Friday, June 21, 2013

I'm Back!

Hi all! I'm back! I took a bit of a forced break and now I'm back and just so refreshed and energized. Sometimes forced breaks are great things! It has been about 4 weeks now since I started getting some back pain. It took a while to figure out that my back pain was caused by kidney stones. Once we were able to figure that out, I started drinking massive amounts of water and began taking an all natural supplement to help get rid of them. This past Sunday was the first time that I have felt like my normal self. It's been a great week! I'm high on life again. :-)

It took a while to catch up on orders, bevel waiting soaps, organize my soap room, get some scented wax brittles made for this Sunday's listings, and get all my soaping gear washed up and ready to go. I knew I was feeling better because I have been daydreaming about what my next batches would be. I knew pink and purple had to be involved. Here are the first two soaps made!




Remake of Smooches on the left and a new fragrance blend called Champagne Summer on the right.

Smooches is now pink and white (instead of various shades of pink) and is scented in a dupe of VS Bombshell. It is a soft and beautiful blend of grapes, passion fruit, peonies, orchids, and greenery. It is a customer favorite.

Champagne Summer is a pink, purple, and blue soap embedded with soap balls and has a scent blend of three of my favorite fragrances. They blended together wonderfully. The scent blend combines notes of champagne, ginger ale, raspberries, peaches, magnolias, lilies, and lilacs. I just love it! I really enjoyed the champagne/ginger ale scent in my Love & Bubbles soap, but I LOVE it as a blend.

I get asked quite often about how I make my soap balls look so smooth and round. I already have a couple of videos on YouTube showing my process but I've changed it up a bit so decided to do a new video on how I make them. You can watch that video here if you are interested. Also on my channel you will find the making videos for Smooches and Champagne Summer.

Before I went on my little forced and uncomfortable vaca, :-), I had also made several batches of soaps that I never posted about here. I remade Green Clover & Aloe and I also made a Rootbeer Float scented soap. It's super dark but really delicious smelling! I don't have any pictures of those yet.

Sideshow was a fun soap to make and I named it that because it's wild and wacky. Well, not really but it has a fun design combining a couple different techniques. The fragrance is supposed to be a fruit loops scent but I heard it smelled more of Skittles. I definitely got that scent OOB (out of bottle) but once soaped, it's basically a lime-based soap. It's still nice, but not quite what I was expecting. It also happened to accelerate and discolor when it wasn't supposed to to that either. So yeah...go figure. :-) The design reminds me of something out of a Dr. Suess book.




I also made my biggest Rainbow batch yet! It is equal to 4 regular loaves. I nearly have it all beveled and resting on the soap shelf. That job takes a while! Oh! The comparison loaf in the picture is a batch of Old Fashioned Iced Tea soap. I forgot about that one!




So there you have it! That is what has been going on in my world over the last month. I have some special holiday items being listed this Sunday in the celebration of Independence Day! I've kept them hush hush in hopes that it will be a bit of surprise! I'm so excited to share them with you on Sunday!




Have a wonderful weekend!