Memorial Day

Today we remember and honor those who gave their lives in service to our country.  I am so grateful to those who gave the ultimate sacrifice for our country.

As an Army Mom, I also want to extend a very heartfelt thank you to the families and friends of men and women who have given the ultimate sacrifice for our country.  Words are insufficient in light of your loss. 

How are you observing Memorial Day? 

Personalized Soap

The other day I made some soaps with pictures and graphics placed in them.  One thing I really love about these soaps are that the possibilities for shapes, sizes, and embeds are infinite. 

The photo will stay in the soap through several uses.  The photo is printed onto water soluble paper, so it’s more than skin deep, shall we say.  However, as the soap is used, the photo will slowly disappear. 

The possibilities with this are endless.  The beach scenes are scented with a fun fragrance that smells like a carful of friends on their way home from the beach (minus the sweat).

Lettering can also be included, so dates, names and sayings can also be embedded.  In the future, I'll offer additional designs.  Customized versions of these with words and/or photos would be great for wedding favors, shower favors, hostess gifts, anniversary gifts, birthday gifts, and so on. 

Oatmeal Soap

Last week I made a couple of my most requested soaps.

Oatmeal, Milk and Honey

Cold Process Soap from Scratch

They are so fun to make because I know people are going to want them and enjoy them.

Here's a video of me making the Oatmeal Soap.  It is fragranced with Oatmeal, Milk and Honey fragrance from Bramble Berry.  It also contains ground oatmeal, which adds interesting texture and is mildly exfoliating.  Oatmeal is also wonderful for our skin.

This is my first soap with the Pink Blender from Bramble Berry that I got for Mother's Day.
 
You can watch the video on You Tube or you can click on the video below.

Thanks for reading!

Lime Green Frog Soap

I’m rarely at a loss for words.  But the past few days, words for this blog have escaped me. So I took my temperature.  Just in case I’m coming down with something.  The result was 97.8.  So I don’t think I’m sick.

While pondering where my words went, I walked by this cute little frog soap.  I don’t have much to say about him, but he makes me smile.  He is scented with a sweet lime fragrance.  Oh. And he's on sale for 20% off right now in my Etsy shop.

I want to make lots more of these in many colors.  I seem to be into bright colors of late.  I especially enjoy making bright primary, neon and rainbow themed colors.  What other color combos would be good for these little frogs?  They are the perfect size for children’s hands.

Well, I’m off to see if I can find where my words are hiding.  And maybe I'll make some soap while I'm at it :-)

Thanks for reading!

PS - Carol, here is a picture of the multi color fish.  The lines between colors are blurred.  I can do them more distinct if you prefer.  Just let me know :-)  Also, I just listed a these fish on Etsy in case you want to take a look at what the rainbow colors would look like.  The fish come either as a set or individually.

Soap Pictures

The Coconut and Cherry Blossom soaps are almost finished curing. 

If you watched the cutting video of the coconut soap cut on YouTube, you can see that the bottom portion of the coconut soap has darkened from when it was first cut. 

Today I made two different soaps from scratch and made videos.  I’ll post the videos after I get them edited and resized for web viewing.  These are the first two batches I made using my new pink stick blender. 

The soaps I made today are two of my best sellers.  Any guesses which ones they were?

I’ll tell you later.

In the meantime, here are some pictures of the Cherry Blossom Soap.

Thanks for reading!

Video Adventures

I just posted another video to YouTube.  I have a long way to go to get the hang of this video stuff.  I hope practice helps.  You can watch the video below or on YouTube.

I spent way too much time trying to figure out how to edit the video.  But my persistence paid off!  I was able to trim the 13 minute video (yawwwwwwwwwn) down to about five minutes.  A good three minutes of the video in original form was of a pan of soap just sitting while I was off camera getting other things ready. 

As I get more practice at this, I hope to learn to have everything in one spot ready to go so the videos don’t contain minutes of still shots.

I’ll post pictures of the soaps later.

Thanks for reading!

Happy Mother's Day

I’m so excited to finally get to share the pictures from the soaping morning with the kids at Plaid Peacock.  Thanks to Plaid Peacock for supplying me with these great pictures!

If you haven’t been to Plaid Peacock in downtown Waterloo, you really must go.  The restored building is absolutely beautiful, and the variety of Iowa art and products is sure to have something for everyone.

The classroom area is very pleasant, with plenty of space and a huge window looking out onto the Public Market across the street.

Now, back to the kids. 

A couple of the kids showed up a tad early, so they helped me with last minute preparations.  We also chit chatted and got to know each other a bit. 

Our first project was a soap the kids mad for themselves.  It was a practice soap so they would have some experience before making their gift soap.

They could choose between a fish or a robot.  While they were doing that, they waiting for me to microwave the glycerin soap base.  Once the base was melted, they added fragrance and stirred.  After putting their toy into the soap mold, they carefully poured soap over the toy.

Next we moved on to the gift soap.  I pre-made little soap spheres with glitter and the kids got to choose some for their soap. 

They put the spheres into a clamshell mold.  Then they waited for their cup of soap to get melted.  Once they had a cup of melted soap, they added some yummy pearberry fragrance.  After spraying the spheres with rubbing alcohol to help the overpour stick, they carefully poured their melted soap over the spheres.  The hardest part was waiting for the soap to set.

While we waited for the soap to set, they made another gift.  Each child got to make some bath salts.  I brought some little salts, kind of like table salts, that already had fragrance added.  Each child got a couple of spoonfuls of those, and then got a big scoop of larger sea salts.  These were placed into a yogurt carton. 

The lids went on and the kids shook shook shook the salts to get everything good and mixed.  Once things were pretty well mixed (it got kind of noisy!), we added a few drops of color to the salts.  I was fun to see the color choices.  There was some color combining going on, and all of the salts ended up with absolutely gorgeous color.  The kids noticed that some pieces of salt were darker than others. 

Oh, I just loved working with these kids.  It’s so nice to have such enthusiastic and interested kids. 

While we continued to wait for the gift soap to set, the kids made cards and gift wrap.  I enjoyed watching the creativity of these precious children.  While they made cards and gift wrap, we also talked about having another soap activity in June. 

 Plaid Peacock and I haven’t set anything up yet, but we would certainly love to do another morning of soaping with kids.  I better get going on checking my schedule to see when we can make that happen.  I hope the kids will come back and that a few more will come join us.  I'm also thankful that one of the moms stayed and helped out with the class.  She was a life saver!

Thanks for reading!