Whew! It’s been busy, which is of course is a good thing, but I am having trouble keeping all of my plates spinning. Last week I was up at 4:30 in the morning getting into Dallas for our table at the Anatole for the Assistance League Conference. It was a fun show to do and the Anatole Hotel is beautiful. The Assistance League even fed us breakfast in the mornings which was wonderful! We were there from Wednesday noon thru Saturday noon. On Saturday my husband and son helped me out. (Irene, my girl Friday, helped me on Wed – Fri). Here’s some pictures of our table, the hotel and my guys.
Then after finishing up with the Assistance League on Saturday, we had our last day of sampling at the Texas State Fair on Sunday.
I came back to work knowing I had a busy, busy week ahead of us.
- Monday: I melted oils and measured ingredients to get ready to make soap on Tuesday. I also dealt with emails, customer inquiries, etc.
- Tuesday: Irene and I made some custom soap, grapefruit tangerine soap and lavender oatmeal soap for cut-outs. Annie checked in what was brought back from both the Anatole and the State Fair. We also processed all the waiting orders and got them in the mail despite a major credit card processing outage on the part of USPS that afternoon.
- Wednesday: Cutting soap, making massage oils and salt glows, and melting oils to make more soap on the next day. Irene and Annie also began work on a large custom order of baskets to go out.
- Thursday: I made Milk & Honey and Orange Clove soaps with the help of Annie. We also got some orders out the door. Then Irene and Annie finished up the custom basket order while I dealt with customer inquiries and paperwork and of course emails.
- Friday: Just me here today. I cut the soap that was made yesterday. Updated some things on the website and then went to work on the blog.
- . . . and here I am. As I said – “Whew!”
I have had some people wonder what my week is like. Although this was a little busier than typical in that I did two sessions of soapmaking and we had an extremely large number of orders to work on – it was still pretty reflective of how things go. When we are not as active on actually making soap or filling orders there is still the tying of soap and labeling of product. I always have more bookkeeping to do and more emails to answer. I have ups and downs, successes and problems like everyone. I enjoy what I do even though at times it can be very frustrating. Welcome to “Life as a soapmaker (lately)”.