Best Gift Ever!

And this time, I don't even mean our soaps, though it is soap related.

Last night, I got together with my family for the first night of Chanukah to eat brisket sandwiches, latkes (potato pancakes), and exchange gifts.

My sister and brother-in-law got a terrific gift for me and Eric!  We are now the proud owner of a whole slew of hand-sculpted soap molds from Milky Way Molds!  We had been intending to try cold process soaps - all of our current varieties have been done via the hot process method - and now we can make fancy cold process soaps in gorgeous molds.  I'm so excited to get to it immediately after the hot process batch we already had planned for today.

Cold process soaps take much longer to cure, 6 - 8 weeks, so don't expect to see them on the site just yet.

But, they also got us two stamps for our soaps, a curled cat to go with our Reef cat logo, and a paw print!

Those can be imprinted into our hot process soaps as long as we cut them while they're still fairly soft.  You can, therefore, expect to see our new soaps with their logo imprints very soon.

Plus, if today's batch is successful, you can expect to see something pretty funky on the site pretty soon.  And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Wounded, But Worth It

Cool as a Cuke soap is almost here!  Yes, that's cucumber soap, made with real pureed cucumbers and coconut milk.  That awesome light green color comes entirely from the cucumber peels.

This is our first soap with nothing scratchy in it.  It's a nice, smooth, cool bar that does not exfoliate.  About time, right?  We've been so nutty about putting all sorts of things in our soaps, trying new recipes, that I finally had to step back and suggest a smooth bar.  It worked!

We were both exhausted when we got to soapmaking, having worked all day.  And Eric got slightly wounded when the unadulterated sodium hydroxide hit his arm, but it was just a few specks, and he's fine.  It's amazing that making soap can cause injury and yet the soap itself is so innocuous, even helpful.

The funniest part was the "zap test."  I generally leave that part to Eric, since I'm not keen on some of the soap to my tongue to see if it tingles and therefore isn't ready yet.  Well, it's not like any of the soaps we've made actually ever taste good, but this one was hilarious.  Either it tastes worse than our other soaps or Eric was expecting it to taste a little better from the cukes, but I've never seen him make faces this funny.

It was worth it, though.  The Cool as a Cuke soap is this amazing shade of light green, our first soap with a real, funky color to it.

Eric is going crazy over it, because of the lather.  When I got home the other day, tired and wanting to sit, he dragged me to the bathroom to try it.  He'd just taken the "extra" off of our equipment, smushed it all together into a blob, and used it, even before it's completely cured.  It's safe to use, just still very soft at that point.  So I tried it, and it didn't disappoint.  We found a mix of oils that gives a huge lather, instantaneously.  He, of course, had to use it again and started blowing bubbles between his hands from it.  He's like a kid!  But he's right, it's pretty kickin'.

He actually risked shaving with the lather from this soap and ended up, happily, nick-free and incredibly smooth.

This one will be available soon, once it finishes curing.  It's on the racks now, getting ready!

Something Funny

The other night, Eric was surfing the web, looking for more soap recipe ideas.  Mind you, we don't steal the recipes of others, we just get ideas, modify them, and make up our own.  We're like mad scientists that way.

Mwahahaha!  

At any rate, in surfing, he found this:


It's basically:
50% olive oil
25% coconut oil
25% palm oil


This recipe will make about 3 lbs. of soap.

Here:  http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soaprecipes/tp/basicsoaprecipes.htm

Now, that is, in fact, a super simple soap recipe.  Only thing is, it's a little too simple.  See, there's no mention of water or sodium hydroxide.  I promise you, mixing three oils in a bowl, even in those ratios, will not give you soap.  If you attempt to wash with this mixture, you will not be clean, you will be an oily mess.  I swear.

And there's another problem.  50%, 50%, 25% give you three pounds of soap.  Um... does that mean if I use 2 tablespoons of olive oil, one tablespoon of coconut oil, and one tablespoon of palm oil, I get THREE POUNDS of soap?  Cool!  That's... like... the cheapest, easiest soap ever!  We could have a lifetime supply of soap on one bottle of each ingredient!  OK, maybe two bottles of olive oil.

So we did get a good chuckle.  Of course, once you click on the link provided and go here:  http://candleandsoap.about.com/od/soaprecipes/r/MMSbasic3oilsoaprecipe.htm you get the full (albeit sparse) recipe.  It was just funny to see ratios of oils listed, nothing else, and no measurements, with a claim that the non-recipe yields 3 lbs of soap.  The folks at About.com need to work on their summary-drafting skills, I think.

Musings

I've no new soap to post about... yet.  No worries, more varieties are on their way.

But in the interim, I have a confession to make.  I cheated on our soap.  No, don't get worried there, I didn't cheat with regard to our soap.  I cheated on our soap.  I used other soap.  I know, I know, how could I?  But... see.. ... I still had other soap in the cabinet when we started making soap!  Was I supposed to waste it?  Well, was I?

I didn't think so either.

So... despite the fact that we have one of each variety (I'm not kidding you here) of our soaps in the dishes in the  bath and one of each in the soap dish on the bathroom sink (This is Eric's doing, I tell you.  Yes, we need to test each batch, but do we really need 17 bars of soap in a single soap dish?  And a duplicate in the bath?), I opened and tried a different soap.

This is a commercial soap, a French soap.  It's very pretty and smells wonderful.  It's got ground almond in it.

Mind you, we also have in our soap dishes our own almond soap.  Why haven't you seen it on our website for sale, you ask?  Because our almond soap was our very first batch of soap ever, and while it's perfectly viable soap and we love to use it, we overheated it, causing it to have properties similar to shale.  When we went to cut it, therefore, we got these funky, irregular shapes.  So we could, theoretically, sell it by the pound as Almond Rock soap in person when you could pick the chunks you want, but we can't in good conscience sell it online when you couldn't see in advance what you were getting and no two people would get the same size/shaped chunks.

So we've got this perfectly good almond soap of our own making in the bath.  It's got crushed almonds in it, some finely ground, some bigger chunks.  I love it.  And yet I opened the commercial version, with all finely ground almond in it.  I guess what happened next serves me right.

I hopped in the shower, and started to wash.  It smelled great, and I was happy.  Now, I tend to scrub with soap.  And I love exfoliating soaps and accessories.  I've used soaps with all sorts of things in them - oatmeal, almond, almond shells... I've used scrubs, facial scrubs, sugar scrubs, salt scrubs.  I'm not afraid of things that are grainy.

This... this was different.  The smoothly molded outer layer wore off in the water, as it should, and I got to the almond.  Or glass shards.  It might've been glass shards.  I jumped and looked down, expecting to see that my skin was gone and blood running into the bathtub drain.  The skin was there, blood was not, and I was glad of that.  But holy crow, what the heck was that?  It was the almonds.  I have no idea what this company did to the almonds, but they were sharp.  They hurt.   It scared me.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I've used the soap again.  I've found that if I put zero pressure, it almost doesn't hurt but still kind of does just from the weight of the bar alone.  Ow!  I'm sad, because I want to like the soap.  This is a $10.00 bar of soap, people!  This is good stuff!  But ow.

And no, I'm not writing this to try and compete with them.  Hell, I'm not even naming them.  And I'm not delusional enough to believe that our teensy weensy business, producing soap batch by batch at our kitchen table in a couple of crock pots is any competition for a huge fancy French soap company.  We're two different species entirely.

But I was really surprised.

On another note, an awesome note, Eric found a very cool soap blog.  This chick rocks.  She's in Florida and she reviews soaps.  At some point, we will send her some soap to review.  But so we've both been reading her blog, and if she was still in Brooklyn, where she's apparently from, Eric and I would be looking to hang out with her.  Her sense of humor, and that of her husband who's posted at least once, is reminiscent of the cakewrecks chick.  And if you don't read Cakewrecks, you should.  Everyone should.  It is funny.  Interestingly, the Cakewrecks chick is also in Florida.

I wonder if they hang out with each other.

Holiday Special!

From now through December 19, all orders will include one free hand soap of our choosing!

(while supplies last, of course)

Our Best Yet!

OK, this is one I can get really excited about.  I am a huge, huge fan of lavender, and our only delay in making lavender soap was getting our tushes in gear and getting some essential oil and dried lavender buds.  We did.  And we made the soap, which we cut tonight.

It is, and I know I'm tooting my own horn here, amazing.  We used a variety of oils that created a hard off-white bar but with an amazing, creamy lather.  The lavender smell is gorgeous.  I just know these are going to be a hot item, but I'm definitely keeping a bar or two for my own use!  It'd be a sin to let it all go.

Success!

Our newest hot process soap is made with strongly brewed coffee and premium coffee grounds.  Coffee is said to be great for cooks and anyone else who works with pungent scents, as the coffee absorbs fish, meat, gas, and garlic smells.  The coffee grains we've mixed in are a natural exfoliant, and for the recipe's liquid, we used a strong fresh-brewed coffee, giving it a faint coffee scent.

The lather from this soap is rich, and results in hands that feel moisturized and comfortable.

We've created both bath bars and hand soaps.  The hand soaps are in the form of soap balls, each separately hand-rolled, and not created with a mold.

Each soap comes packaged, as do all of our soaps, in an ivory organza bag, tied with a ribbon and finished with our label  tag.