New Clean of Kong Soap & Contest!

After several long months, I’m finally able to share a new geeky soap… Clean of Kong: A Fistful of Bubbles! This Donkey Kong inspired soap has been on my mind since last fall when my dad sent me a link he thought would give me some new soap ideas. It was a list of classic games and how they’ve stood the test of time, and I saw Donkey Kong on the list. I was immediately transported back in time where I was a kid playing Donkey Kong on the Atari at my grandma’s house. The first thing that popped in my mind when I thought of DK and soap was… a barrel! Of course! Barrels are the hallmark of the Donkey Kong game series, and I could picture this beautiful soap in my mind.

Fast forward to the present, and I finally am unveiling the Donkey Kong inspired barrel soap in all its glory. I am really proud! It took me several mold attempts to get it just right, and I’m finally happy with how my vision turned out. When I was trying to decide which scent to use, the only thing that made sense (scents?) was banana. Those of you that know me know that I don’t exactly like bananas. In fact, I loathe  bananas. The taste, the consistency… everything. But considering how much a role bananas play in the Donkey Kong series, it seemed like the best choice, and nothing else seemed like a better fit. I went with a banana coconut fragrance oil, and the final result came together so well that I think you’re really going to love it.

CONTEST TO WIN A FREE BAR OF CLEAN OF KONG GEEKSOAP

With the holiday season being so busy, it feels like it’s been AGES since I’ve given away some FREE soap! Time to remedy that. There are TWO ways to enter:

1. Comment on this blog post and tell me your favorite classic video game of all time.
2. Tweet this message on Twitter:

I am entering to win @geeksoap’s new Donkey Kong soap: Clean of Kong! http://tinyurl.com/4o5y2ft #geek #DKcontest

It’s important that you include the URL and the #DKcontest tag so that I can collect all entries easily. You may enter each method once a day all week; I will choose one winner from both the Twitter entries and the blog comment entries to give away two bars of the Clean of Kong soap. I’ll run the contest for a couple days and see how it goes, closing by week’s end. Contest open to U.S. residents only, sorry!

Tell your friends! RT like crazy! Comment away! Spread the love <3 Good luck :)

And special love & thanks to @CapSteveRogers for his help & inspiration with the final finishing touches of this project <3

Clean of Kong: A Fistful of Bubbles GEEKSOAP Geek Soap

Introducing a new GEEKSOAP original! Clean of Kong: A Fistful of Bubbles!

Donkey Kong is one of the legendary classics in the video game world. Forget Billy Mitchell or Steve Wiebe… now YOU can beat the record high score for cleanliness and go down in history forever as the Clean of Kong!

This fabulous soap is an iconic homage to an arcade classic, based on the token barrels found throughout the entire game series. It was custom designed and created by me, so you can be sure your soap is lovingly handmade and one-of-a-kind!

These unique barrel shaped soaps stand approximately 2.75″ tall and are nearly 3″ across at their widest point, weighing in at a whopping 7 oz each! They smell of plump banana bunches with a hint of sweet coconut, and you’ll love that every bar is made from 100% all natural ingredients. As always, GEEKSOAP bars are also vegan friendly!

This is just one design of many in my GEEKSOAP line. Check out the Soap category for more. My fun soaps are available for purchase at http://www.geeksoap.net

Family Life 2010 Scrapbook Complete

Amongst all of the soap news and designs, you (and I) may have forgotten that I also spend a fair amount of time digital scrapbooking, too! For each of the past 3 years I have created a big, single digital scrapbook that encompasses the entire year in its pages. I’m excited to have finished album #3 this weekend! Family Life 2010 is finally complete. Below are a few example pages, check out the full album on Flickr.

Previous years: Family Life 2009 | Family Life 2008

The Family Life albums are each between 40 and 50 pages of digital scrapbooking goodness, showing off major milestones and events that took place throughout the year. In addition to the Family Life albums, I have also created scrapbooks for other things; my nephew’s first year, my wedding, and other family albums for gifts and in memory sentiments. Not ALL of them are online, but you can find a few other completed albums over on my family Flickr account… such as our Wedding Album, the album I made as a wedding gift for Lucas, and our Christmas 2007 album; my first digital scrapbook ever.

So what on earth do I use to digital scrapbook? For those of you new to my craft blog in the past year or so with the rise of GEEKSOAP fame, you may be wondering. For those of you that have been around for several years, you know how much I am in love with My Memories Suite, the greatest digital scrapbooking software of all time. Literally. As a quick backstory, I learned of My Memories Suite back in 2007; I had moved to Canada and was waiting (patiently) on my immigration status and then finding a job. This meant I was home during the day a lot, and one day in October, I got sucked into an infomercial for this amazing new digital scrapbooking software. I’m normally pretty skeptical of infomercials, but My  Memories Suite looked like the real deal. It just so happened that I had been physically scrapbooking for years prior, and was currently in the middle of scrapbooking my Canadian adventures since moving to the great white north. The problem was that I’d run out of supplies or glue or cute embellishments or paper and just hadn’t gotten around to buying more. I had taken over an entire cabinet of drawers in our basement in Calgary with scraps of papers and various scrapbooking supplies and it was a mess. The idea of digital scrapbooking and using digital products that I could design myself or download from others was intriguing. By the end of the infomercial I had already ordered. The only problem then was that My Memories Suite was new and only available in the U.S. No worries; we were planning to visit my family in Indiana for Christmas. I had My Memories Suite shipped to my parents and patiently awaited for December so that I could get my hands on it.

The rest is history; I fell in love with My Memories Suite at Christmas of 2007 the minute I got my hands on it, and was able to quickly and elegantly scrap our Christmas trip home with family. When we got back to Canada, I got caught up and busy with a teaching job, so MMS took a backseat for a few months. But then I began working on a 2008 Family Life album with the software, determined to leave physical scrapbooking behind from that point forward. The only problem I had was that there wasn’t a lot of info out there on the software; even with the huge wealth of info on the Internet, My Memories Suite was so new of a product that there just wasn’t any good resources out there for it; no tutorials, no tips & tricks, and no additional info on usage. I decided in May of 2008 to write my personal review of the My Memories Suite software after using it for several months, and then I began creating my own My Memories Suite video tutorials on how to get the most out of the software. Over the years, I have made 5 video tutorials for My Memories Suite, which have been recognized by the company itself with great praise. (I even had the president and CEO email me over this past winter holiday as I was putting the finishing touches on a gift album I was making.)

Something interesting to note is how my albums have gotten better over the years. I’ve been using My Memories Suite since December 2007, and every year I use it to scrap my life I get better and better and there’s more and more awesome digital scrapbooking resources out there to use with the software. DigiFree, which I talked about in my review back in 2008, has since moved to Craft Crave, but they are still out there and full of awesome downloadable digital scrapping freebies every day that you can use with My Memories Suite. Not to mention, My Memories Suite itself has designers that create beautiful new kits and templates that you can purchase via the online store. I’ve got a few bookmarked in my wish list until next month when we find out whether we’re having a boy or girl so I can get started working on my baby book.

Speaking of expecting our first child, that’s what’s inspired me lately to get moving on finishing my Family Life 2010 album so that I could begin work on baby stuff. Call it nesting, call it me being organized and/or OCD, but I can’t wait to include the geekling in our Family Life 2011 album and create a separate brag book album for my family to celebrate the birth of our first child. I’ve fallen in love with dinosaurs as a “theme” (boy or girl!) and found some really fantastic scrap kits out there last night that I purchased to use with My Memories Suite. I can’t wait to start working on those layouts!

Interested in My Memories Suite? Read my review and then go and purchase it – due to my affiliation and recognition from the company for my tutorials (and I literally help a handful of people daily via email with MMS questions!), I’ve been given the ability to offer a discount if you are interested in purchasing the software! What are you waiting for? Time to get scrapping!

Hockey Geek Regulation Puck GEEKSOAP Geek Soap

“Oh! The good old hockey game,
Is the best game you can name;
And the best game you can name,
Is the good old hockey game!”

While not the first of its kind, Hockey Geek puck soap was something that I had created privately to give to family and friends this holiday season, and it was met with so much enthusiasm that I’ve decided to make it available to the general public for a limited run. Get yours while hockey season lasts!

Soap has official hockey puck regulation dimensions and weighs approximately 4.2oz. Vegan friendly and made from 100% all natural ingredients! Scented with a subtle yet rugged scent that reminds me of the crisp air in the Canadian Rockies.

Available at geeksoap.net during hockey season!

Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays, readers!

It’s been so busy around here at The Pink Toque the last few months! If you recall, back in October I officially opened a second storefront for my crochet wares – specifically, my crochet Cthulhu accessories. Since then, it seemed the holidays snuck up on me, and I was busy working my tail off with GEEKSOAP Christmas orders and cranking out as many crochet Cthulhu toques and scarves as my fingers could handle in between soap pours. The result? GEEKSOAP and The Pink Toque as a whole had an ASTRONOMICALLY successful holiday sales season! I was literally working two full time jobs the last two months in preparation for Christmas; my normal teaching job by day, and then soap and crochet queen by night. There were nights I worked around the clock to keep up with orders and do my best to get everything out ASAP. A HUGE thank you to all of my customers and supporters; I’ve received nothing but praise and super awesome emails from you all as you received your orders and/or as your recipients received the geeky gifts that you purchased for them from one of my stores. It’s made my holiday very special indeed, and all of your love has really warmed my heart. <3

The stores both “closed” on December 21 and will re-open on January 3; I’m finally taking a well deserved break and recuperating from the madness of the holiday rush so that I can restock all of my supplies and products for both stores.  I’m also using this break to focus on creating some new geeky soap designs that I think you’ll like a lot when I release them in early January. :) Thank you so much for making this season so amazingly successful!

On a personal note, you may have heard that my husband and I are expecting our first child in June. We could not be happier to finally be starting a family! Thanks for all of the well wishes we’ve received since we made our announcement public on December 1; this is going to be one geeky baby! We’re expecting the geekling to arrive sometime at the end of June and you can keep up with all of the baby details over on our personal blog. We’ve also put together a baby page on our personal site that we can update along the way to keep our friends and family in the loop with info. We’re really looking forward to the adventure of becoming parents for the first time!

So that’s it around here! So much good stuff on both my small business(es) and personal fronts that I can’t help but be thankful for all of the people who have supported me along the way. I am truly blessed! *love* Look for some new goodies coming to GEEKSOAP in January and thanks for all of your holiday orders. Hope you and yours had an a wonderful Christmas full of awesome and win. Happy New Year!

A New Storefront for The Pink Toque!

I have some exciting news for The Pink Toque! A lot of you know that I’ve been around blogging about my crafty endeavors for over four years now. In fact, it was four years ago this month that I opened my Etsy store and started selling purses, bags and custom plush. When I designed The Cthulhu Toque and its companions the Baby Cthulhu Toque and the Sockthulhu plush, they were sold in the Etsy store, too. Last fall and winter were the first BIG seasons for my Cthulhu crochet creations; though I had designed the toque before then, it didn’t take off until the seasonally cool weather set in. Now that we’re starting to experience some cooler temperatures and we’ve officially said goodbye to summer this year, I’ve been getting requests again to have the Cthulhu Toque available, and I’ve also seen an increase in its pattern sales on Ravelry this past month. I’d been playing with some new Cthulhu crochet designs recently, and so this year I decided to create a new storefront just for my geeky fiber arts creations and release some new accessories there, too!

Introducing… The Pink Toque shop! No longer am I using Etsy to sell any of my stuff. The new shop is in addition to my GEEKSOAP storefront at geeksoap.net – most of you already know that GEEKSOAP is just one storefront of mine that’s strictly my line of original handmade geeky soap, and the Cthulhu Bath Mitt since that logically goes with soap. However, The Pink Toque shop is a new and separate storefront hosted on BigCartel instead of Etsy, and there you’ll find my Cthulhu Toque, the Baby Cthulhu Toque, and some new and exciting crochet designs of mine… such as the Scarfthulhu Cthulhu Scarf and coming soon… Cthulhu Mittens!

Wait, a Scarfthulhu Cthulhu Scarf?! Yes, that’s what I said. Isn’t it awesome? Both ends of this 63″ (over 5 ft!) original scarf feature 100% handmade tentacled Cthulhu goodness that will keep even your soul warm and protected from the elements. Or maybe it squeezes your soul right out of you; I forget. Either way, you can’t deny how cool it will make you look in the cool weather. And paired with the Cthulhu Toque? How can you go wrong?!

So now there are two places you can go to get your hands on some original creations of mine – geeksoap.net for soapy goodness and shop.thepinktoque.com for all of my geeky fiber designs. I think you’ll love the addition of the Scarfthulhu to kick off the additional store with something new, and the mittens will be fun, too! I’m still working out a few kinks with their design, but hope to have them up in the next month or so. That means you’ll soon be able to own an evil yet full and fashionable set of Cthulhu accessories to keep you warm this winter!

Want to keep up with me on Twitter? – @ThePinkToque and @geeksoap
Fan The Pink Toque and GEEKSOAP on Facebook! http://www.facebook.com/ThePinkToque

Thanks for spreading the love :) Speaking of spreading the love… did you notice the adorable crochet Cthulhu doll that’s wrapped up in my Scarfthulhu? His name is Oscar, and he’s a creation made by Ruth of CthulhuChick.com. You can snag a Cthulhu doll of your very own in her shop! Oscar has attended two cons with me – Gen Con and Dragon Con – and he always loves a good adventure. At home he has a special place in my soap studio, watching over me as I work. When he’s not keeping an eye on soap, he’s causing mischief all over The Pink Toque shop, so be sure to look for him in the store when you’re there. :)

Remember to look for my creations in two places now! My handmade, vegan friendly geeky soap designs are still at geeksoap.net, and now you can find my original, wearable crochet Cthulhu accessories available at shop.thepinktoque.com. Hope you enjoy!

Scarfthulhu Cthulhu Scarf

Introducing the Scarfthulhu Cthulhu Scarf – the perfect complement to my Cthulhu Toque! This is a truly evil, yet fashionable statement in keeping warm this season.

The Scarfthulhu Cthulhu Scarf is another original Cthulhu pattern design of mine. Made from soft worsted weight acrylic yarn, this scarf is 100% handmade and features Cthulhu tentacles and sewn on buttons for eyes. Due to the button eyes, this product is not recommended for children. Approximately 63″ (over 5ft!) of awesome. Available for purchase at The Pink Toque shop!

Love the plush Cthulhu you see pictured wrapped in the scarf? He’s a creation by Ruth of CthulhuChick.com. Be sure to go and grab one of your very own, and let her know that Lesley sent you!

Washing instructions: Your Cthulhu scarf is machine washable on a gentle cycle, however, I recommend handwashing with lukewarm water and laying it flat to dry.

Goes well with my Cthulhu soap and Baththulhu Cthulhu Bath Mitt over at geeksoap.net, too! :)

FPS / TPS Gamer GEEKSOAP Geek Soap

By fan request… first/third person shooter gamer soap! Featuring Halo and Gears of War; perfect for that boost you need after an all night gaming session!

GEEKSOAP is handmade from vegan friendly, hypoallergenic ingredients and comes generously scented with Boom Headshot! to ensure an invigorating clean that’ll leave you feeling confident and ready to pull another all-nighter with your console.

Size: 5oz bar with the dimensions of 3″x3″x1.25″ (Gears of War) or 3.5″ x 1.25″ (Halo)

This is just one design of many in my GEEKSOAP line. Check out the Soap category for more. My fun soaps are available for purchase at http://www.geeksoap.net

GEEKSOAP is geek soap for the internet. Soap for geeks; just pure geeky soap!

How to GROW Your Dragon GEEKSOAP Geek Soap

You already know how to train your dragon, but do you know how to acquire a dragon in the first place? GEEKSOAP has the answer: GROW ONE! For those who need their own dragon to train, this unique GEEKSOAP bar provides you with endless fun and allows you to grow your very own pet dragon right at home!

This original soap includes one random dragon toy embedded deep within a round soap egg. Simply use the soap to hatch your baby dragon! Once hatched, put your new pet dragon in water and watch it grow up to 600% its size! Makes for a fun, educational bathtime or anytime toy. Bring your dragon to life just by adding water!

These bars weigh a little over 5oz and have the dimensions of 3″x3″x1.25″.

GEEKSOAP is handmade from a combination of all natural & vegan friendly, hypoallergenic ingredients. How to GROW Your Dragon GEEKSOAP is scented with the gentle, soothing scent of lavender, which makes it the perfect just-before-bed bathtime soap for kids and a great unwind scent for parents! These soaps come wrapped to seal in freshness and allow you to keep them on display until use. GEEKSOAP is vegan friendly. Let me surprise you with a random dragon color or chose your own adventure!

How to GROW Your Dragon GEEKSOAP is soap that’s fun to use, and provides BONUS fun long after it’s finished. You will be able to continually re-grow your dragon pet over and over again! Intructions included with every bar of soap to ensure you get the most out of your new dragon pet.

Dragon toys are safe and non-toxic, but warning: since this small toy can pose as a choking hazard, this soap isnot suitable for children under 3 without supervision.

This is just one design of many in my GEEKSOAP line. Check out the Soap category for more. My fun soaps are available for purchase at http://www.geeksoap.net

GEEKSOAP is geek soap for the internet. Soap for geeks; just pure geeky soap!

Ninja Turtle GEEKSOAP Geek Soap

Cowabunga, dude! You know you can’t resist these awesome little guest soaps, ninja turtle style! They’re seriously adorable amiright?!

Each cute little turtle weighs just over 2 ounces, for a combined 8+ ounces of good, clean crime fighting fun for your guest bathroom sink. They are also perfect to use as travel soap!

As usual, these bars are made from 100% all natural ingredients and are completely vegan friendly, as you’ve come to expect from GEEKSOAP. They are scented with a refreshing coconut lime fragrance (Which is better than my original idea of pizza or sewer scented soap… not exactly the smells you’re looking for fresh out of the shower, lol) and come wrapped to seal in freshness and allow you to keep the soap on display until you’re ready to use it.

The mold was custom designed and created by me so you can be sure that your soap is lovingly handmade and 100% one-of-a-kind. You won’t find soap like it anywhere else!

This is just one design of many in my GEEKSOAP line. Check out the Soap category for more. My fun soaps are available for purchase at http://www.geeksoap.net

GEEKSOAP is geek soap for the internet. Soap for geeks; just pure geeky soap!