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In preparing for the holiday season reader's may want to see one of my oldest, but most informative newsletters. I wrote this last year and it discusses How to Recycle Old Christmas Decorations, what tree to pick, how to care for a real tree and so on. My final newsletter for this year will most likely be a repeat of last years, but cleaned up with other new information. Click here to see Christmas of 2002. On another note, many school teachers and other non-profit groups have been placing large orders at Mabel. If we are aware of the customer status, and what is going on, we will make sure they get extra items to play with. One example is a school in California placed an order for a ton of flavors. After making sure they were legit--we were able to give them some great flavors as extra's that are fine, but no longer being sold by Mabel because maybe the name was too long to even make a label. Like White Chocolate Macadamia Nut. This lucky group got lots of that great flavor. It was just long a name for a flavor to make a clear label, as one example. So basically, if you are ordering for a large group, it is always best to talk with us first via e-mail. Saving
Serious Money on Bath Salts: So many non-profit organizations are
making bath salts to sell as holiday gifts that I get to hear the real
scoop. Many of us know that bath salts are one of the highest profit
items to make for sale. This is only second to the high mark up on
perfume. Leave it to the Girl Scouts, a local troop, to be more than
clever! Apparently a 50 pound bag of water softener salts can be
purchased from Wal-Mart for under $5! These kind of large salts are
designed for water softener units. This one troop decided salt is
still salt, and they are correct. I could not even believe this angle,
so they gave me a 50 pound bag as a gift and I went nuts. I used a
whole pound in my bath to make
Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives Water Based vs Oil Based Fragrance This is
Mabel's first real season dealing with a holiday and it has been a serious challenge.
I am also getting Number one, salt is a natural preservative and you do not need to add any preservatives to salt. This is a common question I have been getting. Vitamin e oil is great, if you want to get fancy and add a few drops of that to your creation. Number two, using petroleum jelly in your lip balm recipe is just flat out gross. More so when people subconsciously eat their lip balm. It is a short lasting moisturizer and I do not even want to think about that man made gunk being digested. Better off to lick a oil well if you want to use Vaseline. (Now I am sure what company would never hire me.) The third major question is people who are trying to start their own kitchen table business and they are confused as to just how many types of fragrances they must have. They see "water based" fragrances on some sites and "oil based" fragrances on many other sites. Some sites offering both. I understand fragrance is usually paramount to any craft making, including candles. When I got started I did not have an unlimited budget to buy all the scents I like, (I still don't) and then double that by having to have oil and water based. Very few crafts call for water based fragrances, so lets start with that. Bath salts, bath bombs, lotions and many other toiletries call for oil based fragrance. Bath bombs for sure because any water based dye or fragrance is going to cause the product to fizz before it can even be shaped into a ball. This can be essential oil (very pricey for candles) or any other fragrance based oil. Some oils, such as Tangerine, offer a natural pale orange color, which may also solve the coloration issue. For now we will discuss oil based fragrances.
Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives This troop
also used the bath salts to make gifts for the school gift exchange.
The one requirement the school Now that you have your salt purchase down to just pennies, I would suggest enhancements such as making bath fizzy salts would go over like nothing else on the market. I do not think you can typically get bath fizzy salts locally, so this makes the gift even more of a real treat. To Make Bath Fizzy Salts To make bath fizzy salts, you would use just 1/4 cup of citric acid along with 1/4 cup of baking soda (both make a fizz when they are mixed together an hit water) to 1 or 2 cups of salts, depending on how much fizz you want. The important thing is that you use no water based oils or dyes. If you do, this creation start will fizzing right away. I would place my salts in a zip lock bag, sprinkle a little oil based fragrance on them and shake the bag very well. I would then add some citric and baking soda and shake again. Color can be achieved by using any oil based color, preferably a natural color such as dried cinnamon. Most oil based colors will stick to the person after a bath. Packaging Salts I like the test tube things here, as they say everything is in the packaging, but people are also using plain brown lunch bags with a twist, Chinese take out containers which are very economical, and anything but a zip lock bag. Our new Bathroom Chemist DVD will be out soon and shows exactly how to make lotions, bath bombs, bath salts and much more. Out of ten topics that by far was the most fun to film and to watch. Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives New "How To" Make a Gift Basket DVD
How to Make a Gift Basket DVD Can now be purchased here for $29.95 and includes detailed instructions on how to make beautiful small as well as large gift baskets, how to make a small basket look full, anchoring items, building the creation upwards, removing prices with ease, how to make a bow, along with pricing your basket, as well as how to make and even save money in doing so. The many concepts and ideas presented in the film are fun and many things you learn can be used in basic gift gifting and other areas of our your day to day life as well. For our 55 Minute DVD and manual please order below.
Coming Soon! The next DVD to be offered is The Bathroom Chemist: How to make Balms, Lotions, Bath Bombs Bath Salts, and more. We expect that to be offered for sale in the next two weeks. Future DVD's on the editing block include How to Make Heavily Scented Candles, Floral Design, Making Melt and Pour Soaps, How to Make Gel Candles, and How to Make Cold/Hot Process Old Fashioned Soap. We expect all video's edited and available by the start of next season 2004, if not sooner. We will be sure to announce them in this newsletter when they are completed. Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives Scents and Flavors of the Season
In our flavor department we just added Margarita, a refreshing lime taste, along with wintergreen, and lemon drops. The aspiring lip balm chemist can consider making "double mint" which would be 1/2 peppermint oil to 1/2 wintergreen or spearmint oil. Experimenting is lots of fun! Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives The Dollar Stretcher Recently I was picked up as a syndicated columnist for one of the largest, if not THE largest, on line newsletters known as The Dollar Stretcher. I submitted an article almost a year ago and forgot all about it. After almost a year, I was picked up, article published and did not even know it until I saw my mail box. That first article alone caused a few thousand e-mails a day to pour in to my mailbox for at least ten days. I never thought it would end. I did call the Dollar Stretcher to thank them. Making lip balm, lotions and other things to save money and provide a family a higher quality product seems new to the Dollar crowd and has caused allot of reborn interest in homemade goods. Mabel also likes the Dollar Stretcher for what they represent and its focus on how to save money in almost every area of our lives. Mabel has a big following and would like to invite our readers to subscribe to this free and great on line newsletter full of ingenious ways to save money and other valuable information on how to make a penny go farther. Click here to see the first article I wrote in the Dollar Stretcher about making your own balm, and click here to look at the free Dollar Stretcher subscription program. Any comments to Gary, the Editor, making it clear you are a Mabel fan would be greatly appreciated. I know we can impress his paper as much as he has impressed our company and I hope to write for them for years to come. Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives Cakes Baked in Mugs to Give as a Gift As a child I just loved my Easy Bake Oven and tested it to its utmost limits. This gift seems to have that appeal and the recipient gets to bake their own ready made treat, without using light bulbs for heat, but a microwave instead! Submitted by a troop leader, here it goes!
Top Be a Mabel Club Member! Craft Supply Store Mabel Archives Did You Know? The Way
To Keep A Healthy Level Of Insanity |
sure it was skin safe and it was. The
only thing I did notice, was the salt crystals were so large, they do not
all melt in one bath and this did cause a broken glass look when I was done
with my bath. I could see where people could cut themselves very
easy. So, it was clear if I use the cheapest salts on the planet, then
I MUST find a way to smash the salt down into smaller pieces. Visions
of driving an SUV over the bag came to mind. Whatever you do, you must
break the large salt rocks down before scenting and selling. Kids love
to smash stuff, so hey, what a perfect project! These clever little
girls also came up with other great ideas that I will discuss in this
newsletter later which is cakes baked in a mug. See "
five more e-mails than normal per day asking all kinds of
questions and I have not had serious time to give people a good answers to
good questions. I have mainly been busy in the shipping department,
and experiencing great learning curves on what carrier to use and so on as
the holiday approaches. We have also been getting tons of fake orders we
never experience in slow times, including huge ones from Nigeria that I had
to pull off the shipping line, phone calls to a from competitor's
warning each other on what people are putting in fake orders, and so many
unexpected distractive issues that I could never even dream. I noticed
some of my competitors who I dearly love and have been around many more
years than Mabel, have closed their sites at the last minute due to
"end of year inventory." That may be a good idea to spare a
company a holiday mess, but I just do not see Mabel has to do that at this
point. One reason I started Mabel is because vendors were
actually out of vanilla fragrance oil one year. I was like, "How
can anyone be out of the most popular fragrance oil there is?" Next year we
will be much better prepared and with any luck I will not have to roll up my
sleeves and deal with just shipping. I have noticed that my writing
has also suffered and I have not written any newsletter in weeks. This
is what I am best at, so here it goes. 
To add to the
confusion, some sites are offering fragrance oils that are "Candle
Only" or "Bath Only." I think it is just another way to
get a customer to feel they have to buy more. Most sites sell
fragrance safe enough for candle and bath. I opt for a great
fragrance oil that is as safe on skin as it is powerful on fragrance throw--if
it were to be used in a candle. It took me years to find a true
quality manufacturer as many sites will claim to be a manufacturer that are
not. I found almost all sites cut their fragrance oils with DEP or
other cheap agents that I consider to be flat out poison. It is hard
to tell at first, a fragrance oil may smell great upon first whiff.
But after it is put into an aroma warmer, only then can the truth be known.
The more a fragrance oil is cut with cheap agents, the faster you get this
totally stinky smell. I have tested these more times than I care to
count, and I feel after all these years we do carry the best un-cut
fragrance oils available on the market. We do not cut any fragrance
oil, period. Our fragrances are so strong many people e-mail me asking
how to "tone it down" because they have small rooms and our
fragrances do over power a small room. I tell them to just add a few
drops instead of the 1/2 ounce they are pouring into an aroma warmer, for
example. One site says to just add water and that will cause allot of
popping and the dish to actually break. I am not sure what Rocket
Scientist is telling people to do that. So that is
the scoop on water based fragrance oils versus oil based. If you plan
to try to re-sell such products, the most popular fragrance oils are:
Vanilla, Lavender, Patchouli, Sandalwood, and Apple. Natural
coloration can be achieved with dill powder (green), nothing (vanilla), or
cinnamon (off white) as just a few examples.
made clear was that the gift must be
homemade. Their professional looking final product caused much a stir
and they were accused of buying the bath salts from a store! Bath
salts are so great to soften hard water as well as skin. These salts
can be found even in the most remote towns for residents who really need
water softener units and do not live in a major city where water is already
treated. 
As we finish up on our new DVD's we
ran a poll to some 10,000 people on the subject of VHS vs. DVD an overwhelming
response to DVD only. It appears VHS only users were not more than 3%
of the survey. Many of our customers live in one red light towns and
even they no longer use VHS or so it seems. As a result our first completed
filming will be offered in DVD format only. Price was also a heavily
debated issue and many people made it clear that $19.95 would be much more
realistic than the $39.95 we felt they were worth. There is nothing
else like our instructional tapes on the market and they do cost quite a bit
to create when aiming for a great production as we sure have achieved. So, as far as
price, we agreed on $29.95 for existing reader's and a much higher price for
non-Mabel reader's who are serious about getting into a certain craft business,
spontaneous and only interested in one focus area. Basically our DVDs
will be offered in platforms such as Amazon at a much higher price.
Subscriber's to Mabel that pay via the old Pay Pal system will get
these
DVD's at no charge. This would be any member prior to November 1,
2003. 
I
couldn't help but notice what scents really worked well over the
Thanksgiving holiday. I actually picked fruits, such as Pear and
McIntosh Apple, instead of the normal scents associated with
fall/winter such as Apple Pie or Autumn Walk. These clear and concise
fruit aromas caused many compliments and interest. I found it very
refreshing and good to keep my head clear.
had found specific and approved web sites that
really are focused on supporting families out there with
loved ones overseas or just coming back. We feel these
sites are safe, but cannot guarantee we know them. And
this is what Mary Kathryn wrote: