Soap, Holidays and Bubble Bars

It has been a while since our last blog and I can only apologise - life got in the way!

It has been a pretty busy time for us here at Bubble Trouble. We will give you a round up of the goings on in this blog post.

We have been on our annual outing to Tenerife, entertained over the Halloween period, had a blog post with the Soap Kitchen UK, featured in a blog by Vivatramp, featured in a local magazine, reached our 500 follower goal on Instagram, been to our first ever fair to sell our soaps, started testing bubble bars and have been making copious amounts of soap! We have been busy but loved every second!

Annual Outing

Every year my mum takes me and my daughter, Maisie, to Tenerife (she lives out there half the year). We go on trips throughout the island and this year she took us to a local market that was crammed with amazing local handcrafted goods - she knows I love this type of thing! Guess what, I found the soaps! I love looking at other people's soap artistry for inspiration and now I am fully immersed into soap making I appreciate the little things, like labelling and how soaps are wrapped. Yes, I know how very boring of me! I am always curious on the size of soaps other soap makers sell and their pricing. The soap I found was quite small quantity and was priced at the equivalent of £4.50. As I stood roasting my flip flops off, I thought that the practicality of having smaller bars for holiday makers is probably ideal, so understood the small bars. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the soap maker (age is catching up with me!) but the scents were absolutely amazing and smelt really fresh. I wish I had got some but my mum was hurrying me along so never got an opportunity to go back to that particular stall. Gutted. We had another few day trips that I will not bore you with but the majority of the holiday was spent in the pool with my little mermaid, Maisie, and eating amazing food. I love the way of life over there, it is so chilled out and relaxed. I wish I could emulate it back home but it never seems to come to fruition. Anyway, I digress, we came back completely revitalised and ready to start on the numerous orders we received whilst away.

Halloween

Well, I just love Halloween! I mean, what is not to love; you get to dress up and eat sweeties! We had a great shindig with friends and family. Everyone put in so much effort, which was fab! Well apart from my son Cameron, who was walking round with a horse head mask and that was his 'dressing up'.

What a laugh I had with him buying this mask though, he would not be parted with it when we first purchased it and he found it most amusing sticking his head out the window whilst we drove home - we got some incredibly funny looks!

Maisie went the whole hog and once I posted this on our Instagram page got a lot of questions as to how this is possible. We do love a brain teaser! What I did do at the party is ensure we had some spooky soaps on display so we had brains by all sinks and a couple with hands sticking out a block of soap. Feedback tells me this was the favourite!

Soap Kitchen UK

Oh this had me grinning from ear to ear for ages, actually every time I talk about it I am like a big Cheshire cat! I was over the moon to write a blog post for the Soap Kitchen UK. It was so much fun and I got to talk about my soaping experience so far; failures and all! It was a great honour for me to do this as most of our supplies come from the Soap Kitchen. Check out their webpage and our blog at www.thesoapkitchen.co.uk.

VivaTramp Blog feature

We also were featured in VivaTramps blog post of her favourite things, which was awesome. She took some amazing pictures of the soap we sent to her and we were ever so much in love with her artistic layout using our soaps. I am a big fan of VivaTramp and her knowledge and love of literature makes for a fantastic read. She has a wicked sense of humour. She is an inspiration and I highly recommend having a read of her blog posts at www.vivatramp.co.uk.

Local Magazine feature

We also got a wee piece in a local publication which made us super happy. It was only a paragraph but it is better than a kick in the teeth.

Instagram

Oh the love on Instragram is unequalled. So many kind and supportive people. We had a target in our heads when we started our business to get 500 followers within a year; we got this target after 4 months which completely blew us away.

To celebrate us reaching 500 followers we had a competition of name the soap sheep. It was a really fun competition and the names put forward were superb. Maisie had the unenviable task of choosing 4 winners. We now have Dave the sheep, Highland Hetty, Snowy the Sheep and Glen McFuzzybottom in our collection. We really enjoyed this giveaway and we look forward to running our next one at the next big milestone of 1000 followers.

Bubble Bars

At first I thought these were a royal pain in the bum to make but as I have persevered they have become kind of enjoyable. I have to say, after my complete failure at making bath bombs I did not hold out much hope for these working but low and behold they do, and they are amazing. Thanks to our trusted testers throughout Scotland we now have perfected the bubble bar. There have been a few tweaks to get it just right but I am actually in love with them and we will be bringing these to you in 2018 (if I don't use them all before I sell them!)

Soap

So much soap in the last few months! We have had lots of big orders in.

The first was for Scottish word soaps. They turned out so much better than I expected! I really enjoyed making these as some of the words I did not realise were Scottish. I know that sounds silly but when you use them every day situations, it is just the norm. For example when my children have an argument with each other and one comes down to tell on the other, you will hear the one being ratted out shout 'stop being a clype!' Or if I want Maisie to go to bed I will say to her 'off to bed, skeddaddle'. I remember my dad saying this to me and he was English so I didn't put this down to Scottish language. Amazing what you learn whilst soap making!

We also made lego soap boxes for stocking fillers. They look and smell amazing but by goodness, what I went through to get the lego ordered in the correct way to fit in box after being shrink wrapped was comical. Not only did I have to deal with my arch nemesis, shrink wrap, but then had to make sure that they fitted in the packaging...expletives galore!

We made a number of new designs for our first fair. Maisie was very much involved in this project and we had a lovely few nights designing and making our soaps. Maisie designed reindeer noses that were green, apparently they were the other reindeers not Rudolph!

Well, these soaps sold like hot cakes on the night with all 10 of them being sold out within 2 hours of setting up the stall! I am sometimes surprised at what sells and what does not.

We also made some Christmas Cinnamon soaps for the fair. Whilst these did not sell out at the fair, the remaining 5 sold within a day of going on our Etsy page which was amazing!

RDK Soaps

One of our earliest followers on Instagram is @donnamjenks. She was just a couple of steps behind us in the soap making journey and has been a fantastic support to us. We are so happy that she has got her safety assessments for her products and is in the process of setting up her business to sell her great wares. We have been lucky enough to receive some of her soaps and they are awesome! We would like to wish her every success with her new venture, because she is not only an amazing soaper but an amazing person too. If you are on Instagram give this lovely lady a follow.

Festive News

Maisie has been busy reporting on the festivities and would like to share with you all her news report. Please have a look and make a wee lass smile. She worked so hard to get this and all she wants is to share the Christmas cheer! If you have kids, let them have a watch! You can access it on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlr6PsRBp9o.

Christmas Time, Mistletoe and Wine...

Finally, we will be shutting up shop for the festive period on 19th December until 3rd January.

We wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. Lang may yer lum reek!

See you in the New Year xxx