Holiday gift certificates!!

I know it may seem 1. A bit early to be excited about the holidays coming up and 2. Not worth getting excited about in the first place, but I plan to debunk both these misguided thoughts. With my Etsy store (shameless self promotion!!) I wanted a way for people to let their friends and family members choose their own presents for themselves, or shock, horror, you either have no clue what they want, or no time to go out and spend three hours trekking around a hot, overcrowded shopping mall filled with coughing sneezing people, whinging kids and annoying shop assistants only to find out that Star Trek figurine you needed for Uncle Barry just got sold to the pushy lady with the frumpy hat in front of you.
So with that fantastic mental picture, if you don't pop off and get yourself a gift certificate right now then you have my sympathies. But not too much, cause really, I want you to get a gift voucher!! That's all the rant I have left in me, I shall post photos of said amazing gift cards once their all made up! Woo!

Ahhhh crap.

I did it again, I let my life come between me and my blogging. Shame! I will subsequently attempt to recap the last month and a bit of goings on here in a single non ranting post.

August
Started my nursing course and also got a puppy. Her name is Sally and she is now the love of Dave and our lives now. Nursing is going well, although full on, which hasn't left me huge amounts of spare time for blogging or soap creating sadly. Hopefully I'll strike the right balance somewhere in the near future. So no life and lack of sleep pretty much sums up the rest of that month. Dave and I also celebrated our anniversary, but sadly no giant metal chickens.

Wow, ok when I write it like that I see why I haven't been blogging, I haven't done an interesting goddamn thing since I've started back at uni. That's ok though, I quite enjoy the relaxing pace of doing as little as possible whenever allowable.

I'll do my best to post all my non goings on more regularly from here on in! :) (which should hopefully include some soaping at some point down the line)

Frustrating times call for creative intervention!!

So work and school have both been getting me down lately, with work cutting my shifts and school saying that one of my core units I need to do is already full one day after I get my offer of acceptance letter! What the hell is up with that? It's not like I sat around for a few weeks twiddling my thumbs, we're talking one day here people! So I'm doing some running around trying to get into it anyways, we'll see how we go. Updates once I hear back on that. But here are some pretty marigolds I planted out back to start making my backyard a bit more livable and less 'jungle like' as some of my friends described it.

But onto the fun parts! The creative intervention side of my life lately. I saw this blog post on Today's Nest, and it inspired me to do a project something similar for myself! I decided to use candles instead of bulbs as I have no clue about how to connect wires and bits, and Dave was a bit concerned I might electrocute myself in the process. I started out by finding and keeping any wide mouth glass jars I could find, and a good clean of the fridge came up with some winners that we were never going to be using again. I stumbled across some little glass tea light holders at IKEA which worked perfectly to glue into the bottom of the jars so that the candles would sit flat and not flop around in the bottom of the jar as the bottoms aren't flat. Then I wound wire around the top and attached it onto the thick twine I strung up in the back yard. Spray painting all the jar lids white makes them all have a similar look even though they are all different shapes and sizes. I keep the lids on when its raining (like it is right now) so the jars dont fill up with water and dirt, and just take them off when I'm actually burning the candles. 1 string of 3 is all finished, just waiting on more jars to work on the next two!

Salty salty goodness: Part II

So after much enthusiasm and man soaps mailed off, I've still got a few last bars awaiting their new homes! But after coming away from Australia Post, and finding out they've now raised their prices for overseas parcels so that each bar of soap costing nearly $10 to send to Canada and the US! Highway robbery I tell you!! So these last few bars I'm going to only send to others in Australia to try and save on postage. Sorry to any of you northies if you missed out, write strongly worded letters of complaint I say!! But not to fret, if you had already sent me through asking for one, it's on its way! :)
On a different note entirely, I got my marks back for Uni today, and got 1 distinction and 3 high distinctions! Yay! Onto nursing full steam I say.

Christmas presents

This year I have decided to go handmade! Either purchasing things made 100% by local crafts people (mostly through Etsy), or making it by hand myself! Since everyone in my family (bar my nephew) is all grown up, the excitement for highly commercial yet highly forgettable presents I think has dwindled some. I decided fewer, yet more meaningful gifts would be more worthwhile in the long run, plus it shows you've put much more thought, effort and time into them than just running around on December 24th, tired, annoyed and over jingled. That feeling of dull panic knowing you haven't gotten anything for your impossible to buy for father and end up buying the last calender on the shelf that just happens to be featuring puppies or something else just as traumatic.
This year will be different! so I have already started on and completed a few of my handmade creations! I would love to post little pictures, but seeing as my family also read this occasionally, I'll just say that I'm super stoked about how they're all coming along, and I'm off to the local craft store today to go buy more supplies as I'm quickly going through it!

Salty salty goodness!!

So I tried out my newest creation yesterday in the shower, my new Black Cherry Salt Soap Scrub and while attempting to be both modest and unbiased, it rocks! I have to admit that I suffer from S.L.S, or slack and lazy syndrome to you common folk, and can sometimes not be bothered going and exfoliating with my normal scrubs most of the time. So this is the perfect combo, a moisturizing soap bar by upping the superfatting level to 8%, and added ground walnut shell and natural sea salt to the bar. Along with a generous amount of my black cherry and raspberry cream fragrances that I hadn't used in a range yet, and I'm super happy with the result. I've decided to give away the first batch I've made to anyone who wants to try it our 'risk free' as it were as I'm so stoked you'll want more after trying these! :)

Sales, Soapings and ...something else starting with S!

So today I finally felt productive! I got all soaping ingredients ordered, picked up, organized and even got to make my first batch of soap in the new place! This is my new creation...
More photos tomorrow of the finished product once it comes out of the oven. (I CPOP'd it, which I never tried before, so we're all learning new things today!) Dave and I just got back from seeing the movie Bridesmaids, which was truely hilarious! Even Dave said he thought it was better than The Hangover, so it must be pretty damn funny.