance to add to my line, or rework one of my already standing soaps with this technique.... what do you think? Any thoughts? But no matter what I try I can't wait to get started!!

Monday 13 June 2011

Welcome!

I've been sitting here for awhile wondering what I should start this thing off with, so instead I'll just jump right into my day with some explanations with what's been going on recently for me.

Right at this moment in time I'm a bit pissed off actually as our landlord just decided to come cut down our huge beautiful jasmine bush that covered our whole carport and sheltered our cars without even bothering to call and ask us, and there's now bits of shit all over my car from the chainsaws they used to cut it down. Not happy!!! Grrr. As far as I was aware you actually had to call and let the tenant know you were going on their property and cutting down stuff there. GRRR!! Ok, I will try and suppress my rage and carry on...


Yesterday I made my first chicken stock from scratch for dinner tonight. I made a roast chicken on the weekend which Dave really enjoyed, and I wanted to turn the scraps into another yummy meal, and this was a good way to reuse and recycle perfectly good food that most of us just throw out. I've been on a big cooking kick lately now that its winter and cool enough to turn on the stove, so I have been cooking my little heart out much to Dave's satisfaction!




<--- Stock after 4 hours of glorious cooking. Yummy!!!
Tonight = some sort of soup using my fantastic homemade stock