Thursday, April 8, 2010

Vending in Fayetteville Tennessee

I'm getting set up to vend in Fayetteville, Tennessee at the Southern Weekend of Art event April 16 & 17. I just bought my very first EZ-UP tent - which wasn't too easy to set up after all. Hopefully it will be easier now that I know how to do it. Setting it up in my mom's back lot helped me get an idea of the size of the banner area so we could finally design my sign. I'm really happy with how it turned out. Now I owe her a whole lot more website work

I've heard this event gets a lot of traffic - so I hope it's worth what I spent on the tent plus taking three days off from work. Not to mention my materials and time! I'm trying to get my website more use-able as well. I need to finish making new candles since I signed up as mainly a candle vendor for this event. I finished my Naturals Series and started on my new Coffee Shop series. Candy Shoppe will be next and I need to make a few more of my Luna Rose Originals. I've updated the Candles page of my site to list my current scents from the new series of candles.

I will vend some of my jewelry - especially my dice and potion bottle pendants, and my earrings. The rules for this event require 75% of my display to be my primary craft. Of course I will have my oils available as well.

When I vend at Moondance in May I will have a mainly pagan table. I will start soon on new ritual, sabbat, and deity candles. I will have several rune sets available, prayer beads, oils, and my gemstone jewelry. I hope the weather will be ok to bring out some of my spirit dolls. Is May actually next month? Maybe I should playing less World of Warcraft and doing more crafting!

Thursday, March 25, 2010

New Candles Cooling Now

I've decided to create a series of candles that are 100% natural using soy wax and only essential oils, no fragrance oils and no artificial colors. The first scents available in the Luna Rose Creations Naturals series are: Lavender-Rosemary, Patchouli, Sunshine (a spicy citrus blend), Citrus Mint, Cinnamon, Spice, and Orange Spice. I have glass votive candles cooling now in these scents. Unfortunately it looks like I'm going to have to increase my candle prices. I sat down and figured the per candle cost of materials - not including production time and the overhead costs of my home workspace - just the materials and realized I'm barely making a profit. And that is with the materials I bought recently. I started out buying my wax at hobby stores, which costs way more than my online source. So it looks like I've been selling my previous candles at a loss. It looks like I have to increase my price to at least $4 a votive, if not up to $5... I'll need to calculate how much wax goes into my bigger jelly jars to decide how much they need to be. I really hate having to raise my prices, but I realized I am working with the best prices for my materials I can find.

I plan to re-open my Luna Rose Creations Etsy account to list my candles and my non-ritual perfume oils, as well as any soaps, bath salts and lotions.

Studio Nocturna is all about the art and jewelry creations, and my newest account WebWitch is just for the spiritual ritual tools - ritual candles, runes, pendulums, prayer beads, oils, voodoo dolls, spell kits, etc... I'm doing this to keep my main account from getting too jumbled up to handle.

I will have more candles in the works soon. I have stocked up on 4 oz jelly jars as well. I have a few potential festivals I want to vend at this spring so I'm trying to get ready as much as I can. I want to do more spell bottle pendants and dice jewelry as well. So many ideas and plans... so little time...