Pictures of the process!

[synecdochic]

Everything's been bagged up now. Tomorrow we bubblewrap, print postage, and bag up the envelopes, and they go to the post office on Monday.

I won't spoil the extras, since I know how much fun it is to open a package and find stuff you didn't expect, but thanks to a bunch of eBay shopping I was able to really rock the extras this time! (This is why I ask you for your GC wishlists...) For people who were in the Gaiman circle, I was able to portion out the prototype decants elisem sent to me so that I got five sniffies out of each decant, which means everyone has at least three or four (and sometimes more) prototype sniffies with at least enough oil in them for two or three skin tests.

In-US people who were in both the Gaiman and Metamorphosis circles, and who paid shipping for both, have had PayPal partial refunds issued for one of the two. Outside-US people, I will refund you when I figure out how much the actual shipping costs are. (I won't count the freebies in the shipping costs; those are my treat.)

Finally, I thought people might enjoy seeing the process, so I took some pics while I was decanting yesterday. (I didn't wind up doing any pics today during the divvying-up portion, alas.)

Look at that fucker taunting me! It's so full of awesomeness that the box could not contain it. (I was a bit worried, looking at that staved-in side, but fortunately the contents were bubblewrapped well enough.)

Yup, once I got rid of the layer of packing peanuts, that box sure is full of awesomeness. I love how neatly they manage to package the frimps and the strips of bottles. I'm getting good at packing imps, finally, but I haven't gotten the hang of the bottles yet.

Unpacking all these took forever. No, really, for-fucking-ever, especially since I was trying not to tear the bubble wrap so we could re-use it. There wound up being something like ten different strips of bottles.

After unwrapping each of the strips of bottles, I labelled the tops of them and arranged them in order. Yes, the stickers are color-coded: red for Metamorphosis, green for Lunacy and American Gods, yellow for Coraline and Graveyard Book. (Graveyard Book was going to be blue but I realized partway through that I'd accidentally used yellow for like three different Graveyard Book scents, and I didn't want to redo them.)

Decanting decanting decanting, la la la la la. I started the actual benchwork of decanting around 2PM and didn't finish until around 11PM, although I did take a few breaks; it's not like I was decanting completely nonstop. I watched a lot of Hell's Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares during the process to keep me occupied. This is partway through one of the scents, Southern Cloudywing: if you look carefully you can see that 15 of the imp vials are filled. Usually what I do is fill all the wells in the block with vials, then just keep shuffling them around so I have the vials I'll need for the scent I'm decanting set apart from the others.

The aluminum foil is down because I didn't want to spill on the dining room table and have the table smell like whatever I spilled forever and ever. Usually I'm doing this on the craft table upstairs, which can take all kinds of a beating, but while all this was going on, we were having most of the windows in the house replaced, and I was banished to the dining room instead. I really hope the crew didn't think I was making drugs or something.

I used up the last of my smaller orders of vials on this round (which is why some of the imps will have the pen-clip caps and some don't: after the first order I decided I didn't like the clips on the caps, but I still had a bunch of the ones with clips hanging around). That meant breaking into the flat of vials I'd ordered from Pilot Vials, figuring "okay, clearly I'm going to keep doing this, so I might as well get the big one". That's 2030 vials in that honeycomb. It was a lot of fun to open it.

Lining up bags. These are the bags of already-decanted scents; you can see it's before they got labelled. (I woke up this morning to find that the labeling fairies had arrived while I was sleeping. Sarah really likes doing that part, thankfully.)

All done! Those stacks are Lunacy/Metamorphosis, American Gods/Coraline/Graveyard Book, the Gaiman protos, and the strip of frimps that I still hadn't opened at that point.

The detritus of decanting. I wound up using about four dozen pipettes or so, all told. It was a very bizarre smelling trash bag by the end.

I'm glad I bit the bullet and bought a giant box of like 500 pipettes; I would have felt really guilty having Sarah bring more from work.

Okay, I lied about not taking photos today. This is from when we were packing up the baggies for each order; the papers there are the printed invoices being used for packing slips. The stack Ginny is lying on is where they were supposed to go once the order had been packed. This photo is yet more proof of why the phrase "helpful like a cat" has never been a common idiom in any language ever in the history of recorded time.

Comments

[niqaeli]

"helpful like a cat" is totally a useful idiom! It expresses a complete and deliberate lack of helpfulness!

Also, it's really cool to see all the photos of the process. :D

[synecdochic]

Heh, yeah, we wind up yelling "HELPFUL LIKE A CAT, GINNY. HELPFUL LIKE A CAT" a lot. (The other way of getting that concept across: 'helpy' vs 'helpful'.)

[niqaeli]

ooooh yes helpy totally expresses that distinction quite nicely.

i have two orange helpy kitties. they are the helpiest when it comes to crafts any kind.

[synecdochic]

Ginny is being helpy right now, in fact! I've just removed her from under my monitor.

[azurelunatic]

"Helpful like a ferret (in a bowl full of packing peanuts)" is similar, but a little less deliberate.

[sine_nomine]

Wow. That's massively remarkable. Your service is very much appreciated!!!

And it looks like my dinged box is typical of BPAL but that the way it was packaged was not... I had a whole bunch of loose imps essentially dropped into some bubble wrap... no tape, no tight to the bottles, nothing.

And no packing slip, which I thought was really odd.

Not sure about the ordering direct thing anyway... between you and a friend who lives like 4 blocks away and has offered to me the opportunity to go rummaging through his HUGE imp collection (a friend of G's, who learned from her that I'm starting to enjoy BPAL), I really dont see the point of going to the actual crack maker list of way too much temptation!

(I've also been surprised to learn that I have like zero clue about what scents I like; an alarming percentage of what I smell gets packaged off to G as soon as I smell it in the bottle... yes, I know it can change with body chemistry but I don't have the patience or inclination... did that with one "I dunno.... maybe??" and smelled like furniture polish until I scrubbed it off (and it was still alarmingly tenancious)... thankfully she adores a couple -- including Golden Priapus, which I found myself smelling on her and very much regretting we don't have "that kind" of relationship...because OMG the aphrodisiac potential... it may be that I love amber-based stuff on others. I suspect a trip off to some place -- like Whole Paycheck Foods Market -- is in order so I can get a sense of what some base notes really smell like... )

[fleurrochard]

OMG, this is like waiting for Christmas! (Like it was as a child!)
*bounces*

[momijizukamori]

mmmm organization porn


(re: that last photo, I am genuinely starting a tumblr called 'Cats Helping With Cosplay' for people to submit photos of cat 'helping' to. Storm thinks fabric on the floor is for sitting on)

[kore]

I love all the photos! ....especially the one where I tried to see the book titles, heh.

[synecdochic]

Ha! Yeah, the bookshelves are three deep. When we moved in, we just unpacked the book boxes straight onto the shelves, so they're every which way in there, but we lost a bunch of shelf space in the move (the old apartment was 1700 square feet in one room; we lined one and a half walls of it with shelves). One of these days we're going to deal with that, but the actual home repair tasks have been taking priority.

[kore]

ahaha boy does that sound familiar, down to the "unpacked everything onto the shelves and sorted by what fits where" style -- my bookshelves in my office are 2 deep, not 3, but this only happened because there are now books all over the floor! Oh dear.