All things green and spring

  By Judith | May 6, 2012 - 8:57 am | Green, New soaps, Soaping, Spring, Work to be done
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The air these days is full of green, new scents…poplar leaves unfolding put their spicy resin on the breeze, the warmed soil smells soft and alive, even the new grass underfoot has a sweetness.

Trying to capture these in soap (of course!) has led to several new soaps, including Lemongrass Forest (a blend of lemongrass, black spruce and spearmint, using an armload of freshly cut lemongrass to infuse in the water portion and a dab of galbanum, the King of Green); a batch of Avo-Avo-Avo using gorgeous emerald green cold pressed virgin avocado oil (I’ll have to post a pic of the oil!), Mojito Mint using fresh sprigs of Cuban mojito mint from the greenhouse and sprightly key lime essential oil, a re-stock of Evergreen, and Lavender-Chamomile layered soap that kisses chamomile infused oil with blue chamomile essential oil and western red-cedar essential oil.

It’s been a while since I tinkered with a few of my botanical colorants, and I have a new blue I am trying out (gardenia! who knew!), and some new clay colors, so I’m rounding that testing out with some greens: nettle from a different source (I refuse to grow it!  Too many hours weeding it out of show beds in the nursery I used to work for, too many welts on my hands and arms for me to ever approach it fresh again; luckily, when it’s dried it loses its sting), a pretty batch of alfalfa, and some other mints.  First, though, I have transplanting to do, and potting on, and the sun on the greenhouse is an invitation to run outside and play, so I am going!

Inspired by the National Geographic

  By Judith | February 11, 2012 - 11:34 pm | Soaping, Work to be done
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balloon-slab-cut

…by a photo of a hot air balloon, that is, from a National Geographic photo.  Here’s the original photo: Hot Air Balloon, New Mexico.  I immediately saw it as soap-able, especially in melt-and-pour, which I don’t do, and asked a friend in the Hague to play along.  While I am waiting for that soap to appear on my horizon, several other friends have joined in and made colorful, whimsical soaps based on that image.  I cut the first of two attempts today; this first one is a slab, the second will be done in a log and in brighter colors.

Colored with yellow, pink, and Australian red clays, and ultramarine blue, this is a muted version instead of the brilliant photo; I had fun swirling the poured soap and envisioning how it would look cut.

The cut bars, ready for a bit of edge-cleaning and a cure.  They are scented with a bright, sunny blend of lime-lemon and patchouli and turned out a bit better than I thought they might, graphically speaking.

Stay tuned, as variation number two is in the wings; more intensely colored, with a different scent, but still calling on the imagery in the photo (a small printout of it, for my workroom reference, is visible along next to the cut bars of soap.

Recent soaps

  By Judith | February 3, 2012 - 12:58 pm | Soaping
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Night sky with planets soap, detail

Here are a few pics of recent soaps.  I have more curing, and on the sketchboard, but I wanted to share some of my favorite winter soaping. First, Night sky with planets soap, detailthere’s Night Sky with Planets, a deep dark vetiver scented soap studded with moons and planets and sprinkled with sparkly mica stars and bits of the Milky Way.  This is a bit different every time I make it; sometimes the moons are all crescents, and sometimes the planets have rings.  The last batch had one planet that looked very much like our home world!

Next, there’s Unscented cocoa butter soapa batch of unscented, rich in cocoa butter, soap done as a special request.  I laid in a marbled pattern done in bamboo charcoal on top as a  differentiation from the unscented goatmilk bars and also for a visual treat.

A new ingredient I have been experimenting with is gardenia powder, which I infused into olive oil and added to a tropical scented batch for a twist on my geranium-ylang ylang soap. geranium bar with gardenia

 

Coming up soon: a Blood Orange binge soap, a mansoap with oakmoss, a salute to the Selkirks, and a Valentine’s soap.

Group Research Project

  By Judith | February 3, 2012 - 10:56 am | Soaping
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A bunch of fellow soapers and I are working on a research project, investigating the effect various additives have on lathering qualities in soap.  Included are milks, chelating agents, proteins, resin, and more.  We all used the same exact base oils and procedure, and made the soaps within the same week.

It should be fascinating to get my bag of soap bars and start testing!  I contributed oatmilk, a strained oat-water solution I have been experimenting with as an alternative to silk in soap (silk gives a ‘slick’, smooth feel to lather; but it’s not a vegetarian item, so I don’t use it.)  It’s been a pleasant surprise to note that the oatmilk also boosts lather in the un-silk bars, (including the Pink Grapefruit and Winter Tropics bars).  Now it will be interesting to see how this additive compares to over 20 others!  (Thank you Shannon for organizing this!)

My oatmilk bars went out yesterday, and here is a pic of them, with a bar of the unscented cocoa butter, and two other full sized bars for comparison:

Oatmilk latherswap bars

Oatmilk samples, with cocoabutter and goatmilk bars for color comparison

 

 

 

 

 

(And no, I can’t cut a straight line with a ruler!  Which is why I love my log-soap cutter.)

Oakmoss & plinky bubbles

  By Judith | January 17, 2012 - 9:33 pm | Soaping, Work to be done
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I collected more oakmoss last week, (bonus to the weird weather; woke up thinking it’d be a good day to look for it, after the gale and downpour)–I think I will try tincturing it just for fun.

It’s that or find a perfume locket for a chunk of it, I do like the smell….. at reasonable amounts.  The absolute is not only very very pricey, it is incredibly strong.  That and the possible irritancy of the tree mosses hold me back from soaping it.  There are a few fragrance oils that dupe it, and I have smelled a couple that come close, but haven’t yet found one I want to soap.  But since I keep returning to the moss fragments on my desk, and find myself stuffing bits in my pockets, I have to do something with the oakmoss that falls from the sky.  Even if that only ends up as a personal scent, or a perfume locket, and a guide for what fo to use when I give up and soap with a duplication.

LOL, Unreasonable amounts would also include the bathbomb I treated myself to the other day; some store brand, it was a nice scent but OVERPOWERING and CLINGY.  I had to take 2 showers afterwards, the smell was that hard to remove.  And then bleach the tub!  It’s too bad, cause the tech was there; it was nicely fizzy (the sound is my favorite, I think; those plinky bubbles), it emulsified well, left a nice emollience behind, it was pretty (pink and white) but the owls could probably smell the bath out on the county road.  I’m not sure a quarter of the remaining one wouldn’t be too strong!  Still, it was nice, and I will have to find a recipe and make some un/barely scented ones, using some favorite or new essential oil blends.  I could really see crawling gratefully into a eucalyptus or ginger-orangey fizzy bath to warm up after a day of shoveling and plowing.

Happy New Year

  By Judith | January 8, 2012 - 3:23 pm | Soaping, Work to be done
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A new year for soaping and the farm..the weather is uncannily mild and it seems like spring, more than the snow encrusted time January usually is.  And I’m FINE with that! :)   I had to go to the Big City last week and I hauled soaping oils back; unthinkable usually in the winter.

I’m using the extra time I have that’s usually plowing and shoveling to do some testing and product development, and have pages of new soaps scrawled in the notebook, so there will be new things to share soon.

I’m going to be installing a different shopping cart this winter too; I’ve found another one that is more flexible and will allow coupons and other goodies; but that will come after getting the seed catalog done, so —look for a slight ‘disturbance in the (shopping cart) force’, but not until March.