We’ve been getting beeswax in large amounts from a local beekeeper to make the salves, lip balms, and solid perfumes that we offer in our shop. With the extra, we’ve been melting it (can you imagine how heavenly our home smells on those days?), filtering it, and pouring it into molds. We are so excited about this. Want to try your hand at candle making? Or make your own salve? You can now find filtered, pure beeswax in the shop!
We have a small 1 ounce size, which is convenient to measure out for recipes. (Also it’s nice to include in your sewing kit to wax your thread and keep it from knotting up.) Next, we have a 3.5 ounce size with a bee & honeycomb design and then a 4 ounce size with a sunflower design. I think both of those would make lovely gifts. Our most economical size is the 1 pounder, it’s definitely the best deal.
The first time we poured the wax, the fabric we used to filter it was woven too tightly and didn’t let the wax through. So we ended up pouring our first molds unfiltered. We have a limited amount of those in our shop for a discounted price. The next time we poured the wax, we used t-shirt material and it worked great. From now on we’ll be offering filtered beeswax in the shop, so the unfiltered ones currently available will only be there while supplies last. (We currently have 5 small, 4 bees, 4 sunflowers, and 1 large available. The unfiltered has natural bits in it and is still wonderful for all your projects.)
So there you have it, beeswax is now in the shop.
By the way, be sure to come back here Saturday, we’ll be having a giveaway!
Something else on my mind lately:
At a birthday party in the fall, I was talking to a mother I had just met. She asked about what we do and I told her how we make our living: selling our handmade items online and at a local market. She was shocked. She asked me something along the lines of: ‘How do you get by?!’ I answered her honestly. Barely. We just barely get by, that’s how. Making a living as an “artist” can sound so romantic, but I didn’t want to sugar coat it. I want to be honest. It’s incredibly fulfilling and rewarding to be doing something you are passionate about. But it’s also extremely challenging. When you rely on selling buttons, salves, earrings, and such to put food in the mouths of your family…. it takes a lot of faith to say the least. I’ve found it to be incredibly humbling over the years, to make a living this way, when we literally rely on each and every sale we make to get by.
Talking with a market friend at Holiday Market, they had assumed that we had a “day job” and just did market as a hobby or for some money on the side. That’s the way it is for many people at market (but there are also quite a few who support themselves solely from market.) When I told her our family business is entirely how we make our living, she was so surprised. Yes, over the years, Jeff and I have wondered if we were totally nuts. I would not recommend for anyone to quit all their jobs and start a business with absolutely no money to get it started, which is what we did. Jeff started woodworking because we had access to wood for free, it didn’t cost us anything. And that was good, because we didn’t have any money to buy materials of any sort. My mom bought a tool for us and my dad and stepmom bought another tool for us, but other than that we had no money to get our business going. Jeff and I get so many ideas of things we want to make to sell and so often we come up against the one thing standing in our way: money. Oh yeah, that stuff. We need money to buy tools, to buy supplies, to buy things to make things to sell things to support ourselves. No, I wouldn’t recommend diving off a cliff, as we seemingly did (aka quitting your sources of income and starting a business with no money), but I do recommend following your heart and that we certainly did. Yes, we were crazy. And it’s a good darn thing we were because when would we ever have done it otherwise? We must still be crazy. Otherwise we wouldn’t still be doing it. I’ll admit, the stress wears on us sometimes. The stress to get the bills paid without a steady paycheck. We never know how much we’ll make in a month. We pay each bill as we are able to. But obviously what we do has value because we wouldn’t have so passionately stuck with it for so long if it didn’t. Being together as a family is at the top of our values. The fact that Bracken doesn’t have to have a parent that leaves for work everyday, means the world to us. Of course we have to work incredibly hard to make that happen (and spend as little as possible.) And Bracken doesn’t get our full attention all the time, he gets two parents working at home all the time. We don’t take weekends off. We work every single day. And when we’re not working for the business, we’re working to produce more food here so that we can live on less money. (Also for the joy of it, of course, the garden feeds our spirits so much.) Here and there Jeff will tell me how much he misses the feeling of a steady paycheck, the security of it, knowing you can count on it. He had that (a steady paycheck) for most of his life. He worked every job under the sun. But you know what? He never had a job he loved nearly as much as this one. I’m in awe of how hard he works for us, so we can live this way. My dream is to someday earn the money in our family so that he can rest from working so hard for so long. I love to think of him spending his days with Bracken in the garden, peacefully relaxed and no longer worrying about money and paying those pesky bills. When I think how hard it is sometimes, I remember: We chose this path. We chose to live on less money so we could live this way. It was our choice. Every day I want to work. I look forward to it, I enjoy it. It’s not easy. Sometimes we don’t sell a thing and we wonder what we’re doing. But there’s a deep sense of purpose driving us forward. We just keep making things and creating things. Because we can’t stop. Because it’s all we want to do. Making a living doing what you love sounds like a dream and I need to remind myself what an incredible gift it is to be doing just that, even when it’s hard.
Leave a Reply