Calendula - This actually may be one of our favorites. We started with a base recipe that we found in one of the Soap Queen's books (Soap Crafting: Step-By-Step Techniques for Making 31 Unique Cold-Process Soaps by Ann-Marie Faiola), but we didn't have exactly the same essential oils on hand. Relying on our expert sense of smell, we slowly added a variety of essential oils (EO) that we like and happened to have. Unfortunately, we only had drops of this and bits of that, so we got crazy and just started pouring in different things (We wrote down what we used so we can recreate it). We wouldn't necessarily recommend that approach; it just happened to work this time. We had been lovingly referring to it as our mystery soap, but everyone who has come by to smell it has fallen in love with the scent. We may have a hit on our hands. Glad we wrote it down!!
Castile - This was our first attempt at a castile soap. We really like the simplicity of the ingredients, and the family members who received this one for Christmas have already been asking for more.
Coconut Lime - Smells like a day on summer vacation. With this one we froze coconut milk in ice cube trays and used that to mix with the lye. We also used fresh lime zest that we dried ourselves, and we even added unsweetened, organic coconut. MMMMM! Notice the cool shape? All molds don't have to be expensive. This was made by re-purposing a yogurt cup.
Lavender Swirl - What we think is going to be one of our favorites, this lavender swirl smells just as good as it looks. This was our first attempt at mixing colors, which turned out to be easier than we had anticipated. As with most of our "firsts" our fears were totally unfounded.
Honey Oatmeal - One of our Christmas gift soaps (picture on left), infused with real almond milk, local honey, both whole and ground oats, and yummy smelling clove bud, sweet orange and eucalyptus EOs (who knew that combination would smell so good). Because we had so many requests, we decided to make a second batch, unfortunately it did not go as well as the first batch and we were faced with our first "failure." Well, it wasn't a complete failure as we quickly got out our soap making books and taught ourselves how to "re-batch." Pictured above (L) is the first batch and (R) the re-batch of the second batch in which we substituted the sweet orange essential oil with tangerine, it smelled just as good.
Rosemary Peppermint Castile - We are feeling pretty good about our soaps at this point and decided to try a Castile variation, since rosemary is such a fresh smelling herb that we both love, we mixed rosemary and peppermint EOs (which we had on hand). Much to our delight it was a wonderful combination with the added plus of the dried crushed rosemary (think Cuisinart) mixed in as an exfoliant.
Spearmint Lemongrass Swirl - While K was in sunny Florida, A the other hard working part of the team enlisted the help of her 13 year old daughter, E, to make soap. Just to show you that soap making is not brain surgery, a lovely smelling soap was created using mainly lemongrass EO with the equally fresh spearmint EO, for added texture and exfoliation crushed spearmint leaves were added. The end result has a heavenly fresh foodie kind of smell. (No teenage children were harmed during the making of this batch of soap).
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