New babies in the family

Say hello to the new babies in the family!!

These new babies are part of the samples I'm to hand in this week. They are all naturally scented and colored, which was tricky specially for the orange one. For sure this gave me the opportunity to make lemonade, figuratively speaking. I had the base product and had to come up with wonderful creations. It was hard at first, trying to think outside the bar, but then it started flowing so naturally it was a wonderful experience. As I write, I have them sitting down beside me and they smell so wonderful!! let me introduce you to them...

Lovely Chocolate-Mint, although I have the "fake" version of this, the idea was to create a more natural version. For this, organic chocolate was used for it's fragrance and color - a deep brown color. The white parts contain spearmint EO and nothing else. It is a delicious fresh smell. I was amazed with the chocolate, I used about 1/2 oz to color around 8 oz of soap, i thought it was going to be a light color, but it turned out this rich brown color. Loved it!!

Full Moon Over the Dessert - a shampoo bar with fresh mint and lemon grass EOs, an invirogating mix of fragrances. This shampoo has a long list of oils, waxes and butters, perfect for keeping hair healthy. Green color was given by the seaweed mixed with the base soap.

Orange chocolate soap, a lovely mix of organic chocolate and sweet orange EO. Coloured with powdered anato (achiote), a very common spice in Costa Rica, and mixed with orange peel to give a little exfoliating action. Lovely color, lovely texture - but alas you cannot eat it :(

Calendula Honey soap, a very simple soap base with coconut milk, mixed with calendula flowers and honey. This soap is a very smooth bar with great calming properties. i fiddled around with adding fragrance, but the calendula flowers give it it's own unique aroma. Of the natural soaps, this is the most natural there is.

Finally, a simple shampoo bar, full of nutrients and moisturizers, colored with seaweed for that beautiful pale green, and fragrance with Lemon Grass EO. A must for hair care, and body care, and face care. shampoo bars are wonderful that way, they are supersoaps, there's no reason not to use them for all your soaping needs. They are also fabulous for a trip abroad since you don't need to take 2 oz shampoo bottles plus the soap...you can take any size bar of soap and use it for everything.

Hope you've enjoyed them, they are my new favourites.

Soap Base in the making

Hey everyone,

Life has been hectic around here, work gets in the way LOL. Today I whipped up a 2lb batch of base soap, to be turned into 3 beautiful creations: Chocolate orange soap, chocolate mint soap and calendula soap. All using only organic chocolate and essential oils. This is part of the samples I want to turn in next week.


Oils and lye mixing. As usual, I reduced the water to 30% and substituted the remaining with coconut milk. This gives the soap an extra yumminess that I've come to love. Oils used were Olive, Coconut, palm, sunflower oil and Shea butter.


Here the mixture is starting to trace (light) so I added the coconut milk, mixed for a little while longer and transferred to my preheated crock pot, for the hour long cook. I realize that hot process is a little harder to handle when you want to accomplish swirls, but just by doing the extra step of cooking I don't need to keep it sitting on a shelf for 4 weeks. I still get away with nice swirls and colors, and get to use my soap the next day. LOVE IT!

Hopefully by tomorrow, the samples will look half as good as these soaps from SUDS...they're amazing!!!

Or these calendula soaps by Sabons Carmeta -WOW!!

Enjoy the soap porn!!

Care and Share Artist's Market

As promised, these are the pics from the artist's market last Saturday. I loved the fair, there was a lot of movement and people liked the product a lot. The crowd was really young so the best seller's were the colorful soaps with a lot of fragrance.

Parents liked the more natural ones, like Ginger and cinnamon soap or beer soap. This one person took 8 bars of beer soap! That was a hit! The other favorite was the chocolate mint soap, I was left with one bar only...have to make more of those :) Bath salts are not a big thing :( Too bad because I love to make them!

Jewelry started moving also, which I was kind of worried about, no one seemed to like it at the other fair. I need to work out a better set up for it though, looks crowded and people are afraid of even touching the jewelry - not sure why. I need to practice practice practice.

I changed the look of the table a lot from the other fair...included a lot of earth tones, several levels and color but not competing with the product. It made the product stand out a lot more than the ugly blue color we had at the other fair. I also included gift baskets, which I thought would be a great hit with Christmas just around the corner, but I ony managed to sell one of those.

Overall I'm really happy with the outcome...it gave me the boost I needed to continue creating beautiful soaps :)

Waiting...

Waiting...for the soap to cook. I would not write about this unless it was a monumental thing..and it is. It is my first official product sample developed for another person tha is not me.

I was approached by a very nice woman on the fair the other day (I'll write tomorrow about the fair..I promise). She wanted to include soaps in her body care line, and wanted to try my products out and see if we could come to an arrangement. I met with her today and everything went better than I ever could have imagined. She ended up buying some of my ready made product and she gave me some butters, EOs and callendula flowers to develop some samples for her store.

I'm so happy :)

So now, I'm waiting for my liquid soap to cook, which is currently in the not so liquid - can't stick my spoon on it - stage. I still have about two to three hours to go on this one, but so far it's looking really nice.

I think I'll use the lemongrass EO on this one.

I forgot to say, she does not want artificial ingredients on her soap, no fragrances or colorants. I love a natural bar of soap so it's a match made in heaven :) Plus I get to experiment more with natural colors :):)

I'll let you know how my soap goes...bummer I have to let it "rot" before I can try it :(


If your feeling daring, please try this book by Catherine Failor, on Liquid Soaps. It's simple and to the point - it's only missing "Don't Panic" writen on the cover in nice friendly letters. Well actually it says Liquid soaps in nice friendly letters, so that will do :)

Also in spanish: Jabones Liquidos (Spanish Edition)

What's in your pot?

The rebatch pot that is. I began this week feeling my soaps were ugly. So this week has been dedicated to remelting, adding colors and scents to my soap.

I've managed to do a tri color set with three lovely fragances. Hard to do with HP soap, but not bad at all for my first try with layering:

And this morning I did a two color/fragrance soap. It was fun since I made yellow soap balls, rolled them in cocoa powder and embedded into green soap. I'm waiting for it to cool down so I can go and cut it.

However, I did not take into consideration my stupidness. Since I do HP soap, it's not as liquid as melt and pour, so I was afraid the green soap would not flow around the yellow balls. So I banged the mold against my work table a couple of times. I was also worried about it getting hard on the pot instead of the mold so I kept going and banging it. When I finished I noticed it was thicker than usual...it checked the sides and they were ruined!!! I banged too hard and the mold twisted...I tried banging the other way with a rubber mullet, but I don't think the mold will survive :(

Hope the soap did not suffer too much :( Ill take pics of the cutting and post them.

Next time I'll stupid proof my station.