I recently had the chance to try out a few things from Product Body, and I've been ridiculously pampered all week. These are a range of natural scrubs, lotions, bath soaks, bubbles, balms and cleansers that work fantastically and smell divine. I've been using the Crush On You scrub in the shower and it is a miracle, it exfoliates, moisturizes with shea butter and gently cleanses at the same time. I emerge soft and ready go. And, this is nice, it doesn't leave the tub dangerously slippery. I have this in Lemon and it smells exactly like the fresh squeezed lemon aid you get at a fair (you know, the one where they stick the lemon halves right in the cup), it's just the right amount of cheerful I need in the morning. Crush On You is the one that Bust magazine called "quite possibly the greatest exfoliant known to women."



The day I used the Sugarfoot scrub Scott rubbed my feet (he's a very good boyfriend) and commented on how smooth they were. The Ruby Red Grapefruit smelled so fantastic that I went over both of my feet twice. I got the Velvet scrub in Sweet Vanilla Mango and it smells like a fruity beach and offers a wallop of moisturizing oils. I also got to try out the shea butter infused Cream in Lavender and I'm very impressed by the texture and how quickly it soaks in, leaving nothing but soft behind. It smells so good I keep stopping as I type this to open and sniff the jar I have sitting on my desk.

(p.s. The jars in these photographs are half empty because I've been using them copiously.)



Product Body also offers salt and milk bath soaks, solid bubble bath and a gentle wash (Bath & Shower), a whole range of salt or sugar scrubs (Body Scrubs), creams, balms and whipped butters (Moisturizers) and a whole range of natural products for pregnant or new mothers in the Mama Bomb line.



The things from Product Body are very, very good and I know I'm not alone in this since the testimonials page is filled with happy customers. You can feel good ordering from them as it's a small business started and run by a woman, each item is made when it's ordered so it's always fresh, and the ingredients are natural and locally sourced. You can read more about Product Body here.

And know what? Product Body likes you so much they're offering a $75.00 Goodie Box, including a Crush On You and a selection of other products. If you'd like to win please leave a comment with this post, the usual fine print applies and I'll let the Random Number Generator pick the winner on Monday, Sept. 8th at noon PST. This giveaway is only for those living inside the US, sorry everybody else, catch you next time.

In addition to the goodie box Product Body is offering a 20% off coupon, enter notmartha at checkout. There are no minimum orders and you get free shipping over $75, good through the end of September. Yay? Yay!

Good luck!

Our laundry room is cramped and has two doors which access it, so if you leave the hard plastic cheapo laundry basket we used to have sitting on the floor and exit via door #1, somebody coming through door #2 would find the door was blocked by the basket. This made for a bit of unnecessary frustration. I thought all was hopeless until I came across this laundry basket at a Storables. It's tall and holds a lot, but most excellently it is flexible, so not only are you able to grab it by the handles to take it downstairs but it will squeeze out of the way of door #2. Also, you will not bruise your shin if you stumble into it while moving laundry through the very cramped laundry room. Yay.



Seriously though, being able to carry it like a large tote makes it really easy to bring up and down stairs, rendering all other laundry baskets useless to me.

Yesterday Scott and I found ourselves in a Target so new that Google Maps refused to believe that the address existed (so much for the convenience of being able to look up driving directions on the iPhone). While we were looking for the aisle where the doomsday-sized packages of Ivory soap are kept we passed some things marked clearance in the kitchen area. So, we bought a big 2 quart brother for the tiny 1 quart saucepan I bought a while back instead of spending a lot more on a shinypretty All-Clad. I'm giving some serious consideration to the 3 quart saute pan with a lid, something we've been improvising a lot lately by wrapping a splatter screen in tin foil and weighing it down with a plate. An actual lid would be way safer than our current method, don't you think?

So, while the Calphalon Kitchen Essentials aren't quite as sexy as All-Clad I've been pretty darn happy with the one I have. If you need a saucepan I can recommend getting yourself to a Target and seeking out one of these while they are on sale. The 2 quart size is on sale for $28 (instead of $40) and I forget the sale price on the 1 quart size, though I think I bought mine for $17 earlier this year. They are heavy enough to hold heat nicely and clean up easily and, happily, these are dishwasher safe.

Why did it take me so long to finally get myself into Zenith Supplies here in Seattle? It's only a half a block down from the Ravenna Whole Foods, I have missed out on so many opportunities to go and admire tiny lip balm containers.

In short, Zenith Supplies sells all the things you need to make candles, soap, lotions, balms, perfumes, things for your body, the bath and your home. I went in hoping to find some DPG for making my own reed diffuser scents and not only did they have it but they had a recipe, bottles, reeds, perfumers alcohol and a more than impressive selection of essential and fragrance oils. They have candle and soap molds, jars and bottles of all sizes, lotion bases and bulk oils, salts and dried herbs, more waxes and additives than I knew existed. But most thrillingly they had an excellent selection of small jars for lips balms and solid perfume including the elusive clear plastic compact. They had those old fashioned metal sliding tins, little rollerball containers for scents and teeny pipetts, small atomizers and all sorts of packaging supplies. You can buy just one of anything, which sounds awfully good to me, the girl who still has well over 100 pipettes from my lip balm making experiments. The store is large, clean and orderly and the staff was perfectly happy to answer all my inane questions. It is, as I had been warned by Yelp, a little hippy dippy, expect to find crystals and books on healing arts. I see a solid perfume in my future and maybe, maybe, some serious soapmaking.

I have a guest post over at Shelterrific today on buying a sewing machine. This is always a question I dread, I know just enough to give a bit of advice but not enough to feel like I'm not potentially steering somebody towards spending a lot of money on something they don't like, or worse, won't use very often. So, here's to hoping it helps a little.

Oh baby, I've joined the future, or at least the present. Last weekend Scott and I got up early to arrive at an Apple store before it opened in order to get iPhones. Was getting there early entirely neccessary? Not really. At 45 minutes until it opened were we the first ones there? Nope. Did being there early cut down on our wait time? Yes, there was a slightly miserable looking line that had formed by the time we were leaving the store.

This is how we justified the cost of this little luxury: instead of paying a whole lot for cell phone service we barely use, we're paying a whole lot more for mobile devices we'll be using all the time. During the last few months, which I like to think of as our Justification Period, I've been noting all the moments where having an iPhone could solve problems. Small problems, problems like: Are the I-5 Express Lanes open right now? Who was the actress in that movie? How much yarn do I need to buy to make that sweater again? Are we going to talk those eight blocks just to discover Stellar Pizza is closed today? Is this cheaper on Amazon? What was that third thing I needed for the recipe? Why don't we have any music to listen to right now?

This is the advice we were given by friends upon announcing we were getting iPhones:

- After 9 p.m. you can check if your Apple store will have your phone in stock the next day.

- Go to the store earlier in the day to get a voucher. You can either stand in line right away, or come back later in the hopes the line will be shorter. The voucher will assure that they won't sell the last 8 GB iPhone to somebody else. We didn't encounter any mention of vouchers, but when the store opened the group of early customers wasn't quite a mob yet. We heard from other people that in the middle of the day they waited between 45 minutes and an hour.

This is the advice I have after:

- Bring a current cell phone bill with you so you you have immediate access to your account number, at least around here were they can port your current number over to your iPhone right away. I blame our lack of a current cell phone bill on the early hour. They said it might take six hours for our phone numbers to transfer but ours were both working in an hour or so. Apple said that the process would automatically cancel our old service, but we're bracing ourselves for a little confusion in that department.



The iPhone is smaller and more slippery than I thought it would be. We bought crystal film for the 3G to protect the screen, but the store didn't have the PixelSkin in black that I was hoping for so I went home without a skin. At home I found I was terrified of dropping the phone while trying to type into it so we were off to find a skin I liked. I settled on the Incase protective cover because a friend has one and I like how simple it is. I got it in black and find it downright sexy.

The afternoon was spent setting things up, porting contacts over from old SIM cards, installing apps and discovering that it's all as easy as everybody said it would be. I'm so very happy.

Here are the applications I've installed so far, all of these are free:

- WordPress
- Twitterific - makes Twitter on a small screen nicely viewable
- Pandora - since I don't know much about music, or even have a music library of my own, this is perfect. You type in the name of somebody you like, say, Matt Nathanson, and it plays music that other Matt Nathanson fans like. It's so convenient.
- Urbanspoon - You shake your phone and it gives you a random restaurant in your area. You can also see the regular listings, but they're not as fun.

I'm considering using Things - clutter free productivity.

This is also very useful information to have: How to charge your iPhone in the car, update one and update two by Carl Jonard, via A Whole Lotta Nothing.

So, any recommendations for applications I might love? Games? Particularly cool things of any sort?

It's been a week full of new kitchen gadgets. In addition to the scale and scoop, an Amazon gift certificate prompted me to finally (finally) buy the Breville electric kettle I've been wanting. It's so shiny and pretty and such an aestheic improvement over the white plastic one we've been using (which has started to rust and really needs replaced). And I'm sure since the interior of the Breville one is mostly metal it's better for us. It also makes a gentle *ding* sound when the water is boiled, which is good because I'd stopped listening for the old kettle to turn itself off in my early morning sleepy state.

And I love the plug on this thing, I keep unplugging it just because it's so easy to do:

history of the hobble skirt, via kottke

mustache necklace! at Swiss Miss

When I'm old I'm totally getting a big old tricycle like this, at the dirt on fert

Both Mighty Goods and SundryBuzz like shiny sheer lipsticks. These look promising, lipsticks with saturated colors make me look like a clown, or a crazylady.

Love Bottles, safe-for-you glass

CB2 is opening a store in San Francisco, yay, another reason to take a trip there soon

This collection of souvenir photographs is brilliant.

What item do you use all the time and wonder how you ever lived with without it? at Ask Metafilter