March 21st may have heralded the arrival of Spring but here in Minnesota we are still firmly stuck in a Winter Wonderland. As I gaze out my window, lakes are still frozen and snow blankets the ground. I have experienced many winters throughout my life that dragged on, but this one feels particularly unwelcome. I’m getting very impatient waiting for warm air and leaf buds and for it to just stop being too chilly to sit outside and enjoy some sunshine.
But alas, it seems the frigid weather is here to stay. Case in point, I was meant to have my first craft show of the season yesterday, April 1st, however Mother Nature saw fit to gift us with a dose of freezing rain the night before (accompanied by thunder and lightning, it was very bizarre!) I woke up to communication from the craft fair organizer that the show was to be rescheduled due to pesky ice and slippery roads. It worked out well enough for me, I hadn’t slept well and went right back to bed.
When I did wake up for the day, I found myself with an unexpected spare Saturday, and worked up the gumption to do lots of work for my business in lieu of the craft show. I ended up spending the day making candles. The Litchfield Spring Bash Craft Show has been rescheduled two weeks out. It will now occur on April 15th, from 10am to 3pm at the Litchfield Civic Arena.
Two weeks happens to be just the ideal time to allow soy candles to cure, so I suddenly realized my chance to bolster my candle offerings before the first show of the year.
I think I made candles for 6 hours straight yesterday, making 4 scent blends and 41 candles total. I am investing more in offering 7oz jar candles, a bit larger than my usual 3.5oz fair. The 7oz’s are nice little medium affairs, offering a decently long lasting candle without needing to commit to a substantial price tag. I made a few of these 7oz jars to fill out my offerings in that size. The crowd-pleasing scents of Midnight Waters and North Woods will be available in that size at the Litchfield craft show, along with a brand new addition to my scent lineup: Dusk Flower, a captivating blend of heady black violet and lavender blooms with the slight spice of saffron.
The rest of what I worked on yesterday was restocking some of the varieties of my Eeveelution Candle series, based on the Pokémon franchise. Each of the 9 varieties in that line are now (finally) back in stock. You can check out the listing for them here.
With an excess of business zeal yesterday, I finished my candle pours and sat down to more planning, research, and development. I crunched some numbers, made some inventory purchases and then played around with exploring the concept of the Fragrance Wheel to double check that I have a nice variety of fragrance types in my lineup, and to conceptualize new must-have scent combinations. If you’re curious, Candle Science has a really excellent writeup on their website regarding the use of a Fragrance Wheel. Maybe one day I’ll do my own post about it; I find it a really fascinating and fun tool.
That’s all from me for now. Litchfield is the only in-person show I’ll be doing this month so let’s hope I can start off the season with a bang. And with any luck the weather will cooperate this time!