http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/11/22/w.....els/#continued

Yay!

So apparently on WoW Insider today sometime, they'll be featuring the Druid Kitten plushes in their World of WarCrafts section. Keep an eye out for them!

I'm still looking for homes for the Night Elf kitten and the Worgen kitten! I want to trade them for another piece of WoW fanart, so if you think you have something fair to offer, let me know!

I'm so proud! The caffeine soap gift basket I donated to help raise money for Child's Play through Desert Bus for Hope sold for $160 today. And the best is yet to come, I've got a plush Tauren lion going up for auction later this week that hopefully will go for even higher. :3

If you're a crafter and going to FC, you should check out the Crafter Meet n' Swap starting up on the FC boards! It's going to be a really cool opportunity to get some unique treasures from other crafters.

I completely stole this whole post from Matrices' journal and I don't feel bad at all. TRY AND STOP ME.

 matrices and I have released our Anthropomorphic Plushie Pattern Free!

This pattern will create a 25-inch plushie with anthropomorphic-style proportions. For now it is a Canine, we plan on releasing OTHER ANIMALS, different tails, legs, shapes, ears, etc later (as time permits). Visit http://www.furaffinity.net/user/northsound for a preview of the pattern pieces!! For full instructions and all pages in one .pdf to download, you will be able to find it here:

ZIP file of the PDF: http://www.matrices.net/NorthSound/.....hropattern.zip

or here
PDF: http://www.matrices.net/NorthSound/.....hropattern.pdf



There is a moderate to advanced skill level required to create this pattern, and it is not intended for beginners. If you have made a fullsuit before you should be able to put one of these guys together!

IMPORTANT We have released the complete pattern for free, so please do not use it to make plushies for profit! This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Thanks everyone! Enjoy this pattern! We want to see you at FC with your plushies! We'd love to do a photoshoot together! Please send a SHOUT to  northsound photos of your plushies made with this pattern as well! We also want to encourage you to innovate and share your own additions to this pattern as well (please refer to the CC License, it is important when using our pattern!).

Have an awesome day, guys!! We'd love to hear your feedback, too! :D

 matrices updated in her journal! http://matrices.livejournal.com/853777.html

These little guys are coming out so well, I can't wait to see what other people make with the pattern.

Want to give our soap as a holiday gift? Use discount code EARLY20 between 11/13-11/20 to save 20% off your order! Avoid the holiday rush!

Just mixed up my first batch of Ruby Dragon tonight and it smells really, really good. It's a blend of melon, peppermint, and lavender. Strange sounding, yes, but very clean, with both sweet and spicy notes. It's like you can smell each component on it's own, but they play together nicely in a very interesting way. Can't wait to add it to the store.

Speaking of which, I added Rich Lime and Pink Grapefruit options to the Fortune Soaps last night, so those are available as additional choices alongside Chai Spice and Cucumber Melon.

Just an idea. Would anyone be interested in custom soap batches? Like, you'd get to pick the color and scent (I have quite a few!). I could produce either my caffeine soap or a decaf soap, buyer's choice, but it would be a small run (1.5-3lbs, or around 5-10 pawprint bars). Might make a very special and unique gift, or something to be a "signature" thing, as in "This is /my/ bar of Con*Tact Caffeine soap, nobody else has these!" No idea on pricing, but I don't think it'd have any reason to be too much more than my standard $5/bar.

Made up some Sandalwood soap over the weekend, it smells divine! Will be getting it up in the store later today. Also have some of the Green Tea soap available in pawprint molds now, and am going to be adding "Manly Man" and "Ladyfriend" gift packs of our most masculine and feminine soaps together, excellent for the holidays.

Don't forget that Lil' Chai Punkins make adorable decorations for Thanksgiving, with a great warm spicy fall scent perfect for guest soaps.

I've got some star shaped molds and will be using my Supermint scent in the stars for a Christmas/New Year's/Winter scent as guest soaps to offer in boxes like my Lil' Chai Punkins.

And you creative people, be creative! If you were to get a fortune cookie written for (or by) a geek, what would it say?

Anyone have any spare DF "sage" fur scraps? Small pieces will work just fine. I can paypal, shipping would be to US 98037.

Oh man you guys,  northsound is going to have the coolest "street art" style surprise art for people at Further Confusion this year. We've started scheming on it tonight, and the end result will be unique little pieces of art for random congoers to take home with them for free! I made the first of 40 already, and can't wait to make more.

At Rainfurrest this year, we gave out plastic "kandi" bracelets. This is WAY better. (and in no way involves caffeine soap, in case you were wondering)

I got the job! I start on Tuesday. I'll be working in a fabric store, I was able to convince them I knew a thing or two about sewing.

Hey guys! Getting ready for the first of several Halloween parties this weekend. I've got Klickitat in a very cute Halloween dress with bats, candycorns, and scary cats on it, a matching apron, and a bandanna that has spiderwebs printed all over it pinned to her head.

Saturday we're not sure what we're doing, but I'm sure we'll be out and about at costume contests.

Sunday is Hallow-Easter! We're going to have  northsound over and paint Hallow-Easter eggs, and make corned beef, and wear bunny ears. And hand out candy to confused children.

Soap wise I made more OMG ZOMBIES last night, as well as some green tea scented pawprint soaps. I'm making Sandalwood Vanilla pawprints probably tomorrow, and I think I'll offer a "Manly Man" gift basket of Sapphire Dragon, Rich Lime, Supermint, and Sandalwood Vanilla, as I think those 4 will be our most popular masculine scents.

And I just got a call back from the fabric store, I've got an interview tomorrow morning! *nervous*

Hey guys! I've been busy chugging along on soaps, got things packed and ready to ship out tonight, and I was thinking - what is it that I could be doing better? Feel free to be honest with me, I really will take this advice to heart and do my best to produce the finest product I can for all of you wonderful people.

So here's your chance to offer Con*Tact Caffeine some feedback.

If you've used our soaps:
Where did you first encounter our soap?
What do you like about Con*Tact as a product?
Would you use our caffeine soap again?
What didn't you like about it, or what could make it better?

If you haven't used our soaps:
Why haven't you used Con*Tact? Was it selection, price, shipping, or a combination of those qualities? (or something else entirely!)

Anything else you'd like to see being offered? More "species specific" items (like the Beary Delight gift pack), or different scents, sizes of soaps, "gift basket" type items, holiday themed soaps, accessories (such as brightly colored scrubby poufs), gift certificates, etc.

First off,  charfox has a very cute kitty with the cutest name ever. Waffles is hospitalized right now with a urinary blockage, a painful condition common in male cats, but dreadfully expensive to treat. Con*Tact Caffeine has a special soap with 100% of sales going directly to Waffles. It is called "Cat Milk," a joke tracing back to silly drawings done for Char's birthday. It's "Oatmeal, Milk, and Honey" scented and is in very cute kitty shapes, and available here. If you've got a moment, check out Char's Livejournal with a little more information, as well as a few other things like some really neat nalgene water bottles with pawprints on them.

We also launched a few other caffeine soaps yesterday!
Chai Spice, available in full sized pawprints, and a gift box of little pumpkin shaped guest soaps.
OMG ZOMBIES, green tea scented awesome for Halloween or just for the zombie fan in your life (or for you!)

In the next 24 hours, we'll be adding a few more caffeine items to the store:
Beary Delight - cast in the (no longer color bleeding)fish bones mold, it's a 6 pack of berries and cream scented soap. 2 each blackberry, strawberry, and sweet cream. Why "Beary Delight"? Bears love fish and berries, so it seemed to work!  murrkurie gets credit for the cute name.
Blackberry in full sized pawprints, as well as a couple Strawberry ones.
Citrus Slices - cast in little guest soap sized "citrus wedge" shaped molds, a 16 pack of 4 each lime, lemon, orange, and pink grapefruit scented soaps.

Just an update to let you know that between making adorable little kitten druids, I'm still plenty busy with soaps.

Tonight I'm making some special Halloween edition Teabones (in little skulls), brewing up Chai Tea pawprints, and also some Oatmeal, Milk, and Honey caffeine soap molded as little sleeping kitties as a fundraiser for a very special kitty named Waffles who's going through some tough vet trouble right now.

Maybe I should livestream while I'm working on soap? Would anyone actually watch that?

If you've never chopped bacon into your macaroni and cheese, you've never lived. About 4 strips for one box of Kraft mac n' cheese seems to be the right ratio - it's super cheap and super easy, my favorite qualities in a meal.

In happier HAPPY HAPPY news, there's going to be a moonkin hatchling pet in Cataclysm.

THIS MAY BE MY HAPPIEST DAY.

You may not know how much I love moonkins, but rest assured, it's A LOT.

So for those of you who have known me for any amount of time, you know that I was widowed 3 years ago. This Wednesday (the 13th) will be the anniversarry. Haven't decided if I should do anything special for the day, or just go through the motions of a regular day without acknowledging it.

Maybe I'll ride a ferry.

Got my interview in for WoW Magazine, hopefully I'll know more about if it's getting published, and if so, when. Also have everything packed up and ready to ship to Desert Bus for Hope, donating a gift basket of caffeine soap and the tan Tauren lion to their charity auction benefiting Child's Play.

Wrapping more soaps tonight, dropping shipping costs on Con*Tact's store, and adding BerryBones to the store as well. Also special edition fall soap is going up as soon as we get more caffeine in (we ran out!), so keep an eye out for Chai this week.

First and foremost, http://www.contactcaffeine.com/ is officially OPEN for internet orders. We've got some great soaps available, and can ship to US and Canada. I've still got a lot of work yet to do, more soaps to make, more scents to create, but this is where we'll start.

Secondly, I've been contacted by World of Warcraft Magazine, they're going to interview me about my WoW related crafts! So there's a lot of really exciting things going on around here and I'm just trying to keep everything in order.

And thirdly, I'm retiring my Klickitat fursuit. She's old and it's time to build a brand new 2.0 version of her. Already in the planning stages with  matrices (she's going to redo Beef Jerky), but we don't have a timeframe set for when the new costumes will be ready.

 brighton and I have just returned from the Far Northern Lands, bringing with us 150lbs of soap base and some yummy new scents!

We got:
-Chai Tea
-Creamsicle (orange/vanilla)
-Sugarmint (a Moroccan mint/spearmint/peppermint)
-Pink Grapefruit (may be blended with my other citrus scents)
-Cucumber/Melon
-Oatmeal/Milk/Honey (I'd like to pair this with some of my fruity scents, or call it Cat Milk)

I finished the labels for the Teabones and Berrybones last night, demolded all of our sample scents from earlier in the week, and cleaned out all of my molds today.

So it looks like there will be STUFF TO BUY in http://www.contactcaffeine.com 's webstore very very soon!

I'm tired! You'd think with so much caffeine exposure, I'd have BOUNDLESS ENERGY FOREVER but alas, maybe I have some kind of mutant tolerance of some sort.

We've got a Facebook pace for Con*Tact Caffeine, available at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?filter=nf#!/pages/ConTact-Caffeine/117027308351711 - as well as a twitter at http://www.twitter.com/contactcaffeine . Our photographer is coming over to discuss how best to shoot the soaps for the website, and after we've got pictures of that, the site will be going live (most likely using BigCartel, we like their interface and prices best for what we're doing at the moment).

I've got some neat new molds coming in from the Far Away Lands of Ebay, so expect some of that stuff coming up soon, as well.

Thank you everyone for your amazing feedback, and most of all, thanks for the interest in our soaps. We love making nice soaps for nice people. :)

Among other things, we're getting Con*Tact Caffeine set up on Twitter. Follow us contactcaffeine for information on what we're doing, the first chances at new promotions, and website information!

I'm going to post my full con report after I've had some sleep, and time to organize my thoughts. I will say that the convention was a wild success for Con*Tact Caffeine, though! We were totally sold out by noon on Saturday, so we're really looking forward to Further Confusion and have some great ideas for more products to offer, as well as changes to our existing products to make them even more fun.

I met SO MANY wonderful new friends, and I won't even attempt to send shout-outs to all of them, because I'll miss somebody and then they'll be sad and think I love them less than the other people. Needless to say, it was really the people that made the con for me this year, rather than the theme, costumes, or money.

There were a few negatives about the convention, such as a Gofur asking us for free merchandise AT OUR TABLE in the Dealer's Den (but alas, we never caught his name), and the conbook being devoid of any recognition for any of the panelists who taught panels over the course of the weekend (In my case, I did 4 seperate panels). Considering the substantial time, money, and space investment many of us put into our panels, to be completely ignored for any sort of note in the conbook, or on the signage for the panel, and still having to pay full membership price to go to the convention, it's left a really bad taste in my mouth for doing any future classes at cons. Which really is a shame, because next year's theme is "Furry Camping" and I had some great "Summer camp" themed projects to teach. Even something as simple as a pretty ribbon to stick on our badges for the weekend would've been better than nothing. We didn't even have a mention anywhere on the website, and that wouldn't have cost them a thing to add.

While the bulk of this post may talk about the negative, rest assured that Rainfurrest 2010 was really the best con I've ever been to as far as the people, the dedication of the (majority) of the staff, the location (my favorite hotel in the world), and the sales. I found myself constantly busy with wonderful fun activities (although I missed panels I wanted to see, due to table-sitting), had a lot of fun showing off our new(ish) costumes, and most importantly, had a good time for the last time out in my Klickitat suit. I've decided to retire the bear, and have plans with  matrices to work with her, and build a 2.0 version of Klickitat, while she is going to finally update Beef Jerky. Despite our best efforts to prolong the lives of our costumes, time and travel really do take a toll on fursuits, and it seems like both of them are reaching the ends of their lives.

We will be getting photos of the 1.5 versions of Brighton and Mome Rath up as soon as possible, it looks like the weather will be agreeable to getting some great pictures of them this week, and my photographer friend has already agreed to coming over and working with us on photos of the soaps for Con*Tact Caffeine's website.

In the meantime, enjoy this video of Brighton with FC's Ninja riding on his shoulders, dangling a giant taco-on-a-fishing-pole in front of him to keep him moving: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEYczpMhlWM (Note: Brighton is a "Cave Dog," not a kangaroo!)