All Good Things Come To An End - we are closing down

I've been putting this off for a few days, but it can't wait any longer.

I am sad to share with you all that The Blessed Thistle will be closing, after the first of the year. I don't think this will surprise people given the economy, of course. That is one important and unavoidable reason - but there are other, more personal ones as well. Suffice to say that the time is now, and so with a heavy heart, but also one with great clarity, we are closing our (virtual) doors.

I don't believe in saying never, so there is the possibility that you will see us again. I have a lot of faith in the value of these teas - both medicinally and energetically - so if somehow it all comes together in the coming years, I may launch a better and new version of this ol' herbal shoppe.

This blog may or may not continue, I'm not sure yet. I like being able to post about information, both inspirational and provocative, so ...we'll see. Check back and we will have updates about what is going on, most likely after the holidays.

The upside is that this means all teas and balm are on SALE! So jump over to our website and take advantage of your favorite blends, gift bags and tea strainers now available at WHOLESALE cost or even BELOW wholesale! Teas will last for well over a year in cool, dark and dry storage, so stock up! We have limited stock available, no rain checks - when it's gone, it's gone! You will note we have raised our shipping by up to $1.50 in some instances, and this is due to the rise in cost from the USPS to us.

Much love and blessings and
gratitude to all who have supported us over the years,
Be Well and Honey in the Heart,

Kimberely Arana
proprietress

Shoppe News: We have a new batch!

We are happy to share that we have a new batch of Breast Balm curing, and all seems good to go. We need to update our website that the large size is now available again. Yay!

Thanks for your patience, and as always - your support and positivity!

Shoppe News: Breast Balm Batch Gone Awry

I'm frustrated and sad to say that I am currently putting the production of Breast Balm on hold.

Our most recent batch did not cure well, even though we followed our rather precise recipe. As anyone who makes natural products such as salves and balms or lotions knows, sometimes you simply cannot entirely control the outcome. While the ingredients are all the same and from excellent sources or harvests, the consistency is not the usual; and therefore we do not feel this batch represents our usual high-quality product. We want you, our vendors and customers, to have only our best. So until we decide how to proceed, we are setting aside production of the balm.

We'll keep you posted as to when it may - if at all - return. Thanks for your support and encouragement, always good medicine!

Shoppe News: Seasonal Teas, wherefore art thou?

Someone out there, we are sure, is wondering what happened to the Seasonal tea line. We hope in the coming year to pick this up again, but for now that line of teas will be put on hold.

With rising gas prices quickly causing a rise in cost to produce, as well as a lag in sales everywhere, we found that it was difficult to be introducing limited run tea blends. We are a small, 'mom and pop' type business, which basically means we are not able to absorb costs for such a crazy market right now.

The upside of this is that Lilith's Spring Equinox Passion Tea was a huge hit! We've decided that Passion needs to stick around for awhile, so this tea has been moved into a regular blend. That means you can get your delicious Passion Tea even now, as we watch the summertime wane into Autumn. Drink deep and enjoy!

Shoppe News: Breast Balm

Excuses, excuses... we have many. But let's just move on to the important stuff, shall we?

We've been having a lot of hiccups with the production of Breast Balm recently, as some of our customers know. (Apparently, we've also been having a lot of hiccups with blog updates, obviously!)

I'm pretty picky about the ingredients that I use for all our items. And this season I ran into delay after delay trying to get a hold of some good, fresh Dandelion Blossom oil. I prefer to make my oils myself, which means that you need to seek out the flowers at the right time, harvest and process them. For various reasons (you can take your pick - teething baby who decided not to sleep for a month, or not being able to find true Dandelion blossoms in a good, healthy environment far enough off any road areas, or needing to travel to visit ill family during a bumper crop of blossoms, I could go on...), I missed the window a bit ago, so I was sent searching for a good source of fresh oil. When I did think I had found some, it was not very good quality. More delays.

I now believe that I have found it! And so I am hoping to have a fresh new batch out for the pleasure of all this coming week. So, if you have been patiently waiting for your back-ordered Breast Balm (say that five times fast), then you are about to be rewarded! And as always, we thank you for your patronage and your support while we have worked through this.

Be Well - and Spread the Love!

Shoppe News

Well, we are feeling rather embarrassed. We have been seriously slacking off lately.

But let me rephrase this, and hopefully shed some light on the reasons why: I use the term 'we' all the time because in reality, often my dh helps me pull off deliveries (even if it is only by watching our two beautiful daughters), and because without his support I could not make this business happen at all.

But in terms of the day to day grind of getting things done with The Thistle, it comes down to one person -- me. And as much as I love (!) creating the tea blends and designing the labels and creating the verbiage for the labels and keeping inventory and ordering more and more herbs to make the blends with and roasting the vanilla bean and shredding and grinding the roots and folding the boxes and bagging every single bag and printing the labels and applying the labels and dusting the shelves (nod to Rose! lol) and delivering the teas and debating about what to keep, what to phase out (be still my heart! I love all my teas) and don't even get me started on making the Balm! That's a whole other looooong process in itself -- all of this takes time. And time, people, is a precious thing in my world.

Now, I'm not complaining -- I'm whining. I'm kvetching. Because while I'm doing all of this, I'm also raising my two daughters. Let's just say they are a handful! I'm overwhelmed, I admit it. I used to be the Queen of Organization, the Duchess of Get R Done, the Priestess of Right On Time Perfection.

As any mother out there reading this knows, the quickest way to learn what your weak spots are, or how much you need to let go of deeply-inbred Type-A control issues, is to have a child. For me, my Achille's Heel is sleeping. I need a lot, and small children and sleeping well or regular simply do not go together in one sentence. So I have become a rather drawn out experiment in sleep-deprivation and let me tell you, it works! You can watch a person completely unravel if you simply interrupt their sleep on a regular basis (don't try this at home, folks!). This means that it takes me twice as long to accomplish the most mundane tasks. So that's my excuse for slacking.

Before you doze off -- what I'm getting at here is that if it seems that my replies aren't quite fast enough in their turn around, if it seems like my website needs updating, if I'm simply not posting enough on my blog (well, you wouldn't know but my commitment is to post 2x a week, so I'm way behind), it's because I am swimming in tasks to get done on a daily basis. I'm having a hard time getting my dishes done, let alone dispensing the delicious teas & important pithy herbal and uplifting info that we all know and love.

And, tomorrow is my 40th birthday -- I'm thinking that maybe I have finally earned a break.

Drink deep, get out there and love your life!

Shoppe News: New Seasonal Blend Goddess Tea!

Our latest seasonal blend has arrived ~ Lilith's Spring Equinox Passion Tea.

A delicious blend with hibiscus, vanilla bean, malva flowers and more. You can read all about it and place your order here. Enjoy it while you can, because this will only be available until the Summer Solstice!

Sometimes people ask me how I create the teas we have, and I have to say they really are inspired. The Goddess' are my muse, and I let them lead the way:

Usually, I start with a sense of the kind of tea I want to create. For instance, a tea that reflects what seems to be the theme for not only Spring in general, but what I hear people expressing in their day to day lives as well right now:

words like "Growth", "Metamorphosis", "Challenges" and simply "A lot goin' on!" This is no surprise given that it is Spring, and we all feel that cabin-fever tension to get out and spread our wings. But I also have a tendency to look beneath the costume of words, to unbutton the cloak and see what's hiding there.

Underneath the theme in those words, the common thread would be possibilities. And one cannot support what's possible without hope. The final knot tying it all together? Passion. The flower that breaks free from its shell does so, because it has an inherent passion to bloom. Change is not a question, but an inevitability. It does not consider the why's and the how to's, it simply turns towards what supports its passion, and unfolds. That is magic, people!

With this magic in hand, I set out to look into which herbs support this kind of transformation in life. Various flowers and roots, leaves and lichen came into play. From there, I begin to consider where there is a theme medicinally ~ the practical side to magic. Slowly, the true nature of the blend is coming together.

Finally, I begin to make small cups of variations on the blend, to see which flavors best enhance one another. Sometime I already know how some will marry. But this time, for instance, I had never worked with hibiscus so I wasn't certain. I had to play with how much to add, how much to remove, back and forth.

Then suddenly, you take a sip and something sings! I know it is complete.

The next stage ~ although sometimes this comes first ~ is to see which Goddess has an affinity for this blend's properties. Sometimes it has to do with the practical side (as with Skatha) and sometimes it has more to do with the magical (as with Lilith/Lamia). With our Passion Tea, I was really struggling with everything for the tea label (from the name to the copy), and the Goddess I had attempted to choose wasn't complying. Her attributes where correct for the season, but She wasn't fired up about it. I was talking with a friend at Humboldt Herbals, being my animated self about how passionate and wonderful this new blend was. I literally get tingles when I drink it ~ so delicious! It is truly sensual and stimulating. I realized suddenly that I needed to step outside the box, as they say. To stop trying to make a puzzle fit, and let the pieces come together.

Although I realize that many would not associate Lilith, an ancient and somewhat dark Goddess image with the light-heartedness of Spring ~ it was She who landed on my shoulder from that moment on. She refused to budge, and whispered sweetness in my ear about the current season. I'm not one to ignore a Goddess when She lands, and Lilith's Spring Equinox Passion Tea was born.

Our Goddess Teas are a reverent offering, a mirthful dance with Mother Nature and gratitude for the gifts She shares. We hope you enjoy them ~ drink deep, get out and bloom!

Shoppe News: We are up and running!

Thanks to our local computer dude, Dimitri, for getting us back on track!

Our Lady is back and right as rain so far . Orders are no longer being delayed. Thanks to everyone for your patience while we muddled through this. As D said, it is "never a convenient time."

This did highlight for us a few things that have been on the burner for awhile that we hope to address in the coming year: we need a new website, totally updated. We're going to be slowly working towards this in the coming months. There's a learning curve to wrangle with in the new program, but we love a challenge.

And we need to transfer all our labels from our limited graphics program to a better one (I've wanted to do this for years; but it takes time, which I don't have much of!), and also -- my secret dream! -- get them mass produced. Right now, I do everything myself. If I had multiple labels already printed, it would streamline production so much. This sounds like a small thing, however every little item I can streamline means that I have more time to dedicate towards the aspects of the company that I don't want to have to skimp on -- the mindful creation of the tea blends themselves, the personalized effort we put into the packaging, to name only a few.

I would also like to have more and more info here on this blog -- I'd love to see this become a place people share and converse about herbal health, WAHM's, children's herbal health, recipes, small business support for women...what would you like to share? If you are checking in , please feel free to leave comments now and again. We'd love to hear from you!

Hard drives and files, OH MY!

Well, it happened. Our beloved link to the outer world from our nest here in the Redwoods of rural California has been severed: our hard drive crashed this week. At least it is only temporary. At least we have backed up pretty much everything.

But this means that we are currently in a holding pattern while our Lady of the Perpetual Internet is fixed. So if you place an order, please know that we will fulfill it ASAP, however it may be delayed depending on what you order. Currently, we cannot access labels for our teas, so in particular we are limited in teas right now.

This issue is being addressed as we speak, and hope to be up and running at the top of the week, at the end of the week at the latest. We will be checking our emails as much as we can, but it will be intermittent.

Thank you for any good vibes of Happy Computerness you can send!

Press on!
MsThistle

Shoppe News

Whew. Well, the holidays are over. It was a hard season this year, but I made it through. Next year, I am clear that I absolutely must have some elves to help. I can't do this alone anymore. We aren't a big operation, but we are big enough that doing it myself has become a challenge.

Some updates, and a shout out to patrons who have been trying to reach us by phone:

~ From now on I will be posting News here at the blog,
instead of at the website with its own page.

~ Recently, I've had a hard time retrieving and hearing messages from our phone. For instance, I received a text message almost a month after the send date. Not sure why this has happened; I only know that this has resulted in a lot of very delayed brochures being sent out, for which I apologize. We couldn't be here without you, our customers -- but sometimes there are glitches in the program, so to say. My messages the last week have been coming in what seems to be a timely fashion, so hopefully this won't be a problem in the future.

If you are someone who has left a message and not received a brochure yet, please do call
again. Remember to speak slowly and clearly so that I can be sure your address, or call back
number is correct. And as always, thank you for your support!

More later-- press on!
Ms Thistle

Maiden voyage...

Welcome to the Thistle's blog ~ I've been hoping to get this up and running for many months now. Why so long, you ask? I'm a SAHM with two wee ones running around, and that math equals crazy days and sleepless nights! I am going to commit to posting here two times a week, and am crossing my fingers I'll be able to do that. I'm planning (ohhhh, I use that word with great caution!) on Tuesday and Thursdays as my update days...we'll see.

But let's get to the point and why you are probably here: I've wanted a place for a long time where I could share wellness and healing information, how-to's on herb use, spiritual paths, ritual and it's importance in healing --as well as chronicle the journey of running a small, woman-run business, to name only a few of topics you may find here.

Right now, I am in the throes of prepping for the holiday season. I'm trying to be more organized about it this year for once (although, in my defense I was known for being the Queen of Organization in various jobs many years back now, refer back to the two wee ones aforementioned, lol!), which means that I am bagging hundreds of samples of the tea blends to put into many, many boxes of the Sampler's Special (hope these links work, scroll up from Brigid's Flame to see the Sampler's Box... I'm new at blogging!). I love this box, and it is our best seller. But when I had my brilliant idea to create a sample box it didn't occur to me at the time all the labor that would go into it! We bag and label everything by hand, being a small business ~ which means when you pick up a bag of tea from one of our boxes, when you pull that mantra out and are (hopefully) inspired by it, when you drink deep of our delicious tea ~ myself or my volunteer created that entire package, from cutting the mantras out and folding them, to placing the label on each and every bag. I even run a burnisher over each and every label on the boxes to ensure they are on good! I want each and every box to be created, not merely made. And yes, I put just as much mindfulness into each and every single-dingle batch of tea that I make.

So I'm rambling a bit here, but the point is that I care very much about what we do, and have a great passion to try and create something for our customers - you!- that not only tastes good, and serves a health full purpose, but that hopefully evokes passion and joy for you when you partake of it. It is my attempt to 'pay forward' some passion for life and living. Why else are we here?

I've got to get back to it, but I wanted to mention that we have three new blends right now - Maeve' Favor, a delicious mint tea; Dark Mother's Winter Solstice Blessing Tea, which is rich and spicy and only available until Imbolc (Feb2 2008); and finally a pregnancy tonic, after much request: Mari's Mama Tonic. We are really excited about these new blends, and think you will be too. To make room for these, we are sad to say that it was time to discontinue some other blends. Etains' Aide, Grainne's Prize, and Mari's Cup will no longer be available, however I do have a bit of each left, so if you are dismayed then contact us and I can get some to you.

Next post, I'm going to talk about herbal treatments for mastitis, for all you mama's out there.
Green Blessings,
k