I think I’ve narrowed down, at least, the amount oils we’ll be making, at least to start out with. I have 200 small ziplocks & 200 larger ones, 144 1 dram bottles & 2 dozen perfume roll-on bottles. I also have 100 professionally printed cards to go into the packages that work for incense or oils & perfumes.

I plan to order another package of the cards (at least one more), so I think we’ll do 100 bottles of oil, 100 packages of incense & 24 bottles of perfume. Now, I need to go through my oil recipes & decide which ones we want to make, and sit down with Dawn & decide which incenses to make.

We’ll also be packaging dried herbs, but those will go in a smaller bag with no insert & I can buy the bags locally. We do need to buy some small flower pots in June sometime, since we’ll be selling live, potted herb plants, too. I’m excited about wha we’re doing & just hope that we manage to sell some things!

Thirteen Movies I Love (in no particular order)

1. Drop Dead Gorgeous

2. Con-Air

3. The Wizard of Oz

4. 10 Things I Hate About You

5. That Thing You Do

6. The Birdcage

7. A Knight’s Tale

8. Braveheart

9. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

10. The Harry Potter series

11. The Pirates of the Caribbean series

12. The Wdding Singer

13. Ghost Ship

I haven’t made a lot of progress as far as actually making anything, but we have planned to work on ritual oils on Saturday & Sunday. We won’t be able to actually bottle anything until next week, since the bottles won’t be here until Monday, but we can get several done & ready to be bottled before then.

I have the basic package inserts for the oils designed & ready to be customized for each different oil. My cards I ordered & the labels got here yesterday & the bags will be here tomorrow, so everything we needs for the rest of the packaging is about ready to go. I need to dig through my stuff at some point tonight & make the bag tags for the new size bags, since all the ones I already made are now too small.

So progress is being made, just in small ways. They’re still pretty important & will make the bigger processes a lot easier & faster.

Play Along!

1. Is there a particular smell that turns you on? If so what is it? The cologne my husband wears; Halston Z14.

2. Have you ever tried or considered trying a Master Cleanse type method to lose weight? I’ve considered it, but never seriously.

3. When you browsing a book store for reading material, do you find yourself checking out a book solely based on the cover design? I will look at a book based on the cover design, but it has to have more than that to it to get me to buy it.

4. Which 80’s trend were you least happy to see come back this year; big shoulder pads or neon? Big shoulder pads.

5. How long do you think could you disappear for until someone would notice your absence and start looking for you? No longer than 12-13 hours. Troy or the kids would wonder where I was long before that, I’m sure.

6. Have you ever walked out of a movie and asked for your money back? Which movie(s) and why? My parents took me to a movie in my early teens & we walked out of it because we were all bored, but we didn’t ask for our money back. I can’t remember which movie it was, but it was a war movie.

7. Have you ever changed your plans because of something you read in your horoscope? Absolutely not.

I plan to start using Tuesdays to post pictures of our previous weeks’ work, but since we haven’t actually started anything yet, I don’t have any progress pics to post today. I guess I’ll post a bad photo of our notepads, sticky notes & business cards. The lighting on them is terrible, but it’s too windy to take them outside for some nice, natural light today.

Play along!

The theme/prompt for today, April 28, is:

Make any kind of post using “Down on the Farm” as your prompt. Your post should be about things or animals that could be found on a farm. There’s a lot of possibilities with this one.

I grew up out in the country, we had a pretty large family farm, where we grew a lot of our own produce. We very often raised our own meat, too, in the form of pigs, chickens & goats & we definitely had a lot of eggs. It was a lot of work every summer, for all of us, but the pay off in homegrown produce was worth it & I still dream of having apace for my own, nice garden that those of my childhood.

When I was in middle school, I worked at a couple of huge farms, picking onions. It was boring, back-breaking work, that definitely wasn’t worth the money I was paid, but I did develop a lifelong respect for migrant workers & had plenty of time for daydreaming about things I’d rather be doing. I still remember that summer every time I smell onions growing in a field.

We managed to have our faire meeting this week, after we had to cancel the one we scheduled for last Monday. We got several more applications in the mail, with a few new vendors, which always makes me happy. I love seeing new people signing up to sell at our faire, it helps all of us see that we’re still doing alright, no matter what the economy is doing.

We also reminded ourselves to make sure we pay our insurance well in advance of July (not disability insurance, but event insurance), so that we don’t forget or neglect to pay it.

We narrowed down some entertainment options, made some calls to a few performers & decided to try something new with our advertising, instead of using radio ads, which aren’t working very well. I’m really hoping this will work a lot better for us, we can use all of the visitors we can get.

I sent for my package inserts & labels last week & they’ve all been shipped, so I’m hoping they’ll get here pretty quickly so that we can get everything packaged as we finish blending them. Dawn & I will start our first batches of ritual oils this coming weekend & it would be nice to be able to bottle them pretty shortly after that.

I’m trying to decide which layout will work best for the inside of our booth this year, putting the tables on the outside edges gives us more room inside, but we seem to get more business when we put them on the inside & give our customers a little bit of shade. I think I need to sit down with Dawn & talk about it, to get her ideas on it.

Play along here!

1) If you could change one thing about the building in which you work, what would you change? I work at home, so I’m pretty happy with my work environment. It could stand to be cleaner, but that’s my own fault.

2) What is the silliest or weirdest thing your mom or dad has ever said to you? My parents did more silly or weird things than saying them, like the day I was sitting in the living room reading & a dried up cow pie flew by my head, followed by my mom cackling gleefully.

3) What crime from history fascinates you the most? The ones that were never fully solved intrigue me, like Jack the Ripper & Lizzie Borden. I wonder how quickly they’d have been solved if they happened today & of course who did it.

4) Show and Tell. What comes to mind first when you see this picture? Or, tell a story if it reminds you of one. (it was a photo of a yawning dog) It reminds me of myself last night at Dawn’s house. I couldn’t stop yawning to save my life.

1. Monday 10am: Faire Board meeting
2. Sterilize canning jars
3. Check shipping info & see if bottles & bags have or are shipping soon.
4. Order more disposable eye droppers
5. Make 13 different oils.
6. Bottle & package oils (if bottles arrive)
7. Print labels & instruction inserts
8. Make bag tags that will fit new bags (5″)

That should keep us busy this week!