National Candy Month Continued.....

The Monthly contest theme is now ice-cream.  Here are the suggestions made so far, please feel free to add your own.

I did make some more candy to celebrate June (national candy month).  Licorice Allsorts were suggested by Pam.  When I saw Pam's suggestion, I went out hunting for allsorts.  I actually went to 4 different stores trying to locate them.   I did find some great licorice allsorts at a local store called Sprouts.  They were very pretty, and made great models... They behaved very well ; ).      P.S. Pam if you are reading this please email me your address at sweetandsavorytrinkets@yahoo.com

I did want to take a moment to thank you all for joining in my monthly contests.  All of the suggetions have been amazing, and I wish I could make them all.  Candy month was definately a fun theme, and I do hope to make some more of your candy suggestions.  In the mean time,  I wanted to share a little bit of my selection process with you.  because it really affected my decision with what to make for candy month. 

When you all make your suggestions, I start searching through pages of google images for the suggestions.  They inspire me greatly!!  From this point I start deciding If I am going for particular color themes.  Then I will do an Etsy search to see how many of my fellow miniature food artists are making that item.  If there are already fellow shops that have perfected a particular food, I usually wont make that particular item, unless there is great room for variance. Here is a couple of great examples.

This month I found some amazing gummy bears at  Bit O Sugar .  Bit O Sugar is a wonderful shop run by Brad and Lei.  They opened Bit O Sugar in September 2010, the same week I opened Sweet & Savory Trinkets.  Brad and Lei are in Hawaii, and have over 90 very cute items to browse though.  You should read their profile if you get a chance, it made me smile.      
I wanted to share these amazing gummy bears with you.  Brad and Lei have definately perfected these  little guys!

These lollipop earrings were created by Inedible Jewelry .  Jessica and Susan are sisters, and opened Inedible Jewelry on etsy in February, 2007.  They are an amazing team, and make very realistic goodies for you to wear : ).  
This team of sisters actually wrote a book on making miniature foods, called Polymer Clay Cookbook.  I would highly suggest it for those of you that want to make your own minis :) 
When I saw their tiny lollipop earrings, I was amazed at the color and detail.     



For those of you who are new to the blog, and contest, I run a monthly contest, Every month I give a new theme, and take food suggestions that fit in with the theme.   If I make your suggestion for my monthly charm club, or for store inventory, you win!  The prize is a charm of the food item you suggested.

The Contest Rules

1: Try to limit your suggestions to one a day. You can make a suggestion every day... in fact I love seeing as many suggestions as possible.  I just want to make sure that everyone gets a chance to make suggestions.

2:  Take a quick look at the suggestions, to make sure you aren't duplicating a suggestion. 

 July's Theme

July is national ice-cream month!!!  So lets hear your ice-cream suggestions.  I already make ice-cream mochi, and a hot fudge brownie, so those two ideas are excluded everything else is up for grabs. :)  They can be ice-cream itself, to anything with ice-cream or is ice-cream related.  You can start making suggestions for ice-cream month now :)

I decided after the Japan 9.0 that I would make donating to natural disasters a part of my regular business practice.  I have been donating 5% of sales to natural disaster relief. It is donated through global giving on a donation page, so if any of  you are curious to see the progress you have access to it Here.   So far I believe we are at 84.00.  These donations were made for tsunami relief, and more recently tornado and flood victims.  I also plan on giving the the New Zealand quake too.  As natural disasters happen, I will shift where the donations go, but you can always see the information provided in the link above