{"id":661,"date":"2010-04-20T23:10:04","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T05:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/?p=661"},"modified":"2012-01-31T22:16:27","modified_gmt":"2012-02-01T04:16:27","slug":"shea-butter-or-the-extent-of-my-crazy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/20\/shea-butter-or-the-extent-of-my-crazy\/","title":{"rendered":"Shea Butter–Or, the Extent of My Crazy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last summer, I went to Central Market, a fabulous Austin institution.\u00a0 When I was there, I saw tiny little round tins of pure shea butter being sold for $4.95.\u00a0 We are talking 1\/4 ounce tins.\u00a0 Highway robbery, I thought to myself.<\/p>\n

Around that time I learned about this website called From Nature with Love, a wholesaler for quality beauty ingredients.\u00a0 So at some point in the following months, I decided that instead of giving out bookmarks, I would have a promo product that I<\/em> would be\u00a0 interested in receiving.\u00a0 I would offer the public little tins of pure shea butter–which otherwise cost $4.95–with the cover of my new book on it.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to March.\u00a0 Well, if I was going to have little tins of shea butter to give away at RT, I’d best get started.\u00a0 I ordered a gallon of organic shea butter, five hundred 1\/4 oz slide top tins, and a box of high-gloss labels just the right size to go on top of those little tins.<\/p>\n

And I got to work.<\/p>\n

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Here’s that one gallon container of organic shea butter.<\/p>\n

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With sterilized craft sticks, I filled the slide top tins.<\/p>\n

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Those went into the oven and came out clear and beautiful.<\/p>\n

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Then cooled.<\/p>\n

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Of course I have labels ready for them.\u00a0 The top:<\/p>\n

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The bottom:<\/p>\n

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And here are some finished products.<\/p>\n

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If you click on the image to look at the larger picture, you’ll see that the tins are in little plastic sleeves.\u00a0 That was because when I was telling my friend my idea, she asked if I had any means to show that the product hadn’t been tampered with.\u00a0 So I bought shrink wraps for them!\u00a0 And I loved shrink wrapping, which basically involved me pointing my hair dryer at a tin in a plastic sleeve and presto, the plastic shrinks and wraps.\u00a0 It even comes with a perforated strip for easy opening.\u00a0 I’m telling you, these little tins are unbelievably cute.<\/p>\n

And then, toward the end, I ran out of shrink wraps for a while.\u00a0 So I looked at the couple dozen or so tins that are left, and I suddenly realized, wait a minute.\u00a0 Of course I was being selfish.\u00a0 So I asked Meredith for a high-res image of the cover of her upcoming release–in one week!–and made some more labels.<\/p>\n

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(The label is off center for a reason.\u00a0 Properly centered, the E gets cut off by my printer.)<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, the lovely deep purple did not get rendered very well.\u00a0 But still, I think these are pretty sweet, non?<\/p>\n

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Now that’s a collector’s item, if I’ve ever seen one, as there are only 36 of them in existence<\/p>\n

So, you are shaking your head in disbelief.\u00a0\u00a0 I know what you mean.\u00a0 500 of them!\u00a0 I look back and shake my head too.\u00a0 What was I thinking?\u00a0 I’m surprised His Hawtness didn’t tell me I’d lost my marbles.\u00a0 Instead, awesome dude that he is, he rolled up his sleeves and helped.\u00a0 At one point, all the three men in the house were working on it–without me asking.<\/p>\n

But yes, even so, there were some long hours when it was just me against the work.\u00a0 Thank goodness I’d found The Movie Preview Critic, who deconstructs previews, and sometimes entire movies–in audio.\u00a0 So while I was filling tins or wielding my hair dryer–which saw more action in the past couple of weeks than it had in the 15 preceding years–I was also going to a story and character workshop.<\/p>\n

So it wasn’t too bad.\u00a0 And it could have been a lot worse.\u00a0 I could have done 1000 of them, like I originally envisioned!\u00a0 o_O<\/p>\n

And thus ends this account of my crazy, which strikes rarely, but boy does it strike hard.\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Also, if you are going to RT, keep your eyes peeled.\u00a0 I hear my publisher will be drop-shipping about 100 copies of HIS AT NIGHT directly from the printer, almost a month ahead of the street date.
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Last summer, I went to Central Market, a fabulous Austin institution.\u00a0 When I was there, I saw tiny little round tins of pure shea butter being sold for $4.95.\u00a0 We are talking 1\/4 ounce tins.\u00a0 Highway robbery, I thought to myself. Around that time I learned about this website called From Nature with Love, a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[73,66],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}