Soapmaking Hiatus

Well, a lot of stuff has happened. First, I damaged my right thumb beyond belief on mandoline. Not the musical instrument, the kind you use to slice vegetables. Or your thumb. It was pretty awful. After a month, I can finally remove the bandage. My thumb has a different shape now. It still skeeves me out to think about it. The idea of handling lye any time soon is a sphincter-tightening notion. As a result, I am out of every kind of soap except for a select few.

In addition, supplies for soapmaking have skyrocketed. The same 50 lb pails of coconut and palm oils that cost $50 (plus $25 shipping for each one) have essentially doubled in the last few months. Since they are major ingredients in soap, the price of making it has literally doubled. Then there's higher gas costs for shipping. Oh yeah, and fragrance oil prices have gone up too. I think the days of the $5-6 bar of handmade soap won't last much longer.

For all these reasons, I'm going to sell what I've got left at Sea Sprite Soaps and go on hiatus until I can figure out if it's worth doing anymore. If I come back to commercial soapmaking it will probably be on limited basis with a lot fewer kinds of soap. I may just do my ocean and sea-themed soaps. That would keep supplies and shipping costs down. I've also thought about sticking to just roll-on and solid perfumes and forgetting about the soap. I'll have to see how I feel after a while.

For now, I'm going to sell off my remaining stock and take a break. I still have a good amount of Sea Glass, Oatmeal Stout and Pumpkin Lager left, plus a few bars each of Fata Morgana, Ocean Rain and Cedar and Saffron. If you like my soaps and want to get some, please check out my shop.

In the meantime, my digital products have been doing very well. My Mingzhu for Mavka has recently been released on Renderosity. I'm working on a skin texture and morph for Daz's Victoria 4 now and hope to have it finished soon.

A couple of things to love about digital products:

• No overhead
• No physical storage required
• Unlimited inventory (make it once and sell it forever)

Stacked up against soapmaking, digital products seem the way to go, to me. I know I'm going to miss my soapmaking business though.

Ambrette for Mavka

Just for fun I made the dearest little dollie for smay's wonderful Mavka. Introducing my newest little character, Ambrette!


On the soapmaking front, I've got Winter Festival back in stock and a bunch of new ones coming soon for winter. I'm particularly happy about Pumpkin Lager and Oatmeal Stout soap.

Our dear, dear Welsh Terrier, Taffy, died 3 months ago at the age of 10. All of us are still feeling the loss. We've always had a boy and girl doggie, and our girl WT, Libby, seems lost too. Tomorrow will be a happy, but bittersweet day. We are going to Sarasota to pick up a new boy Welshie puppy. His name is going to be Fergus. Pictures to follow. :)

Ghislaine for S4, V4 and A4

Finally, after many months of hard work in completing this 3D morph and skin texture for Poser, my Ghislaine is in the store at Daz3D.

Update

Three weeks ago our dear, 10 year old Welsh Terrier, Taffy, died. It pretty much knocked the stuffing out of me. We've taken it very hard. I'm gradually getting back to work.

I took advantage of ArtFire's new promotion of a lifetime price of $5.95 per month, and opened Sea Sprite Soaps on ArtFire. I don't know why ArtFire doesn't get more traffic and sales, but they have some wonderful tools and get their listings right into Googlebase, so this is a relatively inexpensive gamble I'm taking to get my shop out there.

I'm still tweaking Ghislaine's skin textures after some constructive criticism. As usual, every little change takes way longer than I ever think it will.

Monday we went up to Tampa to help Vicky celebrate her 21st birthday. We went out to lunch and she had her first legal cocktail in a restaurant -- a Margarita! Her dad had one too, so I drove home and he snoozed all the way back to Naples. I can't believe my baby is 21. It doesn't seem possible, but it must be true. Next year it's Geoff's turn.

One of my favorite suppliers, Southern Soapers, is going out of business. Not only will I miss their wonderful fragrances and fabulous service, but it's going to cut a hole in my stock. They had stuff I couldn't get anywhere else so some things, like Havana Nights, Twilight Rose and (especially painful) Tassie Lavender will be no more.

Back from Long Island

Our Vicky is coming home from her 2 week visit with her boyfriend on Long Island tomorrow. Yay! We've missed her so much. I haven't been to New York in many years, so it will be fun to get her perspective on it. She said she took over 300 pictures!

Today I need to make a couple batches of soap. I am so far behind on getting my stock whipped into shape. I'm out of a bunch of stuff. There's only so many hours in a day and lately I've spent most of my discretionary time making Poser stuff. To be honest, it pays better, no overhead, no storage problems, no supplies or materials. All imagination and pixels.

I'm working on a new Poser character for Stephanie 4, tentatively named Ghislaine. I like that name and have been waiting to use it. She's kind of French looking, if there is such a look. Or maybe Italian, like a Chiara?



I have in mind an unconventional looking beauty with fair skin, natural looking eyebrows and without a ton of crazy tattoos and garish makeups. I'm so tired of all those ridiculous character packs with 95 eye colors and makeups, none of which any sane person would ever have or wear.

Free Churidar Kameez Outfit for Jamika K4

I'm very happy to announce that I've finally finished a Churidar Kameez outfit for my little Jamika for K4! It comes with 4 textures and has all of these Body morphs: Realistic, Thin, Heavy, Chibi and Dolly! It's designed for Jamika, but should fit almost any K4 character. Making this was a real learning experience. :)

Jamika for K4 Released

I'm pleased to announce that my Jamika for K4 has been released at Daz3D.com! She comes with her own beautiful earrings with 20 materials.

One More...

One more of my Jamika, in Alicia hair from RDNA. :)

Arroz con Pollo

Mmmm...my kitchen smells amazing. I made a big batch of homemade sofrito, a la Daisy Martinez, so I can make Arroz con Pollo tonight. The frozen Goya sofrito is OK but making my own was a real eye opener, you just can't beat homemade.

Both of my kids will be here for dinner tonight. We brought Vicky home Friday, and Geoff is joining us this evening. I love to cook knockout Mom Food for them. For dessert: Magic Bars! Yeah, the nutrition goes out the window on the rare occasions both of my babies are home at the same time.

New in my soap shop, Satsuma Handmade Soap! Smells fabulous. :)

I've been working all weekend on one pesky seam in Jamika's skin texture. I think I've got it now. Here's another peek at her.

Featured On Babble.com!

I am so thrilled to be featured on Babble, the comprehensive and fabulous site for moms online! I'm one of the 50 Best Etsy Moms!

Things have been busy for me the last few weeks. My hosting service, which had been stellar for many years, suddenly began having a lot of down time. My SSL wasn't working properly. So I had to move to a new hosting service, one that has a lot of experience working with Zen Cart. I'm happy to report that my Sea Sprite Soaps site is working great, I have been updated to the latest, more secure version of my shopping cart, and my SSL is having no problems. Yay!

In the mean time, my Geoffrey has moved into his own apartment and is learning about how to budget his money and shop for groceries. He's only had a couple week, but he's slowly learning how to pace himself! We are going to pick up Vicky from USF on Friday and bring her home for the rest of the summer. Then she will be moving to her own apartment in the Fall.

In addition to making lots and lots of soap, including some new ones coming soon (Satsuma, Jasmine Vanilla), I've been finishing up my little 3D Poser character, Jamika. Here's a sneak peek of her as a mermaid.

Hyperbole and a Half

Hyperbole and a Half is excruciatingly funny!

My son Geoffrey is moving into his own apartment on June 1st. The dorms and meal plans are very, very expensive and the kids hate the food. This way the rent is actually cheaper and he can cook real, healthier food for himself. Almost 20 and grown up much too fast. Because he's taking his bed with him, his room will be largely empty and any illusion we've maintained that he still lives here will be gone.

He's been in that room since he was a newborn. I can't believe it. Of course he will still come home for dinner a couple times a week or maybe to do laundry, but it's a big change. I think it must be harder for parents, we have nothing exciting happening like the kids do when they get a first place of their own. Mostly I will just miss seeing him around and talking, the everyday conversations that parents enjoy so much.

This weekend Vicky is coming home for the holiday. She's bringing her boyfriend with her. He's such a nice kid, and we're thrilled that she feels like sharing him with us. She's still in Tampa at USF until the end of first summer session, then we get to have her home until fall.

Last weekend my kids went with a small tribe of their friends to a 3 day "Purple Mad Hatters Ball," a music festival in Live Oak, which is up toward the North Central part of Florida. They camped right along the Suwannee River, a gorgeous location loaded with old live oaks and dripping Spanish Moss. I made a little album here with some photos.

I'm still working on my new little character for the Kids 4. She makes a cute little Indian girl, I think. :)

Seams and Skin Textures

One of the joys (not) of making realistic skin textures is making them seamless. The "skin" wraps around the 3D body and joins up the center of the head and back, under the neck, in a crooked line down the inside of the legs, where arms meet shoulders, and where the tops and bottoms of toes and fingers join.

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to get rid of all those seams so that when someone renders an image, there are no hard lines where one side of the body meets the other. You can see what I mean below. Notice the faint line in the skin texture that the arrow points to -- in Poser character creation, that's a no-go.

You can't really ignore even little seams like that. People pay good money for these textures and if they find a seam, even if it's a seam in between the toes that no one could possibly see unless they rendered it at extreme magnification, they're going to kvetch about it.

So that's how I spent my day today, working on seams. It takes me about as long to get rid of the seams as it does to make the actual skin texture. I'm not kidding. It's not fun, but it has to be done in order to finish it up. I do have an awesome program called Bodypaint 3D that makes touching up seams a lot easier, but it's not for gross problems like a dark neck meeting a paler head texture. Stuff has to blend together better than that for Bodypaint to work optimally.

So yeah, tomorrow I'll be back at it, hours of fixing in Photoshop then rendering in Poser, finding the seam, trying again, etc. until it's all smooth and seamless. It's lucky that I'm a good obsessive-compulsive and have a lot of patience. I'm just saying.

Another Cutie

I'm still working on Jamika's skin texture. I think she looks kind of like a young Rihanna here. :)

Jamika

I'm working on a new Kid4 Poser character, tentatively named Jamika. Here's a peek at her portrait, and one of her in an adorable new Regency outfit. :)

Back to the Poser Universe

The last month or so I've been working hard to get back into making and selling my 3D Poser characters. I'm happy to say that my Josie for the new Kids4 is complete and now available at Daz3D. Here's a couple peeks at Josie! :)


OK, I can't resist one more of her as a little elf!


I've already begun working on a new kid character, using photos of a Caribbean woman with the most gorgeous golden-toned skin. Lots of interesting little freckles and bumps that make her stand out.

Soapmaking? Oh yeah. I really need to get back to making more soap. I'm running out of stock. So many creative ideas, so little time...

I can't believe the school year is almost over. Geoff will be checking out of his dorm on April 28th and beginning his summer classes within 10 days of that. Vicky gets out the week after that. She will be going back to Tampa for the first summer session.

Kids with Bright Futures have to take a total of 12 credits in summer to maintain the scholarship, so they want to get it finished within their first two years. Next summer they both want to go to Sweden for a fantastic summer program at Uppsala.

Still Alive...

Things got very busy. First one kid was home for spring break, then the other kid. It's been fun having them here and cooking their favorite meals, going to the movies and beach with them, etc. But now both kids are back at college and we are back to our normal routines. A little boring, but comforting nevertheless.

I'm back to trying to get my stock up again. I have a few new/revived soaps coming soon: Hawaiian Lei Flowers, Lilac, Coco Lime Verbena and Sea Fan, which is an awesome dupe of Lolita Lempicka. Tomorrow I'm going to try to make Gardenia and Havana Nights, maybe even some Sugared Walnut. I'd love to make more new ones, but then I run out of the old ones and have to make them first, so it's hard to add new stuff. I've really got to thin out my offerings, but if only a couple people like something, it's hard for me to take it out of rotation.

I'm making a lot of progress on my new Poser character. I wish I could show it off, but I can't because of an NDA. Even if I do say so myself, it's adorable.

Back to School

Both of our kids have gone back to college. Sniff. After a whole month at home, eating together, watching movies, going out and generally having lots of time for talking, it's hard to have it over so quickly. It's going to take me a while to get back to a quieter and somewhat duller life without our kids at home.

It's been cold and rainy for a week now. Today it never got up over 39 degrees and it's still drizzling. The cats are in my DH's office, too cold for them to be outside. Even though they yowl and scratch and are dying to get outside and freeze to death. This is supposed to go on for another week or more. I really, really hate cold weather.

Today I played with Michael 4 in Poser, trying out some morphs of my own. Take a peek. It's hard to believe this is a pretend 3D character and not a real person!

Relaxing

I'm just chilling, enjoying the rainy, gray, slow-paced start of a new year. I've been playing with Poser this morning, working on a new character for Aiko.

Yesss!

Last night I got enough orders on Etsy to bump me up to 2001 sales! That's pretty exciting. To celebrate, I blew a few bucks on this little dollie, Cookie, and her faery costume.

Playing in Poser

This is why I spent several days re-downloading everything for Poser. I made a couple of fun renders with Sadie Fae today. I think she is too freaking cute!

My copy of "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel finally arrived the other day and I've been reading it at night. I'm restraining myself not to just gobble up the whole book in one sitting -- hard to do since it's 500+ pages anyway. But I want to savor this. It's beautifully written.