The Official Blog of Sailor Mouth Soaps

Hi everyone! Just a quick update today.... It was a beautiful drive on the way to Arrowtown. What we liked most about the town was the walk through the historic Chinese Settlement from the Gold Rush era. It was fascinating to see how small yet sturdy and well built the huts were. Check out the view from Arrowtown Cemetery. This was the oldest part, some of the graves were from the 1800's. Next stop was the Onsen Hot Pools. This lived up to the hype! The ceiling and walls fold up so you can get the fresh mountain air...it was super fresh. When you got too hot, you could add cold water which came down from the roof. It was about 9 degrees and splashed right into the hot pools. It's cold on your head, let me tell you :P Checking out the view... This is Lake Hayes. The wind coming off the lake was almost enough to knock you over and our face was numb after 5 minutes, LOL. A beautiful 3 legged dog came running over after I took this photo with a stic...

Queenstown is AWESOME! Our flight coming in was a little delayed  but that was ok, it gave us more time to catch up with the friend's we're traveling with. The flight was good, the seats weren't that comfy but the landing was smooth, gotta love that. Flying isn't my favorite thing in the world :P Once we landed, we went through the duty free store and holy moley, the booze was cheap! We picked up a 1lt bottle of Gin (Bombay Sapphire) for only $25! Yeeeehar. We later saw it in town for over $75. What a bargain. After we the checked into the hotel, we went for a wander around town. It's so pretty here, everything is beautiful. Lake Wakatipu is stunning, as you can see below. It stays light for so long here, I was able to snap this shot in the very late afternoon. After an insanely long wait to book in ski passes for the next day (their computers were down for almost an hour), we decided a curry was in order.  Luckily there was a tasty Indian place rather close...

My fiance and I are taking our first holiday in years very shortly,  to beautiful New Zealand. Neither of us have skied before and I've never seen snow so I'm really looking forward to it! We've been told skiing is a lot like skating so hopefully we'll pick it up quickly and not break any bones, LOL. I've broken my leg before (roller derby) so I'm not keen on breaking anything ever again :P While I'm out of the country, my online stores will be on vacation mode. This will occur from the 22nd August to the 9th September. It's going to be difficult not to make soap for that long but I'm sure the sights of NZ will keep me occupied. The plan is to keep you all up to date with photos and info about all of the fun stuff we get up to but we'll see, drinking wine by the fire might distract me a little, tehehe.

It's already been a week since the big day, crazy! The day itself went off without a hitch (this year :P). There was a little hicup in the weeks leading up to the event. My supplies went missing in the post! They were 10 days late and needless to say, I was freaking out. I was already running low when I placed an order...they finally arrived 5 days before the event so I was working almost around the clock to get enough stock together.   I guess the silver-lining was that the hand-wringing down time let me focus on the display, print out signs, labels etc. So I guess it wasn't all bad, in hindsight.  Thanks to a kind friend, we had a marquee for the day and boy, was I glad about that! The stall faced East so we had the morning sun and the midday sun was rather burny despite a chilly breeze. Thanks for the marquee Dave! Having my fiance Brad there was a life saver, it got so busy at times that should have had three staff! I don't know how I would have coped...

The car is packed and ready to go for tomorrow's market day at Greazefest, I can't wait! 5,000 plus people are expected through the door, it's going to be a massive day of bands, shopping & other exciting events. I've been working virtually around the clock in preparation for the big day. I'll have soaps galore, lip balms, soy wax melts and solid perfumes to tempt you. Here's a little sneak peak of what will be on offer tomorrow - I took over the spare bedroom downstairs to play with the layout of the display. My op-shop missions had paid off with some fantastic goodies, my favorite being the tiered case you can see in the back. I'll be making a few changes to the layout but I was glad I took the time to do a mock set up, it'll be so early and cold tomorrow; I doubt my brain could come up with anything much without a test run :P See you there <3

Have you heard of Greazefest before? It's pretty much the most exciting thing that happens in Brisbane each August:- GreazeFest is the 'must-do' event for kustom kulture devotees in the Southern Hemisphere. Held in Brisbane, Australia, the GreazeFest is a crankin' weekend of cool cars, rockabilly tunes, vintage bikes, lowrider cycles, low brow art, pinstripers, tattoos and vintage threads. Coming up is the 12th annual installment of this rockin' shindig, so get yourself ready for a huge weekend of fun. Thousands of rockabilly and hot rod fans will be rolling into Rocklea Showground for two hot rockin' nites of live music, followed by one huge day of ultra-kool kustom kulture. It runs from Friday 5th August to Sunday 7th August with heaps of bands (rockabilly, psychobilly & a little country) on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. My favorite day is Sunday aka THE MARKET DAY! With more than 110 market stalls, a not-to-be-missed art ...

Righto, in light of Australia Post's fee increase from today, I'm taking a good hard look at how I ship, what I charge and what (if anything) I can do to improve the situation for my customers. Believe it or not, it's super complicated! I'm been wracking my brain all day long to come up with some solutions. Every time I think I've found an alternative, it ends up only being a measly .30c cheaper or something equally unhelpful. Personally, I'm an avid on-line shopper. I buy everything from clothes to jewellery, home wares to soap (of course, I'm addicted you see :P) and shipping costs are something that has me hovering over the "buy-it-now" button too so I sympathise with my customers completely at your frustration at ever increasing postal costs. Shipping soap isn't as easy as say, a skirt or a pair of earrings. I can't just jam them into a satchel or wrap in bubble-wrap and pop into an envelope. Soap is heavy, easily dented, high ...