Ellensburg? Moses Lake?

Calling all soap fan-addicts east of the Cascades in the Ellensburg and Moses Lake areas.  I just wanted to let you know that I have added a couple of galleries that carry my products in your 'hood. If you want to stop by an actual storefront shop to pick up my goods rather than order online, here's the scoop.

Last fall, Gallery One in Ellenburg started carrying my goods, and promptly sold out before Christmas.  They are now fully stocked again and we have plans to keep it that way.

Gallery One - Visual Arts Center
408 North Pearl
Ellensburg, WA 98926
(509) 925-2670

And if you are in or around the Moses Lake area, just a couple of weeks ago we joined the Moses Lake Museum & Art Center.  Soaps are flying off the shelves over there and we are sending more pronto.  Note: they are only carrying a selection of the full size soap bars at this time, but not the other products.

Moses Lake Museum & Art Center
401 South Balsam Street
Moses Lake, WA  98837
(509) 764-3830


Just like to keep you all "in the know" and up to your ears in suds . . .

Salmon Days 2014 - I'm already IN!

Holy Moly!!  I just got this message in my inbox:

"Great news!

We are happy to let you know that based on your previous success as a Salmon Days vendor, you are in the first group of pre-accepted vendors for the 2014 Salmon Days Festival.  Congratulations! This means that you will not need to go through the standard jurying process."

Wow, Salmon Days has never done this before.  And Whew!  All this jurying and keeping track of notifications and confirmations and booth fees paid is hard enough, so knowing in advance that you are IN?  Priceless!!

Plus this is one of my best shows all year, and in my very favorite spot too, which they promised me I get to keep.  It really is GREAT news.  And brightens up an otherwise sort of dreary afternoon.

First show of the year!

Toot the horns - we're going to be at our first show of 2014 next week: Vasa Park's spring craft show.  

I'm giddy about seeing how all the new spring scents will go over. But honestly, none of these are new new for me. All of them have been done at one time or another over the years. It's just that scents are trendy little things, like fashion, and sometimes even the classics might not be a hit this season. It's exciting to see which way the wind is blowing right this very minute.

And if I'm being brutally honest, the idea of packing up my entire circus into tote bins, hauling every single piece of display to the car, and gearing it all back up sort of makes me cringe.  It's just once though. The first time. Once I've jumped through that hoop the rest of the shows are just a little bit of piling on or editing.

After my last show comes down at the end of December I unload everything. Pretty much every. little. thing. I take it all out of the bins, clean the bins, clean the items, take stock and inventory. Things are all put to bed in their little storage places. The office is clean and cleared. I need space to start over fresh.

When it comes time to begin the show season again I gotta take it all out and pack from ground up. Tables, shelves etc get hauled to the car and pretty much stay there for months on end. It's sort of nuts, but I drive my jalopy around with a load of stuff for most of the year, banging around, jangling and knocking back and forth. Just because it's too much work to empty and re-load it over and over again each week, or even every other week.

Well, I'm at that place now. The big pack up. Checklist in hand. Gulp.

So the show that kicks it all off is the Vasa Park spring-themed craft show. It's a boutique style show which means that vendors (most of them) don't work their own table displays, but we all work shifts to man woman the floor, ring up sales at the cash registers, greet customers at the door, etc. It's a central check-out at the end where you pay for everything like you would at a regular store. It will be chock full of spring gifts and home decor - Easter eggs, chicks and bunny stuff.  Candy for baskets.  Lucky St Paddy things. General spring goods and tasty treats.  Hope you can stop by to check out the hand made loveliness.

March 13 - 15, 2014

Vasa Park Ballroom

3549 W Lk Sammamish Pkwy, Bellevue

Thurs & Fri 10am - 8pm, Sat 10am - 5pm

It's the little building with the big parking lot just across the street from the lake and the actual Vasa Park campground.  I've included a handy dandy map, in case you need directions.

And if you can't make this show, the Best of the Northwest show is coming up too (March 28-30) at Magnuson Park's Hangar 30 in Seattle.  I'll post all the details about that as we get closer, but save the date!  More info about my entire events/show schedule is on the website HERE.

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Coconuts! Going organic

I just picked up my biggie huge supply of ORGANIC coconut oil to make the soaps with and  I'm so excited to start using it. Thought you all might want to know that you're about to be upgraded. For free!

I'm totally in love with coconut oil anyway. It's some of the greatest stuff on earth - to eat, to smear on yourself, to make stuff with.  It contains all the healthy fats so you're supposed to cook with it and make smoothies with it. I can't tell you how many countless articles I've read lately about all the health benefits of consuming coconut oil -and every kind of coconut stuff too, like coconut water, coconut milk, coconut meat - even coconut flour if you're gluten-free.

Ditto all the articles about how wonderful coconut oil is for skin health. It's solid at just below body temp around 96 degrees.  So you can scoop up a little blob and the second it hits your skin at 98 degrees, it melts into a beautiful, light oil that absorbs easily and quickly, with all kinds of essential nutrients, fats and vitamins that keep you glowing. And did I mention that it smells delicious? Be warned, you might want to lick yourself.

This heavenly stuff has been the base of my soap recipe now since I started out years and eons ago in this biz. It's the base oil that gives my soap it's lovely rich lather, in addition to just making it an all around great bar of soap to use.  I've been buying the food-grade coconut oil for my soap from a few different places over the years, but the organic variety was always much more expensive. I'd toyed with the idea repeatedly, but would have had to raise the cost of my soap bars to an unreasonable price, so I didn't make the switch, but I didn't let the idea go either. I still wanted to find a way.

Last month I got word that my current supplier now carried an organic version and it was of course more expensive, but a whole lot cheaper than it ever was before.  And in February it went on sale.  Yahoo!  I ordered a rather large-ish supply so that now I can make the soaps for the next little while with organic coconut oil.  The big leagues!

The old stuff wasn't bad in any way, just so you know.  It's always been really high quality coconut oil.  But when you can go organic, it's better.  And better is well, just better. Especially if it doesn't cost any more.

We're all about to get upgraded to organic -- but the price stays the same.  Best news all day, right?

Beautiful on the inside

Surrounded by images of glamorous models and starlets, we sometimes forget what real beauty is.  And it starts on the inside.  Lupita Nyong'o accepted an award for Best Breakthrough Performance at the 7th annual Black Women in Hollywood luncheon hosted by Essence magazine last week.  Her speech about beauty, so wise and so charming, reminded me again what real beauty is.

Not your grandmother's rose

We love to give small glimpses of what goes on behind the giant green curtain - well, maybe we don't have curtains - but behind the scenes in the studio and the process behind what we do and why we do it.

Last month we announced all of the new spring seasonal products in our Spring Newsletter, and several items in the new product line are scented with rose petals:  Rose Petal Soap, Rose Petal Aromatic Spray, and Rose Petal Dead Sea Bath Salts. Why rose? Because February is the month of love and rose is the quintessential flower of love. Seems like they should hold hands and kiss, right?

The fragrance of rose has inspired poets,  lovers, and dreamers for eons. Greek legend claims the red rose came from the blood of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. The name of Aphrodite's son Eros, god of love, is an anagram for rose. Cool, eh?. Folktales from China to Europe tell similar stories about the rose as a symbol for the unfolding of both spiritual and physical love and perfection.
Pure rose essential oil is some of the most expensive stuff on earth because it takes so very many rose petals to distill into a drop of the liquid gold while rose bushes are sensitive and difficult to care for.  We've used a high quality fragrance oil which contains some of the same compounds as the essential oil, yet is as fresh as a bouquet straight from the florist.

The area of the brain which processes scent is right next to the memory department, and as we all know, so much of our experience of smells is directly tied to memories of previous times and places where we have experienced that before - like cinnamon and baking cookies at Grandma's when you were a child. Plus other random stuff, like the scent of Ralph Lauren Polo men's cologne and the 70's, eww.

Rose is one of those scents that evoke quite a few memories, and some of them involve grandmas everywhere since it's a bit of an old fashioned scent.  But rose is also thoroughly modern and lovely.  Nobody turns down a dozen fresh roses on Valentine's Day.  Or thinks oddly that fresh rose petals are scattered on their pillow at the ritziest hotels, or strewn around the poshest of spas.  It's a classic for a reason.  Rose is timeless and beautiful.

Revered for it's gentleness, it soothes and hydrates when used in skin and beauty products, and is often included in anti-aging skin care for its cell rejuvenation properties.  In aromatherapy it eases tension and anxiety, calming stress.

Rose was the perfect pick for this spring.  We've already gotten great feedback from folks who are loving it. And if you're into layering -- and not just socks, but scent too -- then you've got all 3 products play with.

24 hours of happy

Hey, it's "Just For Fun Saturday" and I wanted to share a cool thing.

This is so darn happy - the world's first 24 hour music video.  It's Pharrell's "Happy" song, which I have totally been digging anyway. (From the Despicable Me 2 movie which is pretty fun too, btw)

But watching this vid for a bit is addicting - seeing so many different kinds of people just rocking out to the song in public places.  And especially seeing the other passing people watch them dance - smiles, breakout dances, photos, smirks, etc.  Just fun.

http://24hoursofhappy.com/

Can't embed it here, you have to go to the website. And not sure if it loads in real time? or how it loads where you are?  But you can move the clock around and start at midnight (all those vids are at night) or move it around to any place in the 24 hours which goes from day back to night again.  The locations change, the people keep changing, and all of it is pretty happy-making, even if you only watch for a couple rounds of the short song.

And it will absolutely get stuck in your head and you'll be clapping along and singing that tune for days now.  Don't say I didn't warn you :)