August 8, 2000

What is it about summertime and me never updating the diary? I dunno....maybe heat makes me lazy. Except this summer hasn't been hot up here in Chicagoland....it's been downright chilly. I don't think we've hit 90 degrees once. Seriously! Yesterday was warm, I was too hot wearing long pants, a shirt, and a denim shirt over that. :-) What a weird summer this is. Is it la Nina? Oh well. I'll leave it to the meteorologists to figure out why...I just think it's weird. :)

So I did my craft show!!! Happy craft show dance!!! It was a two-day event, outside, in a little park literally about a mile down the street from our house. Which was good, because we couldn't fit both the tables and the tents along with the goods for sale in the car all at once and ended up having to make multiple trips each time :) It worked out well, though. I had made a bunch of loaves of M&P to slice for $1/ounce, and those didn't start moving /at all/ (I mean AT ALL) until I took the slicer and sliced off a couple teeny slices to start with. Then people started grabbing the slices and sniffing them and /then/ they would buy slices. :) So maybe it's a nose-thing... Of the loaves that I made, I made two oatmeal, milk, and honey loaves, in two pours... one pour was heavily gold mica'ed, and I let it set up a bit and then sprinkled a nice layer of crushed oatmeal over the top, then poured the second layer. Only problem? The oatmeal kept the second pour from adhering to the first, so the darn bars split in half whenever you tried to slice one!! Good idea, bad implementation. :P I think next time I want to do something like that, I'll have to do three pours, with the one in the middle being a very thin and hot pour with oatmeal mixed in it, so then the second (hot) layer adheres to the first and the third (hot) adheres to the second, so it won't break apart. And everybody kept saying how great it smelled, they just didn't want to buy bars that were falling apart. (Go figure. :) Oh well. I used half a bar in the shower and it does smell nice. :) So my top seller out of those M&P slices was a bright blue bar with white mica, scented with Plumeria FO. I renamed it "Tropical Tempest" because everybody has "Plumeria," and I wanted to be different. :) Folks went ga-ga over that. I'm not surprised, because *I* went ga-ga over it too. ;) What I was surprised about was that I don't think I sold a single bar of Plum Pudding (which is renamed Plum Spice), in either the M&P loaves or GMS CP. I looooooove Plum Spice, I wonder why it didn't sell. But it didn't. I sold out of every CP bar but one of my Citrus Grove, which is a blend I came up with myself when I was trying to knock off Sweetcakes' Yuzu FO because it's so expensive. Turns out that what I came up with doesn't smell much like Yuzu, but it does smell nice, so I kept it and it turned out to be one of my faves. Those are really nice bars, too, I like how that recipe turned out -- it's high in castor, so it really, truly does take six to eight weeks to cure (unlike most of my other CP!), but it feels so niiiiiiiiiice when it's done. You can tell the difference with the castor oil. I'm amazed I went so long when I first started soaping without discovering the joys of castor oil. Anyways, back to the show. I ended up buying an EZ-UP tent a couple months ago, in anticipation of doing shows. I can't remember which model I got offhand, but it's the kind where you put the top on and it stays on. I got mine at Sam's Club, in a kind of family deal where you got the wheeled carrying case and the cheap sides as well. I think it was like $189? The price was comparable to places I was seeing online when I was researching tents, and I didn't have to deal with shipping, so -- YAY. It turned out to be a good thing that I got the sides, too -- both days of the show it threatened rain, and on Sunday we actually got dripped on. For some reason, even though the weather said "you're going to get pounded on," we hardly got any rain at all. Which was good! LOL! Although it was definitely windy, and I kept having to masking-tape things down to the table, like my signs in those little plastic picture frames, to keep them from blowing away. So all together, for two days, I sold about $300 worth of soap. Not too shabby! I sorta made back the show fee, if you don't count the tent and tables as a show cost. :-)