Amy's shower

Ever since one of my BFF's asked me to be her maid of honor, I've been freaking out about all of the responsibilities that come with it. Some of you might know I'm planning my own wedding, and my sister is getting married next year as well. It's A LOT! During the planning of her shower, I was nominated to do the crafty stuff - centerpieces, favors, etc. I am comfortable with those responsibilities. What I ended up coming up with were a homemade body scrub and a homemade lip balm.

The shower is in a week, this August. Her wedding is fall themed, on October 4th, so I wanted to do fall flavors and moderately fall colors that still look nice in the summer. I ended up going with gold, peach, and purple (the bridesmaids' dresses are 'sangria' purple) for the colors. Amy is obsessed with all things fall and pumpkin so of course that had to be incorporated into the flavor. I found a pumpkin cheesecake flavor oil on Ebay which was perfect and smells amazing, and used a lip balm base instead of mixing it up by scratch. I wanted to make the process as easy as possible since I'd be doing everything in bulk. I tinted the balm with orange mica powder for a pretty peachish orange color.

The scrub was the hard part. I used half brown sugar, half white sugar, and a whole whopping pound of cinnamon. I couldn't decide which oil to use, as I wanted the scent to be neutral and the oil to be affordable in bulk. I ended up choosing sunflower oil, which had a neutral, if anything, flavor. I didn't have enough, so I asked Ryan to pick some up on the way home and he got olive oil instead. Everything went smoothly until I added it and it had a weird undertone of olive smell to it.

So I freaked out, ordered cinnamon oil on Amazon and a vanilla fragrance oil. The cinnamon did not pan out, but holy crap, the vanilla smells amazingly like icing and the small amount I added to the 20 pounds of sugar made it smell AMAZING!

For the labels, I used weatherproof premade labels for the scrub, which I printed on at home. The lip balm labels I made from scratch and they look so cute! I also made the tags from scratch here too. They came out so cute, and I think she's going to love them!

Here are a few more shots of the favors.

This is how they will look at the shower:

craft show stuff

Over the last few months, I've been thinking about getting into the craft show scene again. I did some when I first started out a few years ago, but having a job and doing shows was just too much. I stopped doing them, eventually lost my job, and starting out making jewelry full time. Now that I'm pretty established, have my shit together, and a healthy stock of inventory, I've been mulling over the idea of doing some shows again. I want to start small, and do a few here and there. Nothing crazy.

My old display was all black, which is not the look I'm going for anymore. It's too dark for my light, fun jewelry. I am going with white and pops of color this time around. I realized that I need to figure out exactly how I would set up a booth, and went to Pinterest and Flickr for ideas. Honestly, I didn't find a damn thing I liked. Nothing even close.

So I decided I'd buy some old frames, paint them, and try to hang my earrings on ribbons that I strung across the backing of the frame. I wasn't sure if it would work, or look right, but turns out it does and I really like it. It's simple and light, just what I was looking for.

My next step is buying some more, larger frames and doing this to them. I'm also on the hunt for some candy colored glasses dishes. Hopefully I'll find some, but I can never find exactly what I'm looking for when I have something in mind. I'm also hoping my brain gives me some other ideas, because having 10 frames sitting on a table would really be overkill.

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