That Is A Lot of Soap!

I have made a lot of soap in the last week or so! I hadn't made soap in about three weeks so I really needed to get caught up and get lots made.

The first I made was Spanish Garden soap. It's a lovely and unique blend of dark leafy greens, cherries, peaches, pineapples, coconuts, jasmine, violets, vanilla, and musk. I have made this several times before, some with a six color swirl, and I called it Fruitylicious. Here's the thing though, I've noticed that all batches after the very first has had a bit of a yellow hue to it. Odd that the first batch did not but all the rest did. So as any soap maker will do, I adjusted my thought on it and put a Spanish spin on it. I think the colors turned out quite nicely.





This one is Coconut Rose. It is a blend a mixed myself of ripe coconut and wild Denali mountain rose. I am so impressed with the scent once soaped. It almost has a touch of cinnamon to it oddly enough. I colored this with some rose clay and a bit of pink mica to help it along.





Now this one didn't quite turn out as I planned. Can you tell? :-) It is called Wake Up! and has a very refreshing essential oil blend of orange, grapefruit, lime, may chang, peppermint, spearmint, fir needle, and anise. I'm really impressed with the scent. It's very uplifting! I thought to add a bit of espresso powder and it sorta back-fired on me. Those 'freckles' as I prefer to call them, are totally fine. It's just a halo from the coffee color bleeding around it. It retrospect, I think I have read that moistened and drained coffee grounds tend to work the best to avoid this effect. I doubt you can see it from the picture but I also attempted to use a bit of paprika to color a portion and that really didn't pay off either. So yeah...smells great...will do a different design next time.





This is my new Scrubby Soap. It's meant for gardeners and mechanics and all manner of general messes that need that extra scrub to take care of. I scented it in a wasabi-type scent and let me tell you...LOVE. Out of the bottle it smelled very much like that yummy ginger dipping sauce that you get at the Japanese steakhouse. But after I soaped it, it smells very much like tomato leaves. I may well have a new scent addiction with this one. I loved cleaning up these bars. There is something so satisfying to me about the gritty texture and sound when I run the bars across the planer and the veggie peeler along the sides to bevel. Yeah, I may be a bit odd, but I at least I love the process, ya know?





Coconut Pear is also another scent creation of mine. The design turned out very dessert-like and I love it! The scent is very sweet. To me, this smells like the shampoo I use which is Nexxus Therappe Luxurious Moisture Shampoo. It has a delightful tropical fruity scent and this soap smells just like it. To me, that is. Your experience may vary. ;-)





I love the cute soap shreds/curls on top. Those came from shredded a bit of a Chocolate Oatmeal Cream soap bar. I think it looks like toasted coconut.





This is a remake and I punched up the colors a bit from last time and I like it even more. This is a dupe of Victoria Secret's bombshell and I've had many requests to remake it.





Here we go with a HUGE customer favorite called Patchouli Rain. It is a unisex scent blend of fresh rain, earthy patchouli, lily of the valley, cyclamen, fresh ozone, and sweet citrus. I've said it before and will continue to say it, even if you do not like patchouli, don't turn your nose up at this scent. It is AMAZING! It is in my top five scents ever and it bumped something off to get up there. It's wonderful! The first time I made it, I made it with some darker colors and loved it though the lather was a bit blue-grey. The second time I made it, I thought to lighten the colors a bit. Well, the fragrance riced and the colors and mica lines didn't quite work out. It still sold out in less than a few days. I re-evaluated my recipe and jumped in their big and made a double batch. It turned out great!





Finally, we have my newest batch of Black Raspberry Vanilla. I stuck with my most favorite design for this scent but punched it up with the pink color as well. I like to incorporate a bit of apricot kernel powder into the base. It is lightly exfoliating and definitely my go-to choice for exfoliants.





So there you have it! I would say I am caught up, but I am not. I made three more batches last night! Only one was a remake and it had a different design so it barely counts! Today is my beyond wonderful husband's birthday. My creation of the day is a New York-Style cheesecake. I'm pretty sure I'm going to make some fresh strawberry sauce to go with it!

As always, you can find lots of videos at my YouTube channel. Don't forget to 'like' me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter. I will start listing these soaps in about four weeks. You can find a link to my stores over there to the right. :-)

Two New Ones

Happy Tuesday! I hope everyone is having a wonderful day!

I wanted to show you my two new soaps. The first is called Summer Vacation and it is a lovely blend that I mixed myself. I am trying to use up some of my samples and small amounts and so blended 5 different fragrances for this one. I mixed a Beach by Bobbie Brown type fragrance, with Aqua Type fragrance, a bit of Ocean Breeze, with some sweetgrass and another green ivy type scent. It smells so good! The Beach by Bobbie Brown is dominant which is great but there are those subtle sweet, fresh, green, scents backing it up. Love it!





This one here is called Crisp & Clean and it is another fresh scent blend, but it is a clean cotton and fresh air type of scent. Once again, I love this mix! I like clean cotton/laundry scents but they usually give me a headache. Although this one is still strong, it doesn't give me a headache and that's a super duper bonus! :-) The top has tiny blue jojoba beads mixed in. I love the little pop of color that they give.





I do not have a making of video for the Summer Vacation soap. That fragrance totally riced on me! What is up with the ricing fragrances? The soap gremlins are on the loose! I can't even tell you how many people are struggling right now with their batches ricing...I have been getting comment after comment and each person has had several different batches go awry. Anyway...I did whip it back into submission but I'd already turned off the camera in frustration. So no video on that one but I do have a making of video for Crisp & Clean. The cutting video for both is going up now. I've found it easier not to embed my videos here as it makes it difficult for my page to load. I will make a point of putting some sort of link over on the right somewhere...once I figure out how to do that. :-) In the meantime, click HERE to go to my YouTube channel.

My Tiger Stripe Attempt

This was not my best of batches. Let me just tell you that up front! I scented this batch in Black Raspberry Vanilla which is such an easy fragrance to work with. First off, I think I took advantage of an easy fragrance and compensated by over-blending my batter. It ended up being quite thick. From there, it felt a bit warm so I decided to put it on the heating pad and gel the loaf. Then I overheated it! HA! *sigh* It was just one of those batches. I'm still happy with the design, but the soap has a mottled texture that I am not used to having since I don't gel mostly and don't have to worry about overheating.

I present to you my Tiger Swirl for Amy's Soap Challenge - Week 1!




So as it turns out, I am very low on supplies, especially fun fragrances to work with, so I hope I'm still able to continue with the challenges.


Make sure to check out Amy's blog to see more entries!

Green Apple & Rose

One never knows when inspiration will hit. I was just laying in bed the other night, wiggly because I couldn't get to sleep, and then just boom there it was. I pictured this exact soap...color, shape, size...everything. Usually, I ponder the different parts of a soap for a while (sometimes a LONG while) before I come up with what I want to do. I had to make this soap immediately! So into the soap kitchen I went...well, I did wait until the next afternoon. :-)

This soap has a beautiful scent blend of tart and juicy granny smith apples, combined with delicate rose blossoms. I'm not much of a person for rose, but this fragrance totally works. There is something about the tartness of the apple that just makes it all come together.

This soap also features my new 'swirl in a swirl' method. A soap maker and friend watched the video and suggested I call it the Holly Swirl. I like the sound of that! The method consists of swirling two (or more of course) colors together and then using that swirl to swirl with another color. I love it! So fun! You know my brain is just running in overdrive now with all the new ideas that I have.






We received another heavy blanket of snow overnight and for some reason, the bright white beauty of it all always makes me want to make soap. I think it is because it makes my soaping area so nice and bright. I need to clean the house today but I may squeeze in some soap making first. :-D

Shame, Shame, Shame! :-)

Shame on me for neglecting my blog so much! I really do love my blog but it seems I've only had time for tidbits here and there, which makes Facebook and Twitter so much easier to post on. But I will try to be better I promise!

My most recent soap is my new batch of Rainbow soap. It is scented in a fresh, juicy pear scent. This is about my 6th batch of rainbow soap now. It is really quite a lot of work and so it is best to do it in a really big batch. I was still just a bit off on my batch size this time (I knew what I needed to do for it to be just right but got distracted, ha!) and so the bars are super huge again!











I have made several more soaps since I last posted. I've made a Lemongrass Avocado soap, a new one to my Nearly Natural line of soaps. I also remade Patchouli Rain. It is such a well loved fragrance. I should rename it as Patchouli can be a turn-off to some and this scent is just way more than patchouli. I don't have pictures of either of those two yet but I do have videos of those two if you want to see what they look like. My YouTube Channel

Here are some of the others:

A new batch of Princess Kisses - disks on the top instead of chunks - scented in a blend of fresh dew, exotic herbs, green grass, sparkling rain drops, and floral gardens - it's a very lovely tart scent and comparable to Herbal Essences shampoo





Fallen Leaves - a classy and acceptable year round scent blend of maple wood, new dawn blossoms, laurel, sweet clove, balsam, patchouli, and sandalwood -





Summer Love - a beautiful scent blend of raspberries, peaches, magnolias, lilies, cyclamen, and white musk -





Chocolate Oatmeal Cream - an unscented bar for my Nearly Natural line, loaded with cocoa butter, cream, colloidal oatmeal, with a cocoa powder swirl - also a remake -





J'Adore - compare to J'Adore by Dior - I've decided to keep this batch just for my daughter and I since we are big fans of this scent -





Beach by Bobbie Brown Type - A blend of sand, sea spray, salt, jasmine, and mandarin -





Finally, I made a few batches of Camo soap -





So there you have it! Some of these are already for sale at my Big Cartel and Etsy stores. Thank you so much for stopping by! I do hope you are having a wonderful day!

New Etsy Store

Hi everyone!

I wanted to let you all know that I have a new Etsy store! It has actually been up for about a month or so but it only had a few soaps listed. As of today, it has a full listing of my current soaps that are for sale. My main store will remain at Big Cartel, but I will try to keep Etsy updated the same.

Missouri River Soap on Etsy

Missouri River Soap on Big Cartel

The current soaps for sale are displayed on this video. Kaleidosoap is selling out quickly! Wild Mountain Honey and Lilacs In Bloom are both sold out, and I'm nearly sold out of several more.



In other news, Northern Missouri got hit by another considerably snow storm. This makes for 20 inches since last Thursday! Crazy talk! We had only had 6 inches TOTAL so far this year until these two snow storms hit. We're not used to this kind of snow and our poor city is struggling. Thankfully, we still have power and my husband has the ability to work from home and so we can look out on it and not be in it, except to play of course!

The view out of my front door this morning!



Orders are slightly delayed getting out as no mail service is running right now and we are being instructed to stay off of the roads.

I need to write a post about my new soaps but in the meantime I wanted to let you know about the new Etsy store. Thank you all!

Busy Busy!

I've been busy once again! Last week was all about transporting kids back and forth to the grandparent's house and cleaning and all that jazz. It was a great week but left little time for creating. I made these soaps just before things got hectic.




(Unfortunately, Blogger has changed the settings again and I haven't quite figured out how to choose to make the photo larger and centered.)

Captivated - a blend of sweet red raspberry syrup and newly bloomed lilacs. Now that the soap has had about 10 days to cure, I can now pick up on those individual notes but it still remains to be a more complex scent than those two notes. It is very Spring-like indeed. I did a mica swirl (as mastered and explained here by Emily of the Soap and Restless blog. I definitely have room to improve but I really like how it turned out.

I had made some plain colors for a Princess Kisses remake but I wasn't happy with the intensity of the colors so I made some soap balls with the soap instead. I added some cute little soap berries to the top of the remake of Pink Berry Mimosa.

I still had plenty of soap left so I rolled some more soap balls and mixed up some fun colors and made Polka Dot Paradise. It is scented in a white tea and apricot fragrance that is quite yummy and also very Spring-like.

I also gave banana soap a try. I made Banana Oatmeal Cream. It has an oatmeal, milk, and honey scent but it isn't the one that most of us are used to using. It has more of a baked bread scent. With the banana added, it seems very banana bread-like. It's yummy smelling! There is a bit of yellow colored soap in the middle and a bit on the top but it has blended in quite a bit. The soap has darkened a bit since this picture but really not a whole lot.



As always, you can find the videos on my YouTube channel.