To learn the hard way

There are many things along the way that have been learned the hard way. In addition to the financial loss, the mental loss is the biggest of all. It takes a while to pull yourself together and move on. I have taken as a guideline the saying: "If nothing is done, nothing can happen". I think this is a pretty descriptive sentence.

These failures definitely happen to everyone, but no one shouts about them separately on social media or elsewhere. Instagram is filled with rosy and lovely things, but few people post that burnt cake base or ruined painting that a failed character reminds of an alien from outer space. Do you recognize yourself? At least me. Would it hurt my business if someone got a peek behind the scenes?

I have taken it so that failures are part of product development. I try to pose like Elon Musk when he explodes rockets. Hooray, now I know what not to do next time! However, I half succeeded! 

A good example of this would be the lovely wooden hearts I ordered for the candles. Fortunately, I only poured them into the three concrete pots I made, because it turned out that I had probably chosen wooden cores that were too narrow. The wooden core did catch fire, but it didn't split the flame so much that it would have melted the soy wax around it. Now I just have to think about how to get the soy wax out of the concrete pot...

Another example from the early days of soap making.. 

I thought of making wonderful two-layer nettle soaps from the finished soap mass. First, I made a base with white mass and on top of that I was going to add a transparent mass with dried nettle inside. Well.. Everything went well at first. Some of the white mass had time to solidify too much before the top layer, to which nettles had been added. This with the consequence that the parts did not stick to each other. Maybe half succeeded by then.

When I dug my lovely soaps out of the cupboard to pack a couple of weeks later, the dried nettles, which looked wonderfully green, had browned to such an unpleasant brown and scaly appearance. That was the end of the use of dried nettles, they and the soaps went to the Tarastejärvi landfill as soon as possible. A shame, because they would have been lovely.

I learned that in the future I will stick to materials that have been found to be good.

Some things can only be learned the hard way, even if you try to familiarize yourself with the subject in advance. After these failures, you will be much wiser again. 

Have a wonderful and hopefully successful October!