Soaps and lotions and hand sanitizers

I've added lotions and all-natural hand sanitizers to my line of soaps this year.

Soaps available for holiday gift-giving: Lemongrass, Lavender, Spearmint, Lemon Eucalyptus, Holiday Cranberry, White Gardenia, Peaches and Cream, Wild Cherry, Lemon Biscotti, Ginger & Frankincense, Lavender/Rosemary. $4 per 4-oz. bar.

Lotions are new. A lovely moisturizing non-greasy lotion crafted with shea butter, goat milk and honey. $8 per 8 oz. bottle.

And my newest creation: All natural hand-sanitizers. Mine are made with only water, aloe vera gel and a combination of 5 essential oils that have been proven in the laboratory to kill 99% of all viruses and bacteria. No skin-drying alcohol in my santizers. No superbug-creating triclosan in my sanitizers. Just skin-nourishing aloe vera gel and germ-fighting essential oils. $4 for a 4 oz. bottle.

Stay tuned for pictures.

Welcome

... to my soapmaking blog. Especially to those of you who've wandered over here from my cake-decorating blog in an effort to get a cake-picture-fix while we are in the process of moving. I have seven new varieties of soap available right now (including "Pound Cake"), and if you'll scroll down, down, down on this page, you'll see pictures of all the current soap inventory. I continue to have multiple reports from customers of how wonderful this soap is ... adolescent acne clears up, adult acne clears up, eczema on little kids clears up, and long-standing dry itchy skin finally softens, moisturizes and relaxes. If you'll read through the "Story of Soap" post below, you'll understand why hand-made cold-process soap has all these magical properties.

Seriously ... once you try it, you'll never be able to go back to grocery-store-aisle soap again.

Current prices are $4.00 for each hand crafted 4 oz. bar.

As we rapidly approach the end of the school year here in the US, teacher gifts come to mind. A specially-wrapped gift package of 3 soaps ($12) would be a grand gift to give your kids' favorite teachers. Or even 1 bar, or two ... wrapped up beautifully in a cello bag with a ribbon. All gift packaging is free, and I'll include a card detailing "The Story of Soap." Where else can you get an awesome hand-crafted gift for your child's teachers for as little as four bucks?!

"The Story of Soap"

I enclose a card with the following "story" of how soap is made with every gift package of soap that I make. Thought you guys might like to read it here. It explains a lot:

I'm guessing you've never given much thought to how soap is made, why it works, or how to tell good soap from bad. I didn't have the first clue either, before getting hooked on this fascinating soap making journey in my own little urban kitchen a couple of years ago.

It turns out that soap is actually a salt -- who knew? It is the creamy, dreamy lusciously-sudsing result of combining fats and oils with water and lye. Sounds improbable and ucky, but it's true. The chemical process that occurs when all those things are thrown together in a pot on the stove is called "saponification", and the end result (if I do everything right) is lovely bars of high quality soap, loaded with skin-soothing and moisturizing glycerin.

Early American settlers made their soap from rendered animal fats, water, and the ashes saved from their wood cooking fires. Fortunately, I don't have to butcher a cow, slaughter a pig, or cook all our meals over an open fire to make soap today.

All of our soaps are made with high quality olive, coconut and soy oils (the fats) and good old lye (the alkali). If you're cringeing at the word "lye" in your soap ingredients, I don't blame you -- but rest assured the lye is completely consumed by the chemical process of saponification, and the bar of soap you are holding now is as mild and pure as a fresh spring rain.

One of the coolest things that happens during this saponification process is that lots of natural glycerin is created -- right inside every bar! The big soap manufacturers today extract all that wonderful glycerin out of their soap and sell it to other big companies who use it to make other things -- like hand lotion. This is why store-bought soaps are typically so drying to the skin, and why you have to then buy lotions and creams (containing the glycerin that got extracted in the first place) to put the moisture back in. Our soaps will never dry your skin -- in fact, you may find that with continued use you can give up using hand lotions and body creams all together!

Those moisturizing qualities of the high glycerin content in our soaps also mean that the soaps will 'melt' faster if left sitting in a puddle of water in a soap dish. So please be sure to leave your soap air-drying between uses, not swimming in a puddle.

Our scented soaps contain only the purest essential and fragrance oils. This results in a lightly scented soap that smells great in the shower, but won't linger on your skin to interfere with other fragrances. No artificial colorings or preservatives are ever used. All herbs and flowers used in our soaps have been grown organically in our own urban gardens, then air-dried, pulverized and added to the soap. We also make a Pure and Simple soap, containing only olive, coconut and soy oils, with nothing else added. This soap is great for babies and anyone with super-sensitive skin. Try a few bars of our soaps today -- we think you'll fall in love and never go back to store-bought soap again !

Spearmint

Everybody's favorite morning shower waker-upper soap! Just the pure saponified vegetable oils with pure spearmint essential oil added. Yummy.

Lemongrass

A perennial favorite of many of my customers. Such a light, refreshing citrus-y scent ... and a pretty sunny yellow color. I didn't add any dried lemongrass leaves to this batch (thinking I didn't have any that were ready to go), so this batch is free of any exfoliating extras. But I found the dried lemongrass while packing yesterday, so the next batch with have the pretty little bits of green leaves in it. It's still good this way, though -- pure and simple ;-)

Lavender

No colors or lavender bits added to this batch -- just the pure oils with lavender oil added. A simple, straightforward, lovely bar of soap.

Lilac Breeze

This was a new fragrance oil I was eager to try, since we had a gorgeous huge lilac bush in our front yard when I was growing up, and I haven't smelled one down south here in over 30 years. While this soap doesn't smell exactly like I remember those lilacs smelling in my youth, it is a lovely refreshing scent. I've added some candle wax coloring to this soap, to make it that pretty lilac color.

White Gardenia

This soap proved to be a hit at eldest daughter's wedding recently, so I've made a new batch. A nice light scent in a creamy white bar.

Milk & Honey w/Oatmeal Scrub

A lot of customers (including our youngest daughter) like this as a facial bar. I add no essential oils or other scents to it, so it's fragrance-free. And the ground oatmeal acts as just the right exfoliator/scrubbing agent.

Pound Cake -- soap?

Yup, it is. Smells incredibly yummy, but please don't eat it. The usual cast of characters in the recipe -- soy, olive and coconut oils, this time with Pound Cake fragrance oil and Vanilla Buttercream fragrance oil added to the mix. The oils turn this soap a nice rich brown color.

new Soaps in Progress!

Thank you all for so patiently waiting for me to finally get some new soaps made after the holidays. Christmas came and went, all my holiday soaps sold out, then I was busy making 5 batches of White Gardenia soap for wedding favors at eldest daughter's wedding just two weeks ago.

New scents are in, all supplies are in place, and within the next week I will have the following soap flavors available:

White Gardenia (a nice white bar with gentle gardenia scent).

Oatmeal, Milk and Honey (a light brownish/beige bar with real oatmeal, milk, honey and a touch of cinnamon -- no scents added, but it still smells like a yummy oatmeal cookie and it's great for a facial bar).

Spearmint (a great way to wake up in the shower each morning).

Lemongrass (a gentle lemon-y scent with bits of organic lemongrass as a gentle exfoliator).

Rosemary (a brisk scent that will refresh you after a hard day of work or play).

Lavender (that classic "grandma" scent that will have you remembering early childhood, especially if your grandma wore lavender sachets tucked into her bosom).

Lilac Breeze (a new scent in a pale lavender colored bar -- it smells very clean).

Birthday Cake (Can you believe it? I've combined pound cake and vanilla buttercream fragrance oils to create a bar of soap that smells just like the cakes I bake! But please don't eat the soap.)

I'll publish pictures of each of these over the next few days, as I get them packaged up and ready to go. $4 for each 4 oz. bar.

A New Batch of White Gardenia Soap is made...

Follow the next few posts to watch the process in action. I just received my new oils last night, so thought I'd lay out a bit of the details of the process for you all to see, as I make my first batch of Holiday Soaps today.

Perhaps it will be interesting to you. It is surely fascinating to me! And feel free to email me if you want more info or wish to place an order: ksriddle@sbcglobal.net

Thanks!

The Vegetable Oils Combine

Beautiful, aren't they? Soy, olive and coconut oils, all gently swimming around together in my soap pot on the stove until they reach 100-105 degrees F.

While these oils are melting (coconut oil is a solid at room temperature) and heating, I'm combining pure lye with water, and putting that mixture into an ice bath in order to get it DOWN to 100-105 degrees F. When you mix lye with water you get a WHOLE lotta heat, let me tell you!

And here's a little urban culture tidbit for you ... I used to be able to buy good old Red Devil Lye at the grocery store for this soap-making venture. It's the pure lye stuff that you buy to pour down your clogged-up drains to clear them out. Many other drain cleaners have flooded the market in recent years that will accomplish the same thing, drain-wise, but they have all kinds of other weird ingredients added to them, and they will NOT work in soap-making.

Welllllll....... it seems all the home-based crystal-meth manufacturers have been using Red Devil Lye to create their illicit drugs -- so most, if not all, grocery stores have pulled the stuff off their shelves. Red Devil now only sells another product that has all that other junk in it. If the junk is in it, you can't make the drugs with it. Nor can you make soap.

But thanks to all the other generous and lovely soap-making afficionados out there, I now know where to go to buy the PURE lye once again ... but I'm not advertising the fact and I'm not tellin' ya' where to get it unless you can somehow prove to me that you're making large-batch cold-process soap and your life as such will be over if you can no longer obtain pure lye ;-)

The Lye Water

Now, most people freak out at the very mention of that three-letter word, 'lye'. I suppose it's deeply embedded ancestral memories of moms and grandmas bearing the multiple scars of lye burns from their annual soap-making endeavors over an open wood fire involving lots of rendered pig fat and wood ash and rain water.

I'm serious. That's how they used to have to make soap. And they only made it once or twice a year, and it was called "lye soap," and it was a nasty, brutish type of body cleanser compared to what we can create today with all our fancy electric stoves and digital cooking thermometers. Plus, thank goodness, I don't have to render any pig or cow fat to fill the fatty-acid side of the chemical equation. I have the luxury of readily available olive, soy and coconut oils.

But believe me -- I've had my share of lye burns on my hands and forearms. I'm one of those stubborn ones who refuses to wear goggles, gloves and all other manner of protective gear while crafting soap. The good news is -- lye burn scars fade within a year. But DARN they hurt when they happen!

The Chemical Process Begins

I've just poured the lye water into the oils. I love to watch the physical transformation as the two solutions combine. Amazing, isn't it? (Yes, I'm a chemistry nerd. I went to college to become a Medical Technologist. Organic Biochemistry was my absolute FAVORITE class.)

With a few quick stirs, the chemical process begins to work its magic, eventually turning liquid fatty acids and a strong alkali solution, both at about 100-105 degrees Fahrenheit, into a solid salt. Which we all now know by its common name -- SOAP.

A few quick stirs, magical as they are, don't quite cut it as far as making good soap. Fact is, this stuff has to be stirred FOREVER in order to get the whole process complete. BUT -- if you have a handy-dandy stick blender available, what was once a tedious 30-60 minute carpal-tunnel-inducing stirring job becomes a 2-5 minute breeze. And as this magical mixture thickens and reaches what is called a "light trace" stage (much like pudding right before your pour it into the bowls to set up), I will add the fragrance oil, give it a few more quick stirs, and pour it into the molds.

All Tucked In

My White Gardenia soap babies, all stirred up and tucked in to their insulated wooden crates, for a nice long 24-hour sleep as the curing process begins.

It smells delightful here!

Gift Wrap

Free gift-wrapping on all soaps ordered for gifts, this holiday season! You can purchase as many bars as you want per gift, of course, but a popular choice is the $12.00 package of three 4 oz. bars of soap. You can mix and match scents, or have all the same in one package. I wrap them in clear cello bags, then tie them up with a pretty ribbon and add a tiny little Christmas ornament doo-dad, to boot. I also include my "Story of Soap" card that explains the history of cold-process soap, and how I came to be crafting it.

Think about beautiful bars of all-natural, skin-softening soap for all your gift needs this year -- great for stocking stuffers, teacher gifts, babysitters, hair stylists (they will LOVE the skin-soothing, ultra-moisturizing qualities of my soap), bridge club, office mates, Secret Santa, friends, neighbors and relatives. In fact, I can't think of anyone who wouldn't love to receive a bar or three of this luxurious soap. Even men love this stuff. They are some of my most enthusiastic customers, as a matter of fact.

Each bar, weighing between 4.2 and 4.8 ounces, is $4.00. Gift wrap is free. S&H charges are dependent on total weight of the package. Typically it will be about $4/lb for the first pound, then add $1 per lb. after that. So, as with most things in life, the more you buy, the better rate you'll get on shipping.

Give it some thought -- you could get a LOT of your holiday shopping done with just one click of your mouse. Email me today at ksriddle@sbcglobal.net, and let's get your order placed!

Holiday Soap Flavors

I've been neglecting this blog for months now, though I've still been crafting soap.

It just dawned on me that the holiday season is upon us, and I'm almost out of inventory!

So I've ordered the following flavors today, and will have the following soaps available about 3-4 weeks from now, for your holiday gift-giving needs, if you so desire:

Lemongrass
Spearmint
Eucalyptus
Rosemary
White Gardenia
Holiday Cranberry

The last two "flavors" are not essential oils, as I typically use, but rather man-made "fragrance oils." I'm testing out the White Gardenia flavor for possible wedding favors next spring, and I just thought the Holiday Cranberry sounded like a delicious scent ... so decided to try a couple of fragrance oils and we'll see how they do.

I like to stay totally "pure" in the soapmaking, using only vegetable oils, natural essential oils and dried organic plant material ... but I'm thinking 4 oz. of a lab-made scent can't be too terribly harmful when added to 7 lbs. of soap.

The lemongrass, eucalyptus and rosemary soaps will probably have a bit of pulverized dried organic plant material added to their recipes, as well. I love using what hubby grows in his urban gardens, whenever possible.

Check back in the next few days to see pictures of how I'm packaging this year's holiday soap-gifts. I'm on the lookout for gorgeous satin ribbons to tie around clear cello bags ... stay tuned.

Soap Logs

This is what the soap looks like after I've cooked it up in the pot, added all the goodies, poured it into the molds, then turned it out after it hardens. My first soap mold was an old wooden wine box. Then hubby made me a second one to match, since my soap recipe makes exactly two molds' worth of pure sudsy goodness.

The soap cures (hardens) overnight, then I slice them into bars and let the bars air-cure for 2-3 weeks before wrapping/selling/using.

This batch is lavender. Saponified soy, olive and coconut oils, with lavender essential oil added. Smells divine. Available after 7/1/06.