After a week of hot weather in the 90's and over 100 it was a GREAT cool Saturday for a Farmers' Market. I feel lucky to be self-employed and sell our products at such a wonderful place. Surrounded by other self-employed folks selling their beautiful products and showing off their talents. You can find anything from hand sewn aprons, bird baths, wooden furniture, meat and of course FRESH and LOCALLY GROWN PRODUCE! Mmmm! Every Friday evening we pack up our car with all of our market products and gear. We wake up in the morning at 6am and leave by 6:45 to get to the market to set up by 8am. I am glad I am a morning person! I love the atmosphere, fresh air (way better than a office setting!) and chatting with all my customers and being there for them when they have a question about a product or are looking for something to use for a skin condition. I also love when little kids have to stop and smell the soap. It is good to see that kids know what good and healthy soap is! The market is where my customers can find my full product line, new products, and request special orders. It feels great to be selling a product that is good for the people and environment. And even though I am "working" this is my vacation from watching 3, soon 4, little kiddos. I look forward to it every week. Hope to see you there!
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I've teamed up with Mona at Sun Moon Yoga to create a new bar! It is called the Detox Lemon bar. It has the perfect combination of citrus essential oils for detoxifying, corn meal for exfoliation, and vegetable oils for cleansing. This is our first time doing a bar in a plastic mold. Usually we pour into a slab mold and cut the bars. These bars were poured into individual molds which gives them those great finger grips on the top. The packaging turned out really cool. Mona and Roberta came up with some great labels. The bars are sold in pairs with the flat sides together so they kind of look like a lemon. I hope you check these out! They will hopefully be at the St. Peter food coop, but right now they are available at Sun Moon Yoga, our website, and the Mankato Farmers' Market. We made four batches of soap yesterday. Lavender, Lemon Fresh, Invigorater, and Honey Almond. When I started making soap I used a spoon to measure out my raw oils, now I use a small shovel! Here is a picture of John measuring out some coconut oil for a large batch of soap. We are going to have so many new blends of soap at the Farmers' Market this year. I am so excited. It looks like there might be a lot of early produce too! Here is another picture of John putting on the "looptie doos" as we call them. If the soap is at just the right consistency then we can get those really great, extra loopy looptie doos. I don't know why we started calling them that but it stuck. A lot of people have asked us how we do it and it's really not that exciting... we just use a spoon;) It has been a very early spring and it is totally throwing me off. Our rose bushes and raspberry bushes are already growing leaves, and our chives are popping up! It's very exciting. I recently got out some dried herbs from last year and Rebecca, my three year old daughter, was helping me pull flowers and leaves off of the stems so that I can experiment with potpourri making. Right now our yard is a complete disaster. When we moved in over 60% of our backyard was concrete. We just had that removed so now 60% of our back yard is mud!! But we planted grass and hopefully it will be a yard again very soon. I would love to plant the whole thing with herbs and flowers, but we will leave a little bit of room for grass! My first potpourri attempt was a batch of lemon balm leaves, lavender flowers and leaves, bachelor button flowers for color, calendula petals for color, and rose petals. I used lavender and lemon essential oils to scent with a fixative that is used in bath salts. It's not the right fixative for potpourri, it was just an experiment. It smells fresh like summer! I'm waiting for my orris root to arrive so that I can make a real batch and use it as my fixative! |
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Melissa Kruse
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