Is it Spring Yet?

Because I'm still in hibernation mode. Not as much as say if I were living back east and wouldn't be able to stick my nose out the door without it getting frostbitten immediately. But still, it's dark in the morning when I leave the house and it makes me want to go back inside and pull the covers over my head until spring arrives.

And that's my excuse for not having anything done for this week in terms of having something new to share. However, I thought I'd share this post on blogging which I found appropriate and reflects what I feel about my blog.

Hope you have a lovely week and I'll try and be more inspired by next weekend.

Courtesy of http://www.publicdomainpictures.net

Have You Seen My Pterodactyl?

Well last week, I had the conundrum of trying to find a mould big enough to hold my orphan pterodactyl. I didn't realize I had bigger problems than that.

The only thing big enough to hold the beast was the 8X8 silicone pan, but I didn't want to pour a lot of soap to make that one, so I made 3 more pterodactyls so I could have a pan of embedded soaps. The next step was to figure out how to make an amber coloured soap. I googled but didn't find anything that  talked about a colour combination to make the colour I wanted, so I decided to experiment.

First lesson of 2014 in soap making:  don't attempt anything new late at night, especially when the lighting in the room is less than ideal. I thought a combination of orange and yellow mica would make a good amber-ish colour, then a light switch went on in my head and said, how about turmeric? Turmeric is a beautiful colour and in the continuer, looks like the perfect colour. However, combined with everything else, it's a little dark.

Of the 4 soaps I liked this one the most. The top layer of soap didn't cover this one as much and the effect, I think is much better than say…

this one which looks like the dinosaur version of Alfred Hitchock's silhouette. 

My next questions are, will the turmeric stain and make me look I went to a tanning salon of ill repute, and what the heck do I do with all the leftover pieces of orange-y soap? Wonder if the show, Orange is the New Black needs any soaps made for them. 

Such a Lonely One

That's the title of a song by a Canadian group call Prairie Oyster, and for some reason I really like that song even though it's kinda country-ish.

The title also works well for my poor Pterodactyl soap. In the 3 years I've been doing craft fairs, the T-Rex soaps sell like popsicles on a summer's day the brontosaurus soaps holds their own, but none of the pterodactyl soaps have sold. A friend suggested I put the pterodactyl in amber, which I thought was a great idea!

Making the pterodactyl was the easy part. Trying to find a mould big enough to hold him was like Goldilocks going to the Three Bears' extended family's house: I tried mould after mould, but they were all too small for this giant creature.

So my wonderful readers, do you have any suggestions for me short of trimming his wings or trying to find a bigger mould? I could try and find a bigger mould, but that doesn't result in an immediate resolution and I'm very ADD.

Happy New Year

Hope everyone had a good holiday season. Ours was fairly quiet, in fact we were both in bed before 10pm on New Year's Eve, how sad are we?

I started the new year with an order off my site, which those of you who follow me on Twitter knew about. You know what clinched the order though? The fact that shipping was only $2.00. Well that was a total mistake since Canada Post barely allows a letter to be mailed for that. I did an estimate on the Canada Post website and it's going to cost, on the high end, about $57 to expedite the package, and $20 to mail it regular mail. I checked on the US Postal Services site, and it would cost me less to mail it from the States to Canada. Sad state of affairs.

I emailed the lady who put in the order, and told her my dilemma. I offered to mail it via USPS but it would have to be mailed out next weekend, not this weekend like I had offered earlier. She and I went back and forth, and bottom line is she would like the soaps mailed to her in whatever means is best for me.

This was a good lesson for me, make sure my website is in proper order. I have a secondary site on Meylah, and on that one I have put in shipping costs which are more in line with what is reasonable, which could be another reason why I haven't had any orders off that site.

Have you made any mistakes that could potentially cost you?

First order of 2014