I'd like to thank...

Everyone who chose to buy their holiday gifts from me this season, you helped to make my first holiday season successful and  memorable!

I've had such incredible support from friends and family as I'm in the process of getting my business off the ground and I really appreciate all of you.

I'm looking forward to heading into 2011 as I continue to create wonderful products to share with everyone.

You can look forward to new soaps and lip balm flavors. The addition of sugar scrubs as well as new bath salt and lotion products!

Have a safe and Happy New Year!!

Checking in...

My computer still isn't fixed and it's turned into this huge frustrating fiasco. I was able to get my labels & such from the hard drive so I'm able to make and package product, phew.

I have Midnight Pomegranate and Cold Water soaps that I've recently made but no pictures to post yet. The Cold Water I just made tonight so it'll be a few days before I unmold it. I also made more Lemongrass & Lavender tonight, it seems to be a really popular fragrance...I can see why though, it smells fantastic. I think I'll make another batch of it tomorrow so I'm stocked up.

I've been scrambling a bit with keeping some of my stuff stocked but this is really good, so I have an idea of how prepared I'll need to be for next years holiday season.

I hope everyone is doing well and having a nice holiday season. I'll get some pics of the new soaps soon and get them posted.

Have a great night everyone!

been a frustrating week so far...

I'm switching some of labels over to waterproof labels and I finally got them on Friday. Sunday I turned my pc on to work on printing them up and was greeted by this lovely message...

no boot device available-
strike the f1 key to continue, f2 to run the setup utility

After an evening of frustration and a lot of worry that my hard drive had died on me, Monday morning I called an IT guy I know who took my machine and determined that some connection on my motherboard had gone bad and needs to be replaced. I was able to find and purchase one online but it won't be here until Monday... of course this had to happen during a holiday week, right?

In the meantime I'm stressing because I have a bunch of products that need to be labeled and I'm out of business cards and need to print them up. So, the IT guy was nice enough to put my soap stuff on a CD for me, I figure I can print from my laptop... yea, no.. my laptop had other ideas. I went to turn it on yesterday it somehow had picked up some nasty spyware or virus that was completely messing up my hard drive, I couldn't open any programs and couldn't uninstall this nasty guy. Finally I was able to boot into Safe Mode and did a system restore to the previous day then ran various spyware & virus removal programs to make sure it was all gone.

ok, problem solved, ready to print labels, right?     yea, no... my laptop doesn't have the fonts installed that I'm using on my labels and business cards... d'oh

My new motherboard should be here on Monday, hopefully the IT guy can install it same day and I can get back in business.

Until then, I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday, I have a couple new soaps to take pictures of and post... both turned out really great, they smell and look great. I may even have more made by Monday.

Happy Turkey Day tomorrow!

New Soaps!

finally, right! The weather has been cloudy for a while which doesn't make for great soap pics so I took advantage of today's beautiful weather and finally got some done!

From top to bottom we have Pumpkin Spice, Christmas Tree and both rectangle & round Castile Soap. The Pumpkin Spice and Christmas Tree smell fabulous, the Castile is made with 100% Olive Oil and has no added color or scent.

Keep an eye out, all of these will be available for purchase soon!

It was a spicy day today!

Made two batches of soap today... some more Summer Spice and a new fragrance, Pumpkin Spice. I'm really excited to see and smell how the Pumpkin Spice come out. I used a new orange mica that I have and I'm curious to see if it holds its color through the cold process.

I put together a couple of gift baskets for a customer that I'm considering selling through the holidays... Doing the shrink wrapping was not fun but I figure after I do a few I'll get the hang of it.

Here are pics of the medium ($25) & large ($35) basket... if you are interested in one please email me tranquilelements@yahoo.com

I'm still here!

Sorry I haven't done much blogging recently, I feel like I've been so busy lately!

The chocolate mint soaps are curing quite nicely. The green has really darkened up and the two greens have blended into the same color. As soon as we get some decent enough light around here I'll get some more pictures of them, it's been dismal & raining.

I made some Christmas Tree scented soaps the other day. They smell so great! I did a red & green swirl but I think I did it backwards. Red is the prominent color instead of green. The red I have is brick red so unfortunately it almost has a brown hue to it.. I think they'll be ok though. I'm certainly going to put them out in the kids/guest bathroom for the month of  December :)

I also made my first batch of 100% Castile soap the other day! I didn't add any color or fragrance to it so it's 100% natural and the bars turned out a beautiful white. I'd been wanting to make a soap that sensitive skin users as well as children could use and Castile kept coming up as the recommendation. According to an article I found at Livestrong.com-  Castile Soap is often recommended for people with sensitive skin and those suffering from eczema, or other skin disorders.

That's all for tonight, I hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween tomorrow!

New blog url!

Welcome!!

All the posts and comments have been moved over from the old url (http://casimplepleasures.blogspot.com/) so you won't miss a thing! If you were "following" the blog you'll have to re-sign up.

I thought having the blog as the business name would be a lot better and easier for people to find.

Thanks for reading!