Enter to win a gift set of Organic Fusion products here. Scroll mid way down the page, it’s about 2/3 down on the blog. Rare Bird Findsis one of my favorite blogs. I read it at least once per week to keep up on cool indie finds.
Search Results for: facebook photo of the week
Birthday Empowerment
A few weeks ago, my dear friend Amy (that’s her, 2nd from the right in the red top) turned… Well, she had a special birthday. Rather than the traditional party, Amy planned an entire weekend around strong women. She designed a trust walk around a local lake, an evening of sharing (complete with tears and personal revelations) and a assigned a morning activity around balance and strengths. Each person who attended had a part to play and a leadership role to fulfill.
We all went to Vancouver (Canada) for Thai Food, raucous laugher and strong bonding. The gals were kind enough to let me stop by Open Sundaes, one of my fave bath and body producers. Check out their web site here.
My assignment was the Balance Activity. I led the women through an exercise similar to what my friend Lynn Guiliani from Progressions Coaching guides busy executives through. In summary, the exercise had each participant go through their goals in life and compare those goals to how they are living their life currently. Where there were deficiencies, an achievable plan was designed to help everyone easily meet their goals in small, bite-sized goals.
“Small” means manageable. The goals are not superwoman goals. They are easy steps to work towards achieving whatever is important in our lives. For example, one of my goals was to meditate for 15 minutes, just 3 times a week. It’s a tiny goal on the face of it but will get me closer to my larger goals.
It wasn’t all work though! Here we are, goofing around in the middle of the street, in Vancouver BC after walking, shopping and cupcake eating.
Thank Amy for designing such a great birthday weekend!
Giant Cupcakes
This Prozac Cupcake was featured at Burning Man.
I have one fun crafty project planned for this weekend – making a skin firming gel with carrot seed essential oil. I’ll keep you posted with how it turns out.
Happy Saturday!
Swirling Soap – Preparing the 1st color
Earlier this week, Renee asked a question about swirling soap. Renee, here’s a long, multiple day answer to your question. Watch for short instructional videos from this goatsmilk batch (scented with Herbal Essence) this weekend and next week.
Preparing the color mixture ahead of time is helpful. Working out clumps prior to the soap being poured makes for less stress and worry during the touchy last few minutes of the soapmaking process. The colorant mixture above is a blend of jojoba oil, blue ultramarine iron oxide and loofah.
Mixing the prepared coloring into thinly trace (goatsmilk) soap. I did (approximately) 1 tsp of blue color, 1 tsp of loofa and 2 oz. of jojoba oil in 16 oz. of soap. The 16 oz. of soap was pulled from the larger 6 pound batch at thin trace. The rest of the goatsmilk soap is waiting in the large stainless steel mixing pot.
A photo of the entire set up with digital scale, Sunnybrook mold and spatula waiting to scrape soap into mold to get the last drops out.
I’ll post photos and instructions of the swirling technique this weekend.
Pajama Mama Wins
In our random posting contest for last week, Pajama Mama wins! Pajama Mama’s real name is Jeannie and she’s from Georgia. She writes her own blog about soap and family here. Head over to her site and come up with a caption for her cute cat photo.
Jeannie, email me with your address and I’ll pop these goodies the mail for you. Email is info (at) brambleberry.com
Current state of the Bathroom
I got interviewed for another blog this week (Breakfast with the People). They asked a funny follow up question about my post where I mentioned Chris was painting a new bathroom cabinet!
Here is a photo of the project all done. Notice how the cabinet matches the walls and tile?
I’m a lucky girl. Now I have my very own mirror and space so I don’t have to elbow Chris out of the way to get ready in the morning. Just another reason why crafty husbands are the best kind to have.
Letterpress = Sublime
Thanks for all the comments last week. Readers had a few questions in the Comments section. If one person has a question, there are probably others that do as well. So, the answers to the questions you’ve posted:
Anonymous readers posted twice asking what Letterpress is. Frequent readers of this site know that I’m a sucker for anything letterpressed (previous posts include this one and this one). I’m so passionate about letterpress that our wedding invites (see bottom of this post) were letterpressed.
What is letterpress? The Wikipedia explanation is here. It is a way of printing that literally stamps the words into and onto the page. If you run your fingers over a letterpressed item, the words and design will be sunk into the page. 
Current methods of printing (such as laser) lay ink down on a page, upraising the words. Letterpress uses stamps and lots of pressure and ink to get the design on the page. The photo on the right is letterpressed stationary from Elum Designs. It’s next on my “affordable luxury items to purchase” list.
Why doesn’t everyone use letterpress for packaging? Price. Letterpress is significantly more time intensive, labor intensive, requires bulky expensive printing presses and custom stamps. All those components add up to pricing that costs approximately 8 – 15 times what normal printing costs. From an economics standpoint, it’s difficult to justify letterpress for small items, such as soap, where the $4.00 purchase price normally won’t cover the cost to get the custom stamp made, let alone the extra price per label or tag.
Then again, to elevate your bar of soap from a commodity to the sublime takes something special that not everyone is doing. Maybe Letterpress is just that thing.
Moon Valley obviously believes it is.
Photo of our letterpressed wedding invitations, designed by Shew Designs
Retro Cupcake
Happy Labor Day!
This cupcake is a chocolate mud mini cupcake with acqua blue icing and hand made flower. Kylie designed it to match the paper in the background.
This upcoming week will focus on my weekend goatsmilk soap swirling project.
I hope you all had crafty and creative moments in our long three-day weekend.
Otion Press Kits
We have spent the last few months preparing to do a local media blitz with Otion press kits. My sister in law, Cheriss, worked for Deutch LA for the last few years. She has a degree in Marketing, is creative and saavy with press. She was quite generous to help out with our press kit blitz.
Each of the press kits contains a letter from the founder, an Otion FAQ sheet, 1 bar of soap, and a full color/full bleed 8 page glossy about Otion. The special feature with the glossy is a perfume vials on each page. The vials are filled to the brim with our best or most unique fragrance oils. Shew Design did the initial design work for the glossy insert, including the genius idea of including the fragrance vials.
All the labels for the soap were done on full-sheet labels. The labels were cut out by hand and painstakingly peeled apart (thanks Cheriss!)
The final kits shipped out yesterday. Next week, I will focus on calling each of the 24 news outlets and ask if they received the press kit. When they respond enthusiastically (fingers crossed), I’ll explore story ideas with them. For example, a family vacation publication would be interested in our soapmaking bar but a magazine focusing primarily on singles would want to focus on fun, exciting date nights. And really, what’s more fun and exciting than making soap?
As the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK says, the way to get press is just to pick up the phone. The magic phrase, according to Brian Scudamore, is “Hey! I’ve got a great story for you!”
The phrase has been instrumental in getting 1-800-GOT-JUNK lots of free press. Let’s hope that it’s magic for Otion too.
Day 7 Coco Balm – Final recipe
After testing the chocolate balms all week and overdosing on chocolate this weekend, there is a clear winner. The Brambleberrians in the office (Nicole, Amber, Jen and Anne) agree with my choice of chocolate winner.
I was surprised when we all chose the Bittersweet Baking Chocolate as the best texture and taste. The Bittersweet Baking Chocolate beat out all the other expensive, organic, fair-trade chocolates. Of course, there’s not much marketing cachet with regular Bittersweet Baking Chocolate so keep that in mind when formulating your product for sale.Our favorite recipe is easy and simple.
Here is an easy variation to make your ingredient label more exotic and your marketing pop!
Marketing Genius 101 Variation
1.0 oz. Bittersweet Baking Chocolate
.5 oz. Organic, Fair-Trade Certified Chocolate (like Seattle-based Theo)
1 oz. Beeswax
.3 oz. Sweet Almond Oil
.3 oz. Jojoba Oil
.3 oz. Avocado Oil
.1 oz. Vitamin E Oil
Marketing Points: Contains Organic, Fair-Trade Certified Chocolate! Vitamin E oil promotes supple lips! Avocado Oil is high in essential fatty acids for moisture! Jojoba oil closely mimics the skin’s natural lipid profile!
The basic proportions for our winning recipe is:
42% chocolate
29% beeswax
29% liquid oil
You can take these proportions to create your own recipe. The math looks something like this:
3 oz. total recipe
3.0 x .42 = 1.26 oz.
3.0 x .29 = .87 oz.
3.0 x .29 = .87 oz.
If you want to make a larger recipe, just substitute the “3” for whatever total weight you want your recipe to be and multiply out the math.
Questions? Comments? Just post and I’ll get back to you in a timely manner.
Now, go forth and choc-i-fy!
They love us! They love us!
We are totally feelin’ the love out there for Otion, soap and all things Soap-Queen related.
Big thanks to Joanna at The Soap Bar Blog for writing about our own little homegrown soap bar – Otion and reviewing our Soap-Queen blog. Read her take on Otion and the blog here.
Michelle, a frequent reader at The Soap Queen won our box o’ goodies two weeks ago. Read what she has to say about her faves in the box here.
Renee in Texas visited Otion. Click here to see her photos. I love the one with Mark wearing his Otion apron.
Thank You to Renee, Jo and Michelle for the support!
Life is Good!
I finally had a cupcake! After a four week dry spell, our friends Jennifer & Scott had Cupcake Royale cupcakes at their wedding reception tonight. Bless them.
I devoured a Red Velvet cupcake as soon as it was polite to do so. I made sure I wasn’t the first one to take a cupcake from the giant stack of fluffy goodness.
I was the third.
Pink Sugar Cupcake Soap
Peg’s shop on Etsy is: aromaticessence.etsy.com/
Happy Saturday! It’s a rainy, overcast day in Bellingham but since that’s an every day event here, Chris and I are going about the day like it’s warm, sunny and beautiful.
We’re headed to a local park for a picnic (cooking the pasta salad right now). We’re also dragging kayaks along. I suspect that we’ll be the fools in the middle of the rainy lake, fighting the winds, all in the spirit of “Having Fun” and “Fully Enjoying The Summer.”
I’m excited to finish my posts on the Choco Balm so look for a few more of those over the weekend. That is, if my frozen hands can type after our rainy day kayaking foray.
Happy Soaping!
Fun with Food
Given our Chocolate Lip Balm theme for this week, the above photo seems appropriate. For more fun food art, head to Splutch‘s site. The egg one is my fave.