I had fun making these and spreading the love for Valentine’s Day. I met with Mazzi Peled of Latika Soap for happy hour early this week and was able to give her one. Â I accidentally spilled some of my pink sugar perfume on it, and she was asking me “What is that smell coming out of your purse!” so I ended up giving her a scented valentine! What a happy accident since she loves the smell. We have similar philosophies about formulating & designing, so I love getting to chat with her.
Another way I choose to spread love is through teaching. Each fall I take on an adult intern at feto soap. They usually are on their way to starting their own bath & body business, but want some help learning techniques and production from an established business.
Last year, Kelly Darby of Lucy Kat Soaps was my fall intern. I taught her how to make soap & bath bombs, and she helped me package my products during the fall of 2013. We worked out an arrangement of both in-studio and take-home tasks (like entering emails into a spreadsheet & some packaging duties) because she lives in N. Round Rock and has two young children at home. She was super-organized about her babysitting schedule, so would let me know a week ahead when her studio or take-home task availability was. She also helped me at shows when she was available!
Unbeknownst to us, we had a couple of interests and people in common, like Taylor from Nothing But a Pigeon, a love for yoga and NPR. When she’s not busy chasing after her little ones, she’s working at a yoga studio part-time (like I did!) while she makes her fabulous party favors.
I had the pleasure of having both of them over for a pre-Valentine’s Day
lunch complete with chocolates and champagne! Since I didn’t want us all getting tipsy, I made a variation of Profanity Salmon for us while we snacked on the goat cheese and noshes Kelly brought over. I was too busy eating them to get a picture!
This past Christmas, my Mister gifted me a Silhouette Cameo. To learn how to use it, I joined the Silhouette Challenge that Lauren Lanker of the Thinking Closet started. Every month you either blog or take a picture of the project you made with the machine that fits the challenge. Here are all my 2014 challenge posts so far:
This month’s Silhouette Challenge is FABRIC! I ordered some heat transfer vinyl in a bunch of colors I’m planning to use from US Cutter and it came super quick! (2 days, wow!) My first project was to customize my director’s chair (bought on amazon) for my beauty company feto soap! The fabric on it was black canvas so I decided to add white to offset the black.
I typed out “feto soap” in the Silhouette Studio software, selected the word and created an offset (the white part is the offset). I reversed everything horizontally, cut out the white section first. Then using a household iron on the cotton/linen setting (no steam) I pre-ironed the fabric for two to three seconds. You pre-iron to prepare the fabric so it can take the transfer and to get any wrinkles out. I ironed the white/offset section for about 4 seconds after eyeballing it in the center. Then I lined up the black heat transfer vinyl centered over the white, and gave each section a firm 15 second press with my body weight. Viola! Now I have a custom director’s chair to bring to shows, like having a mini banner behind my table!
The next time I heat transfer vinyl black material with white, I can just crop out a void in the software where the black is in the white so I don’t have to waste black vinyl and worry about getting it lined up just right!
My next  project for my cosmetics company will be a table runner to use at shows. This is the blank I bought online (still waiting on it) but I have the black vinyl cut out and waiting to be ironed on!  I’ve always wanted one, but custom table runners cost somewhere in the $60 – 80 range (shipped) the last time I checked, so I passed. The blank white table runner cost me around $17 including shipping. I used about $9 of black heat transfer vinyl for the table skirt because I made a few newbie mistakes.  I was using 15″ width vinyl, so I plugged that into the software, and it cut off center since the Cameo can only cut within 12″. Whoops! and then when I went to cut it again, I forgot to flip it horizontally. So I made about $5 in material cutting mistakes, which is not too bad for early projects with a new material/medium. and hey. I’m not going to make those mistakes again!
I found a local supplier for Heat Transfer Vinyl, River City Graphic Supply in Austin, TX, but it’s not for hobbyists. You’ll have to provide your Sales Tax & Use Number when you buy from them. You can also order from them online! It’s wonderful and terrible that they are so nearby! I’m eyeing their Copper from their Siser Electric line for a project, but I feel the need to work with some of the htv I have on hand first. That being said, I did pick up some hot pink flocked heat transfer vinyl from Hobby Lobby today ($2.99 for a little piece 5.5 x 9″) Â just in case I wanted to add hearts to things. You can iron on flocked heat transfer to wood & cork, too! Not just fabric.
My Silhouette Challenge buddies and I are all sharing projects on our blogs today, so peruse the projects below for a wealth of Silhouette inspiration!
Find great gifts for him + luxurious pampering treats for her this Saturday at Opal Divine’s Penn Field! If your not sure which brand of beard products to get him then check out these two brands Beard Czar vs Beardilizer. It’s my first market of the year, so let’s start if off with a BANG! I can’t wait to see you all at the The Austin Flea.
I got my first custom vinyl car decal order from a friend of mine, Manue of Pretty Kiku last week. (even before I had announced that I was starting custom sign business. It was like she knew!) She wasn’t sure what size she wanted, so I sent her some mockups to give her an idea, and had her measure to see how big she would like the decal to be.
I had to make a tiny thank you card to go with it, of course!
This is a great video that shows you how to apply a decal to your car:
We decided to trade for a pair of earrings I had started eyeing at the Blue Genie Art Bazaar. She’s sending me these: Style #4. I love black and gold right now, so they are perfect! I had a hard time choosing between styles #2 and #4 because I’m really into floral motifs, but it’s the one with most gold, so I went for it. My hair is black, so I usually like to wear lighter earrings for some contrast if my hair is not up.
I opted out of having a party this year – we’re in the middle of remodeling (yay, good-bye carpet!) but not quite done yet, so I’m not ready to have a group of people over, so the Mister treated me to a decadent weekend of dinners instead.
We started at Kome on Friday night. The camembert tempura with honey is such a treat! I left my memory card at home, so no pictures. Whoops!
We had driven by but never stopped at the Elizabeth Street Cafe, so we headed there on Saturday night. Highlights for me were the fried spring rolls (so far my favorite in Austin) and the pork bahn mi. I love how they have gingham trays holding the sauces, and their pretty plastic cups were nice too. Someone had also delivered flowers from the local Houston florist delivery.
To end the night we went dancing at Kick Butt Coffee, who hosts the monthly fusion dance where I met my North European could-be sister, Anna.
For Sunday Brunch (my “official” birthday meal) the Mister and I headed to Pappadeaux’s Seafood Kitchen that pretty much held us over for dinner. They sent us home with our cheesecake to go since our meal was so huge! Look at that doggie bag!
I had fun playing with Cami (my Silhouette Cameo) with my friend Crystal on Saturday after my heat transfer vinyl order came in this week. She picked out gold and we downloaded some vectors to cut out from the internet! I’m planning on making a one with the stare of Texas one for myself, either in gold or this awesome shimmer lime green (from the Siser electric line) I picked up the other day! Now I’m wishing I had some HTV in copper. This wish can come true pretty soon if I *really* wanted on Monday morning at 10 am, because I found a local supplier of heat transfer vinyl! (River City Graphics Supply) It’s $16 a yard for the Siser Electric line, ouch! but I wouldn’t use much to make a similar design – this was a little less than a 5×5″ design. I’m all about the metallics these days, so I’m sure it will come in handy.
I showed her how to weed the “stitch” marks in her design on the HTV. I compared weeding to using a seam ripper… especially for this project since we were weeding stitch marks in the design. We used Siser Easyweed Heat Transfer Vinyl. She decided to use her nails instead of the weeding tool and it went by quick! but we played for three hours, so uhm, I’m not sure how quick it went because it was so fun! She did play with my cats when she first stopped by, so that might have been it? Maybe?
We also forgot why she came over… partially to pick up some chairs she had lent me (the iron-on transfers we designed for our shirts were just a little way to say thank you.) So, Crystal, I have your chairs. still. ha! Don’t forget to send me a picture of the shirt you decided to iron it on to!
Hello friends! Every second Monday of the month I will be posting about my Silhouette Challenge Project! January’s theme is organizing, which I have already started on, so I jumped in.
TL;DR version: I now have a Silhouette Cameo & can cut out beautiful vinyl labels to organize my home.
When I first got the itch to label my things around 1997, I started out with a Brother Labeler because it prints laminated labels which is great for things that get touched a lot or things that might get wet. At the time I didn’t own a printer or working home computer, so I wasn’t able to do any home desktop publishing like when I rocked a dot matrix printer back in the day with my Print Shop Plus or whatever it was called.
Eventually I bought a computer and inkjet printer and let’s say in 2003 or so I discovered inkjet label paper in both white and clear. The clear was awesome, because it made it look like your label was printed right on the object you were labeling! I used it on my bulk food canisters with a cool bar code font. Unfortunately the label paper wasn’t water-resistant, so the labels did not hold up over time and streaked when they got wet. Â I printed tons of labels to organize my soap business items on my white label paper. I would cut up half-page shipping labels down to whatever label size I needed or use the whole label depending on the container.
The Ikea bookcase had drawers with the cut to size labels and the buckets with the half page labels.
I accidentally bought many, many boxes of UPS half-sheet label paper from someone on ebay years ago, so I would have to cut off the edge of the paper that said “for UPS use only*”! I should have read twice before I clicked once! I’m still going through that stash with probably less than a dozen pages left. I used it to practice making a “kiss cut” for stickers on my Silhouette. If you have some laying around and are interested in making stickers with here, the settings I use for UPS label paper are: Speed: 8, Thickness: 7, Blade: 1
These were the result of my many cut tests (not the kiss cut!) though I finally got it down to where you peel the stickers right off of the paper instead of these separate ones! *disclaimer: I’m not saying to order UPS label paper from UPS to make stickers… I made a mistake in my ordering, so it’s material that I have on hand that I didn’t mind experimenting with.
Fast forward to 2006 – I bought my first color laser printer and somewhere along the way, I discovered the existence of die-cut label paper that comes in more than Avery brand full or half sheets! Here’s my collection:
My label stock is mostly to label the beauty products I make. The 1.8″ label paper has a wide top & bottom border, so I started using it to label my plastic bins (mostly shoebox size, but some 16 qt and larger) that I use to organize just about everything. I make a lot of different items, so I need to be able to find things relatively quickly. I use a lot of this size for a couple of different items, so I have a bunch of this “waste” label paper around that I keep to label my bins. I like that they stick on really well, but let me remove them (they have regular adhesive on the back of them, not removable.
Because of the projects I want to complete with the help of my Silhouette, I needed to pull out my acrylic paints and sewing kit, so I decided to label those too.  This tackle box holds all my acrylics & brushes. It was originally full of paint, clay, sewing notions & a bunch of other craft treasures Kai gifted to me when he moved to China.
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I tackled the sorting out of my sewing box (a big metal toolbox) the next day and combined the Mister’s, Kai’s and my sewing notions all into my toolbox after sorting everything into baggies. Thread, needles, lace, patches, etc. I was originally just going to label it with the words “sewing kit” but I thought it would be cute to have the keep calm poster on the side. I downloaded the free Keep Calm font and traced an image of a spool of thread in Silhouette Studio instead of a crown at the top.
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I’m also putting the Silhouette to use around the kitchen, of course! Here are a few of the things I have labeled so far:
I made sure to save the file so I can use consistent fonts and sizes for each area of my house or if I need to cut them out again.
Want to Check Out More Silhouette Projects?
My Silhouette Challenge buddies and I are all sharing projects on our blogs today, so peruse the projects below for a wealth of Silhouette inspiration!
I’ve really appreciated the time off I’ve taken after the holiday & Â have been doing lots of personal crafting after having a nice rest. This is a free printable from C.R.A.F.T. made by Vanessa at the Tried & True blog. I’ve “known” Vanessa for probably 10 years now from an online business forum (The Switchboards) and we reconnected on instagram recently.
I wanted to see if my Silhouette Cameo could mimic chalkboard art with the sketch pen feature because I have some ideas for how I want to decorate for Valentine’s, so I traced the printable with a copper metallic pen on black cardstock. I’m happy with how it turned out. I might sketch some smaller versions for my smash book(s). Marshall’s had them on sale for $5.99 yesterday (I’ve seen them for $12 at Target), so I picked up one for myself + one for my biz. I’m collecting bits of paper to put in them and might do a year in review starting from December 2013 and going backwards.
These are just some of the things I’ve been cutting out of with my machine – mostly paper and vinyl that I had on hand.
The Blue Genie Art Bazaar is open Saturday,  Sunday,  Monday, 10 am – 10pm & on Christmas Eve Dec. 24th 10 am-6pm 6226 Middle Fiskville Rd. near Highland Mall. It features over 140 artists such as Nothing But a Pigeon, Poppy & Fern and Curare Sweets!
I have a little something for everyone in my booth! Here’s a smattering of what’s there:
This is the last of my “wo-manned” holiday shows for the year!  The first 20 attendees of the flea will get a goodie bag that contains a gingerbread soap! There will be a raffle to raise funds for SafePlace.
austin flea
sunday, december 15th
at scholz beer garten
(1607 san jacinto) 11am – 5 pm
+ make your own nail polish station*!
*maybe, if I have room! I’ll be an indoor vendor (a 6×6′ spot) & they are still working on the layout!
Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be at Cherrywood Art Fair from 10am – 5pm today at booth #82. My other show, the Violet Crown Arts Festival was cancelled for the weekend, so Cherrywood invited me to exhibit at their fair again this year.
The funds raised through the Cherrywood Art Fair go towards the CHULA League + one of my favorite programs that I had the pleasure to be a part of this year, the Little Artist, Big Artist Program.
Little Artist/Big Artist pairs East Austin students with professional artists to experience the creative process from ideation through commercialization.
Mentored by a Big Artist, the Little Artist creates art, along with a journal of the experience. Little Artist works, along with selected art by the professional artists, are displayed in the spring show. One work by each Little Artist is auctioned at the prestigious Cherrywood Art Fair each year on the second weekend in December.
Houston is my next stop this weekend. I’ll have my beauty products galore + my custom nail polish station setup at the Winter Holiday Art Market alongside many other talented artists.
Then I’ll be setting up at the Blue Genie Art Bazaar after I return & selling at the Austin Renegade Craft Fair at the Palmer events center.
We made lots of soap at the Formula 1 US Grand Prix in the Kiddie Zone Tent. They requested all the toys we had to be racing themed, so some of our soaps ended up looking like this:
On the last day of the races, Pitbull put on a concert right next to my tent!
Did you know you can learn how to make soap completely from scratch in Austin, TX? I will help you get over your fear of working with lye to start your on your path to making beautiful, natural soaps! Sandy scented her custom soap with lemon drop cookie fragrance and topped it with calendula petals! Choose from over 100 fragrance and essential oils that I have in-house in my studio!
Sandy D. took my latest class this week, and this is what she had to say:
“Lisa is a wonderful teacher. Her instructions were clear and she is well-organized. She was very patient with my endless (and sometimes nosy!) questions about the soap making business. Every time I asked a question, it turned out that she had already included the information on the handouts! I had a great time in this class and can’t wait to take another class from Lisa. I can’t stop admiring my very first batch of cold process soap. I would highly recommend Lisa and her classes.”
If you’re interested inlearning to make soap, email me at lisa@fetosoap.com and we can set up a time!
Join us on Saturday at the Austin Flea 11-5pm 1500 Barton Springs where you can shop my seasonal scents: lip balms in gingerbread and chai tea! I’ll also have my make your own nail polish station set up where you can customize the lacquer of your dreams! See the full lineup of artists here!
Come and see me at the Round Rock Market Days located in Downtown Round Rock (just north of Austin) this Saturday! I’ll have my fall scents out like Pumpkin & Pepperberry, and you can also check out my fall colors of nail lacquer. My glow in the dark polishes are especially fun for halloween!Â
On October 17th, I have an upcoming Bath Fizzy Workshop at the Austin Tinkering School where you will get to make and take home 9 bath fizzies you have made from start to finish! You will get to custom scent and color them!
Thank you New York! We made over 400 soaps together! It was great meeting new faces and to see returning faces! One mom told me her child was so excited to make soap again that he wouldn’t stop talking about it from the car ride all the way to my booth! I can’t wait to do it all over again next year! Oh & at the end of the day Jen from NYSCI brought me an Educator’s Choice Award! Squee!!
I’m back home in Austin, TX Â preparing for my upcoming bath & body classes at the Austin Tinkering School. My next class is on Sunday & I’ll be teaching people how to make their own custom nail polish! If there’s something you’re interested in learning that’s not on the schedule, comment here and let me know! If you’re shy, you can email me at lisa@fetosoap.com instead!
 
 
 
