I wasn’t going to buy it until I saw it with my own eyes.

Usually when the weatherpeople talk about snow it never comes.

They warned us for a week it was coming.

Yea right.

It came.

Not only did it come but it came in a huge way.

You would think living in Washington state we would get snow on a regular basis….

We don’t.

We get rain.

The snow lasted a week and it snowed every day.
We got around 9″ which is huge here.

I stayed home each and every day and worked my butt off making soap.

It’s disappearing now.

Temperatures, even overnight, are now above freezing.

And….
As Usual….
I’ts raining!

Here are a few pictures of SnowMageddon 2012.

Brodie & Jasper playing in the snow

Backyard with about 8"? of snow

Icicles on The Truck

Our Street

Flower pots

Butterfly bush weighed down by snow

Snow casualty: Rosemary branch broken

Jasper thinking it's just too damn cold out here!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

It’s the end of yet another year…
One that was busier than most…in more ways than one.

We have quite a few new products we are working on for 2012 and are quite excited to bring in many new scents!

We would like to wish everyone and their families a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!!

Our holiday hours are as follows:

Country Meadow will be closed for the Christmas holiday from Friday, December 23, 2011 through Sunday, January 1, 2012.

We will reopen for order processing on Monday, January 2, 2012.

Thank you for reading our blog, following us on Twitter and Facebook and purchasing our products.

It means the world to us as a small business to earn your respect and confidence in our company.

Sincerely,

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Whew…..Just auto-upgraded our blog to the newest version…
Always makes me nervous…
Mostly because if something goes wrong I don’t know how to fix it…
At the moment…
All seems well…

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

But especially my own…

I want to thank all of the husbands out there…especially my own…
For his unwavering, uncomplaining and loyal help this year in helping me peddle our wares at so many venues!!!

We did a record number of shows, festivals and craft bazaars and I can’t begin to tell you just how much work and effort goes into getting ready and setting up for each show.

I couldn’t do it without his help.

Thank you honey for your help this year.

I am happy to say we did our last show yesterday so we can now take a few months off to recuperate and concentrate on restocking product and creating new merchandise.

I plan on a full (of not fuller) show schedule next year!!
(did I just hear a groan?)…..
Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

It has been a couple of years since we have cleaned up our website database so I went ahead and did this today.

All website accounts that have not been active in the last two years have been deleted.

This means if you have not logged in to your account or placed any orders with the last two years the account was deleted.

We do this to keep our database managable and not over burdened with inactive accounts.

So if you try to log in to your account and can’t most likely it’s because it had been inactive.

All you have to do is create a new one!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Shea Body Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

September 1, 2011….
Wow….I feel like fall never left and here it is again!

**Summer here didn’t start until August….about the second week it started getting really nice. Now I see next week we could ver well hit 90 degrees! I’m keeping my fingers crossed our summer continues on through October…While the entire rest of the country sweltered….we grew mold.

**Jasper (6 month old AmStaff) and Brodie (16 month old Amstaff) (cousins) are the best of friends. They are never without each other and even though Jasper is smaller than Brodie he runs the show.

**We had a scare with Brodie. They were playing, Jasper with a stick in his mouth, and Brodie somehow (I wasn’t here but hubs saw it) got stuck pretty hard in the eye with it. So hard he yelped. Afterwards he was having trouble with his eye so we took him to the vet. After staining his eye it was determined he had what looked like a piece of wood in the cornea. Since my vet didn’t feel comfortable messing with his eye she put him on antibiotic eye drops until we could get in to the eye specialst the following day.

Dr. Sullivan with the Animal Eye Clinic in Seattle was very kind in working Brodie in between his other appointments. After a brief look in Brodies eye he said all he had to do was numb the eye (with eye drops) and he could in fact remove the wood debris!

He took Brodie into another room for the procedure and had him back to me in about 5 minutes! Amazing!!!!! Brodie didn’t make a peep with either this vet or our regular vet. He is such a sweet, docile, loving dog he just stood there and let them poke around his eye all the while giving them kisses!

After a week of antibiotic eye drops every 4 hours Brodies eye is just fine. It could have turned out so much worse and in fact had we not started the antibiotic eye drops the day before he very well could have lost his eye due to infection!

My hat off to both Dr. Jones of Lynnwood VCA and Dr. Sullivan of the Eye Clinic!

**Behind…..
I’m running behind. I have a good grip on our fall products but truth be told I should now be working on Christmas soap! We have many, many shows this year along with our web sales and wholesale accounts so I’m trying to guestimate from last years sales how much product to have this year…then double it!

It’s a holiday weekend tomorrow so I will be busting my chops to get a lot done!

**I celebrated a birthday last month. It’s one I was just going to let quietly slip by…kids coming over for bbq dinner and cake..nothing fancy….

However….
My family (and I have a VERY good idea who the driving force was!!!) however decided to do something very different!

They threw me a very suprise birthday party!
Totaly and complete unexpected!

I won’t go into details except to say my husband and adult daughters did a wonderful job in keeping the lid on and getting me there on time.

I want to thank my entire family for the party.
It was fabulous to see everyone together…something we don’t get to do too often.

Oh..and the over-the-hill gifts…
Um yea…
I hate to say it but I actually can use most of them!

Enough for now…..
It’s just barely 8:00 pm and it’s dark already…
I am feverishly working on soap boxes and have hundreds to do…
I will be burning the candle late and keeping our Keurig busy!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

August 1st already…..damn…
I don’t mean to complain but just where the heck does time go???!! It seems like it was just June a few days ago!

Let’s review July:

Weather
As of July 31st summer had not hit yet….Oh we’ve had a fairly warm day or two and if I remember right a total of 78 minutes of summer but most of the time it’s been gray and hovering around 65…while the rest of the entire country is steaming in 95+ degrees!

This week and it looks like next week will be in the mid-70′s hitting 80 over the weekend…
woooooo
‘Bout time!

Business
I have decided instead of revamping the old style labels I’m just going to revamp entire scent lines instead! We are discontinuing half of our product line and am in the process of bringing new scents in. This is a time consuming process as I have to group like minded scents narrowing them down so I can order samples. Then from the samples we move into the testing phase. This all takes time and money but I hope to have at least two new collections up before the end of the year.

We did/are doing a few new festivals this year and are already booked through the end of December.

At the moment we are in production of our fall soap and will soon move into the Christmas/holiday ones.

Puppy
Jasper (Brodies cousin) is now 5 months old and a tank! Him and Brodie are best friends!

We found two new dog venues!
Check out our new link category….Dog Links!

Older
Our oldest granddaughter turned 14!
Wow…talk about making me feel old..

Saying Goodbye
A year and a half ago we had the opportunity to have an Umbrella Cockatoo…we weren’t really looking for one..it just sort of happened. He was a rescue of sorts as the people who had him had NO idea what a large parrots needs were.

Long story short…
The last nine months have been less than kind to me with my work load and other issues. I simply had no time left over for Lemon and was getting increasingly distressed as I couldn’t give him what he needed. Parrots are a social bird and need human contact/interaction.

After discussion with hubs we decided while we would not actively seek a new home for him if the perfect opportunity arose then we would consider rehoming him. There was no way we would just rehome him to anyone.

As luck would have it a few days after that discussion Lemon found a new home. As sad as I was to see him go I am thrilled to have him now on a small farm living in an outside aviary (inside during bad weather) with another Umbrella Cockatoo his own age!

And saving for last…as it’s the hardest…
We had to say goodbye to our beloved 10 yr. old English Bull Terrier, Maggie Mae. That’s all I really want to say about that…

Jasper, American Staffordshire, 4 months

Lemon in his new home with Kramer

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

A handful of years ago I had graphic designer students revamp our packaging. It was 1000 times better than anything I had come up with but it wasn’t 100% exactly what I wanted.

So when we added our Spring, Summer, Pear and Spirit lines this year (Fall and Holiday products last year) I designed the packaging the way I wanted…..and I will say…They Pop! We get TONS of compliments on both the packaging and the soap.

So….I decided to revamp most of the rest of our product labels….

Then last night it hit me…right between the eyes!

I have been making body products going on eleven years now and for most of those years we have offered the very same scents that we have now….

And you know what….
It’s time for some of them to go!!!

So…….

We are not going to be redoing packaging…
We will be revamping some of our collections as well with new and totaly different scents!

This is what I know right at the moment:

Gardeners Collection:
Keeping packaging
Changing scents

Herb Patch:
Packaging – Gone!
Scents – Gone!

Herbal Teas:
Packaging – Will be revamped if we keep this line
Scents – Will be changing if we keep this line

Hint of Asia:
Packaging – Gone!
Scents – Gone!

Island Tropics:
Packaging – Gone!
Scents – Gone with the exception of Plumeria in limited one-of quantities

Simply Soft:
This entire scent line just might be gone

SpaLusion:
Packaging – Questionable
Scents – Will be revamped if we keep this line

The rest of our catagories are keepers.

We have soap on clearance and once these are gone they are gone unless we bring them back for a limited time as a one-of product.

I am excited as we can now add new scents and updated packaging that more reflects our spirit!

All of this will take time as we are now coming into the fall and holiday production zone. We have to now concentrate on producing our Fall Harvest and Seasons Greetings products as well as attending numerous local shows we have line up through the end of the year.

Our website may end up looking a little bare until we start testing and uploading new products so bear with us…
We are working as fast as we can.

The only problem now is…..

What Do We Add????

I’m not hot on foodie type scents so you will NOT be seeing Grandma’s Cupcake or Snickerdoodle soap.

Remember we do things in three’s (three scents per product line).

Anyone have any scents they want to see added to our product line? There are hundreds of scents to choose from and it’s going to take me some time to even pick the first ones to test not to mention grouping them together in three’s!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

Wishing you and your friends and family a very happy and safe 4th of July!!!

I am looking forward to having three days off….
With sunshine no less!!

Happy 4th of July!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com

As you may have noticed I have tweaked the website just a bit!

New:
We no longer have a Beaded Soap category.

We now have a One-Of category-On occassion we have fragrances on hand that we have decided for one reason or another not to incorporate into our regular line. So we will make a limited supply product to use up the fragrance. If a particular product goes over well we will sporadically make more…just not on a regular schedule!

All One-Of soaps will NOT be packaged in our soap boxes but instead will be sold totaly naked (no packaging whatsoever!).

We have deleted a few of the scent lines that were slow sellers. We may at some point add these back in.

We have finally revamped our Umoja collection and no longer use the very expensive fair trade ingredients so we were able to bring the pricing down substantially!

Some pictures are missing and I am at this very moment working on new ones!

I ask that you have patience as I have to fit this in between everything else!

Rebecca
Country Meadow Ltd.
Eco Friendly Shea Butter Spa Products

www.countrymeadowltd.com