Urban Folk Art in Hillsboro, OR

Oregon customers, mark your calendars! Kate & I are excited to announce that This Charming Candy will make its Oregon craft show debut about six weeks from now. We’re participating in the Hillsboro edition of Urban Folk Art, a national organization that holds shows in a few locations around the U.S.

When: October 7-8-9, 2011

• Friday Oct 7: 5pm – 9pm
• Saturday Oct 8: 10am – 5pm
• Sunday Oct 9: 10am – 4pm

Where: Washington County Fair Complex, Hillsboro, OR

Why: so you can buy candy without no waiting for shipping! And so we can meet you in person – we love chatting with our wonderful customers.

Spoiler alert… Our popular holiday gift, the Greatest Hits collection, will be available at the show! It’ll have a few different flavors compared to last year’s collection – we’ll refresh it with this year’s best sellers.

So, Portland/Hillsboro area friends, do you have any recommendations for restaurants and lodging near the Fair Complex? And we’re curious – have you heard of this show yet, seen any advertisements for it?

This Charming Candy in Slow-Motion

Our beloved photographer Kevin Keeker experimented with the video capability on one of his cameras, and recorded me pouring candy syrup into the lollipop molds. It’s not a true video camera, and so the videos are a little grainy, silent, and for some reason they are in slow-motion. Having no video editing skills of our own, we’ve left them that way. I kind of like the slow-motion anyway.

Here’s ~1 minute of me pouring the syrup for Birthday Cake lollipops – note the candy confetti pieces in the mold cavities:

video filmed by Kevin Keeker

The rest of our videos are posted in our This Charming Candy YouTube channel. If we were to film more kitchen videos in the future, what aspects of candy production would you want to see?

Lolly piles!

One of our favorite ways to “pose” lollipops for photoshoots is to artfully scatter them on a table and take “lolly pile” pictures. Behold!

We tend to favor the “overhead” shots but I also like the side-on shots for a different angle:

Do you prefer one of these styles to the other? What do you like or not like about them?

The Return of Hockey Friday!

Instead of an Eye Candy post this Friday, I wanted to at least briefly resurrect the Hockey Friday series. The NHL recently posted an interesting video about the prototypes of new nets they’re testing in research & development. Dan Craig explains:

Dan Craig explains potential changes to the NHL goal

The first changes he describes are to make the footprint of the goal cage smaller. You might think that any change that involves the words “goal” and “smaller” would be designed to inhibit scoring – not so! The intention is to allow skaters to curve around the back of the goal cage faster, increasing their chances of scoring a wraparound goal! I love counter-intuitive stuff like that.

Some of you know that Kate & I are not only hockey fans, but we have experience working in user research and usability. From that perspective, I’m also intrigued by the changes that are intended to help the referees determine whether to call a goal or not: clear plastic instead of an opaque goal skirt along the bottom pipe and behind the crossbar.

The one thing I can’t figure is the green line painted on the ice. Craig says that if any part of the puck is touching the green line then it should be ruled a goal. How is that any easier to determine than whether the puck has completely crossed the *red* goal line?

HOW SOON DOES THE SEASON BEGIN? WANT HOCKEY NOW!

I mean, um, are you looking forward to the start of the next sports seasons? Hockey, football, college football, basketball etc? What’s your favorite sport to watch? How about to participate in?

Blooper Reel

Despite having three people reviewing the designs for the Adventurer’s Pack lollipop labels, somehow a cute little error got past us all. Luckily it only appears on a few labels:

When I saw this label, my mind immediately went Barry Melonllow (you know, like Barry Manilow – please don’t ask how my mind works). So for fun, and because we are gigantic dorks. he went along for the recent Adventurer’s Pack photoshoot. We took photos of Barry in front of a printed calendar from San Francisco’s famous Castro Theater. I think he’s looking pretty much like a rock star:

photos by Kevin Keeker

The Castro calendar was all we had handy. Where else should we take pictures of Barry on his adventures? Would you be excited or appalled to buy a lollipop that had this blooper on its label?

Good News for the Soy Allergic

On the back of every bag of lollipops from This Charming Candy, we of course print our ingredient lists and disclose allergy information in accordance with guidelines from the FDA and the WSDA. Here’s the back of the Love Triangle lollipops packaging:

photo by Kevin Keeker

We spray our candy funnels and lollipop molds with nonstick spray to help facilitate syrup flow and finished lollipop release, respectively. Until recently, we had been unable to find a nonstick spray that didn’t contain Soy Lecithin, so there was a chance that our lollipops contained traces of soy. Hence the statement, “Contains: Soy” on our labels.

We are thrilled to say we have finally found a nonstick spray that contains no soy and we’ve begun to transition to that product. The Adventurer’s Pack and its flavors by the dozen are the first to be soy-free and to have the soy statement omitted from their packaging:

photo by Kevin Keeker

Of course, for the rest of our products we’ve got lots of labels already printed and they still have “Contains: Soy” printed on them. And we have a small stockpile of cans of the nonstick spray with soy. So we’ll use those up. Eventually those stashes will be depleted at which time we’ll update the rest of the allergy statements accordingly.

Celebration Time will be the only collection that will continue to contain soy, because the candy confetti pieces inside the Birthday Cake lollipops contain it. But the rest of the flavors will be soy-free. Yay!

What foods are you allergic to?