Summer summer summer SUMMER!

Thursday, May 29, 2014

Kathy and I got our signals crossed today, and I thought that we would be working today and taking Friday off, while she had meant exactly the opposite.

No problem, though.  My daughter, Emma, and I decided to forge ahead and create a tribute to summer. Today we made a coconut lime soap using coconut milk that we had frozen in ice cube trays last night.

Because we would be making a lime soap, we wanted to swirl a shade of green through the soap.  Emma combined two different shades of green to create the color seen below.  We used titanium dioxide (TD) to color the whole batch white.

In the picture below you can see the mixture of the oils.  The recipe we used today called for coconut oil, olive oil, sunflower and safflower oils.  We wanted something that would be nurturing for the skin and have been reading about the benefits of grape seed oil.  When we noticed how yellow the sunflower oil was today, we decided to substitute grape seed oil for it instead.  We knew that one of our essential oils would have enough orange/yellow in it and we did not want our soap to be yellow.

Before we made the substitution, however, we made sure to run the recipe through www.soapcalc.net to be sure the liquid and lye amounts were correct using grape seed oil.

We honestly forgot to take pictures of some steps.  1st we started with the lye mixture.  We had frozen coconut milk in ice trays the night before because we knew we wanted to use it in the soap today.  When using milks rather than water in the lye mixture, it is important to freeze it first to either frozen cubes or at least a slushy stage.  Mixing the lye must be a slower process, adding just a small amount at a time and stirring in between additions.  This keeps the milk from scorching in the heat of the chemical lye reaction.

Once we combined the coconut milk/lye mixture and measured the oils, we wanted to get the temperatures down to around 90 degrees F.  The lye mixture was still much hotter than the oils (even after heating them slightly to melt the coconut oil), so we made an ice water bath in a shallow pan and placed the bowl with the lye mixture in it until it cooled.  It really did not take very long at all.

When the temperatures were acceptable and within 5 degrees F of each other, we poured the lye mixture into the oils and blended with the stick blender until we reached light trace.

Below you can see a swirl of yellow along the edge of the batter.  This is the essential oil mixture.  For today's batch we combined lime oil from +Bramble Berry  and pink grapefruit oil from +Lebermuth Co .  Although we wanted a coconut lime soap, the lime scent alone seemed too overpoweringly lime - like a cross between lime Life Savers or Kool-Aid and some kind of cleaner.  Adding a bit of pink grapefruit essential oil gave it the balance that it needed (at least for what we like and were looking for).

After we added the essential oils, we mixed in the TD to achieve an even base color and to be sure that we had as close to a white soap as possible - given the yellowness of the essential oil.  For further skin nurturing, we also added at this point, 2 tsp. of Vitamin E oil.

We poured 1 cup of the batter into a Pyrex liquid measuring cup to reserve for later.  From the batter left in the pot, we poured 1/2 of it into another container.  Into that 1/2 we removed, we mixed the green colorant.  Once the colorant was evenly mixed with the batter, we poured it back into the pot and then gently swirled it through the batter.  It is a similar technique to making a marbled pound cake.

See the swirls of green in the batter?

This recipe makes a smaller batch of soap than our usual, so I created a divider to shorten the mold.  I could have made shorter bars of soap, but I didn't want them to be shorter.  I estimated the difference between the volume of this recipe and our usual one, then made an estimate for how much of the mold I would need.  I think I made a pretty good guess!

Don't forget about the cup of white batter we had reserved in the Pyrex cup!  Into this bit of batter, Emma added about 1/8 of a cup of organic, unsweetened, finely shredded coconut.  We think that this will make an interesting texture for the top of the soap as well as a nice exfoliate.

We wanted to be sure that the "topping" for our loaf would be thick enough to stay in place without running over the sides of the mold, so I used the stick blender again and blended until this portion of the batter reached a nice thick trace.

When it reached a thickness we both liked, we gently spooned it over the top of the soap.

Finally, Emma sprinkled a bit more coconut on top just to make it look pretty.

We wrapped it up in our insulating box, and can't wait to see how it looks in a day or two when we cut it.

The soap should be ready to use during the first week of July.  

Saturday May 31, 2014  (added by Kathy)

The soap was removed from the mold, and is now curing, even though Alison and Emma weren't here for the unveiling, I wanted to share it with you.  This soap smells great, the essence of lime comes through with a hint of grapefruit, very clean smelling, the coconut on the top is really pretty, can't wait to use it, here is a peek at the finished product.

Look closely, you can see the shredded coconut on the top

Wednesday, an energetic day for us!

Wednesday May 28, 2014

Since school is officially over here in Habersham County, Alison's daughter will be our official assistant, lackey, gopher, scent consultant, apprentice and entertainment for the next few months.  We get lots of good ideas, (young ones that we don't think of) from her, so as long as she can stand it she's a junior Soap Lily!

One of the scents that we all have LOVED ever since it was unpacked is Energy.  We bought ours at Bramble Berry ( +Bramble Berry ) and their description is as follows:

 "A stimulating blend of Citrus, including Grapefruit, Lemon and Lime, with hints of fresh Cucumber and Jasmine, and a touch of Pineapple, Blackberry and Champagne"

That pretty much sums it up, but you really can't imagine how good this fragrance is - it just pops. It's so great that we all just smile and (almost) break out in a happy dance (okay - maybe we actually did, but there are no pictures to prove it).  The colors we used all say "energy" to us, they are bright orange, yellow and pink.

In case you can't read the labels in the picture, the colors are, from L - R, fired up fuchsia, fizzy lemonade and Tangerine WOW ,  the picture below shows what they looked like mixed up and ready to add to the soap mixture.

In addition to all the energetic colors, we added TD (titanium dioxide) to make sure that the soap stays as light as possible and so the contrast will give you lots of energy.  Ok that was a little lame, just couldn't think of anything cool to say as to why we add the TD.

In this soap we used (sustainable) palm, olive, coconut and castor oils and mixed them with a lye/water combination.  Since we had decided to swirl our colors, we kept the oil temperature around 90- 95 and the lye water at just under 100 degrees F (or within 10 degrees of each other).  Keeping the temperature down makes it trace slower which in turn gives us time to be creative.  

Once we had the oils and lye/water mixed, we used the stick blender so it was mixed well We then added the Energy FO and the TD to the soap batter and mixed them in well.  We poured (3) measuring cups to about 2/3 c. full with the soap, we then added the colors to each.  The remainder of the soap we then poured into the mold, tamped down a few times then began the coloring process.  

We poured a stream of orange soap batter across the mold, going in three different sections, we then followed with yellow and finished with the fuchsia,  The following pictures show you how we added each color.

Next we added the yellow. 

You can see that the soap is thickening and holding it's shape; this is what is called a heavy trace. It was getting a little hard to pour out of the measuring cups at this point.

Fuchsia was the last color we added; it seemed to bring it all together.

Now comes the fun part - the swirling.  We have to be careful that we don't get carried away and over swirl. If this happens our soap might lose the distinctive color application and wind up with a bland blend of colors that look like mush.  

It's interesting to see how a few swipes of a skewer can completely change how something looks.  We went from plain stripes to a neat design in 25 seconds!  Once we pulled the skewer from top to bottom we did a few L - R for the final design.

The last thing for today (other than cleaning up our mess) was to insert the dividers (which gives us 18 evenly sized bars), put the lid on, and then let it sit for 24 hours.

Due to the magic of all things electronic and computer related we now jump to Thursday afternoon,  after the soap had set up overnight we took it out of the mold.

As you can see, the swirling brought just a hint of all three colors right through the bars. The Energy scent is perfect for this soap, and we can't wait for our customers to try it.

A salute to the Vets in our families, a great vacation day, Soap Lily took Monday off!

Tuesday May 27, 2014

First things first 

We owe much to the Veterans in our lives, most of them no longer with us.   Alison and I both had grand fathers and great grand fathers (and great, great etc)  who fought bravely in past wars.  Alison's father and Kathy's husband are both Vets from the Viet Nam skirmish (don't think it was officially declared a war).  Sometimes Memorial Day is just another day off, without thought to the reason behind the celebration, but to us it's a day to remember the brave men and women who are responsible for our being able to live in a free country.

On Saturday we officially kicked off the long holiday weekend by attending the Main Street Farmers Market in Clayton, GA.  Located right in front of Butlers 2 gallery, it was a prime location.  The weather cooperated and there were lots of people strolling around Clayton.  While our soap sales weren't through the roof, we did sell soap, and that is what we wanted to do.  We met many lovely people and will probably try the market again, but probably not on a holiday weekend.

We decided to skip work on Monday, so on Tuesday we played catch up, worked on our Etsy account (we promise it will be up soon), caught up on cost calculations, and generally did a good bit of office work.  Sorry to report that there just aren't any interesting or entertaining photos to share.

Since we put a teaser photo of the baby powder soap on Fridays post we will give you the full blown creative log here.   We made a 18 bar batch of Hot Processed (HP) soap, the object was to create a soap perfect for kids and babies.  The scent we used, what else but "Baby Powder" fragrance oil (FO) from Natures Garden.   We decided to mix  pale pink, pale blue and white together and swirl it so there would be no gender bias!  The description of this fragrance says "reminiscent of Johnson and Johnson's Baby powder" they weren't kidding, the fragrance is divine and totally smells exactly like J&J's baby powder.

Since this was a hot processed soap batch we started by adding all the oils (palm, coconut, olive and castor) into the crock pot.  The lye/water mixture had been combined and allowed to cool a little, then it was added to the crock pot.

The mixture began to emulsify immediately and reached light to medium trace fairly quickly.  We covered the crock pot and allowed the soap to "cook".  After about 15 minutes we stirred and noticed that the soap was beginning to harden, after only 15 minutes we knew it wasn't ready, but both of us were amazed at how quickly the process works.

After another 15 to 20 minutes we stirred again and noticed that the soap was beginning to gel, we kept checking and stirring and checking until we reached what is scientifically called "mashed potato" stage,  (you have to see it in person, it totally looks like mashed potatoes.)

After about 2 hours we did the zap test and declared the soap finished.  We added the titanium dioxide (TD) to the whole batch and the scent, mixed them well then removed about 4 cups of batter.  We divided the batter in two and colored one with pink and the other with blue, mixing both completely.

At the beginning of the day we had lined the mold with freezer paper so we were ready to "plop" the soap into the mold.  We randomly mixed the colors so that the result looked rather like an abstract painting for babies, rather than future soap.

Not so pretty at this stage, but boy it smelled great.

Once all the batter was added and tamped down we added the plexiglass dividers and put the soap up to cure for a day or two.

Since this is HP soap it is effectively ready to use when finished, to err on the side of caution we let it age one week before we use or sell it.

This picture is what the soap looked like after it was cut.

 I wish you could smell it, honestly it screams baby scent, plus it looks very pretty and is not biased (gender) at all.

The week "after" we make plans, and head to the Internet!

Friday May 23, 2014

Per usual we blinked and a week has passed!  

We have spent the week taking baby steps, seemingly silly stuff, but all seem to be necessary if we want to progress.

we opened a joint bank account, 

which we needed to take payments using "Square" (credit card scanner that works with a smart phone)

and

we needed to open a Pay Pal account for Soap Lily.  

and

we needed to take payments online when we activate our Etsy account (SoapLilySoaps)

which we needed to sell more soap!

If you have ever done any of the above you know that it's not as easy as it sounds, ok opening the bank account was pretty simple, but all the other "steps" were filled with details and new passwords, and secret hints and things that at this point we have to write down or risk losing our minds.

So while we haven't made soap, we've thought about it.  Our supplies arrived yesterday so we are "back in business" and will be making soap this afternoon.  Hopefully we will be  posting pictures of our latest creation soon.

At the urging of a customer last weekend we looked into the Main Street Farmers Market in Clayton and am happy to say that we will be there tomorrow from 9 - 12.  The market is located in front of Butlers II gallery and consists of local purveyors of fresh, natural products like bread, honey, goat's milk etc.  If you are near Clayton please stop by and say hello.


By the way - we did make a batch of a hot process soap today scented with baby powder scented fragrance oil.  It is such a nice clean baby smell!  The soap should be ready for use by next Friday.  Isn't it cute?!

At the Mountain Laurel Festival

It's almost been a week since we did the Mountain Laurel Festival, and I guess we are suffering from post (first show) let-down or up as the case may be.

The show was great, we sold soap, lots of soap!  People gave us positive feedback about which scents they liked, loved, were so-so or wanted us to have in the future.  Local merchants asked us to sell our soap in their store, we were invited to other festivals and markets.  It was a really good day.

Both of us were blown away that so many of our friends came to the Festival, not to see the parade, but specifically to support us, that was hands down the best part of the day.  The encouragement and cheer we got from friends and family was wonderful, it is good to have such a network of supporters, we thank all of you for being there and hope you enjoy your soap!

Some of you may have heard the term "Blackberry Winter" - it's probably derived from 18th century folk lore.  In case you've never heard the term, by definition it's the last gasp of cold weather which is supposed to happen when the wild blackberry bushes are blooming or during "blackberry winter"  On the morning of the festival it was 37 degrees!!  Full on Blackberry Winter, on the way to town we observed blooming blackberry bushes everywhere we looked, so much for folk lore!  

Thankfully as we set up the weather was clear, but that didn't last.  As the blustery (we were glad to have concrete blocks weighing the tent corners down) day progressed it went from cold and clear; to cold, overcast, windy and rainy.   Many festival attendees stuck it out, but unfortunately by early afternoon the crowds (and vendors) had thinned considerably.  As the rain started then stopped several times we were kept busy moving the soap away from the blowing rain and trying to keep it dry, soap bubbles flowing down the street we didn't need.

The festival went on into the night but vendors were told to pack up between 3 and 5, we left around 4.  Both of us were exhausted, a combination of excitement, anticipation, then just plain work leading up to and during the festival.  We unloaded the cars and just left everything for a couple of days.

Alison had family stuff to do and Kathy had old friends visiting, so we both switched off the soap buttons in our brains, for a few days anyway.

Below you will see a few pictures that were taken during the festival, note the jackets and long pants!

This picture was early, we still had sun, technically it was taken before the festival started, we were set up and ready to go!

This was later, by this time the sun was gone and rain was on the way.  On the far left you can see Alison's daughter Emma (in green) and if you look really close you can see Alison right behind her.

Tuesday, a "getting organized" kind of day

Tuesday May 13, 2014

Today was supposed to be pricing and labeling all day, but of course it didn't work out that way.  

We had to fix some weird whiteness on our BBG candles. "Weird whiteness" really isn't the way to describe it.  Probably, the clearer picture would be to say that after the candle cooled and solidified, a "bubble" appeared on one side of the candle, down in the jar.  It is not something we can explain.  The jars were not moved after we poured the wax, the liquid wax looked perfectly correct as we poured it in the jars and as it cooled.  It was only after the candles were completely cooled that we noticed the bubbles.  So, we re-melted them (taking care not to get the temperature above the fragrance's flash point) and sat them on a level surface to re-harden.

Once we were satisfied with the BBG candles, we moved on.

Kathy began by whipping up several batches of bath salts, and in the mean time Alison was cutting and pasting coordinating fabric to the lids of the jars the bath salts were to go in.  The scents used in the bath salts are Pink Grapefruit, Lavender and Orange Valencia, all from Lebermuth 

( +Lebermuth Co ).  

We used Avocado oil in the salts because of its moisturizing properties and vitamin E as a preservative.  In the orange and lavender batch we added (respectively) ground orange peel and ground up lavender buds, the grapefruit simply didn't need anything added to it.  What a clean and energizing smell!

Once the bath salts were finished and lids had dried they looked like this:

The individual salts, up close, look like this, first the orange complete with ground orange peel bits.

Next the pink grapefruit, we love the pink color.

And last, the lavender, if you look closely you can see the bits of ground up lavender buds.

We spent the rest of the day counting and labeling, figuring out our cost, and completing other non-creative but very necessary aspects of our festival preparation .   Below is an example of the wrapped and labeled Kudzu soap.  We are actually pretty tickled about how good our soaps look (as well as how they smell!).

Back to work Monday, and one last Mother's Day Surprise

Monday, May 12, 2014


Mother's Day has come and gone, so we both put away our "Queen for a Day" crowns and got back to work.  

Even during the weekends we find ourselves thinking about "soap stuff"!  Saturday "K" found some beautiful white English porcelain cups at a yard sale and decided to make candles in them.  In the mean time "A" had forwarded an article about using tea cups for candles. Great minds think alike you know!  On Saturday afternoon "K" decided to make the candles - solo!

She measured the wax and while it melted, she hot glued the wicks to the base of the cups and stretched blue painter's tape across the tops to keep the wicks in place.  The scents "K" chose were Cannabis Rose from Natures Garden ( +Natures Garden )  and Wisteria and Lilac from Lebermuth  ( +Lebermuth Co ). Choosing the colors was easy - a bright pink for the cannabis rose and lavender for the wisteria/lilac.

The candles turned out nicely and smell great!

Now we return to our normal work week....Monday

With our first official public selling venture this coming Saturday (Mountain Laurel Festival - Clarkesville, GA) we are trying to be organized. For us this may be problematic, but we are trying!  Most of our time this week will be dedicated to pricing, wrapping, labeling and so forth.   We did work in  a little time today for fun in the form of making Lemon Verbena HP soap (see below) and some useful (we hope) candles.

One of the scents we have is called "Bug be Gone" from Lebermuth ( +Lebermuth Co ) . It contains the finest of essential oils including citronella, lemongrass, orange, eucalyptus and litsea cubeba - all of which are known to repel bugs and pesky flying insects.  

We are hoping that our customers dislike pesky flying insects as much as we do.  The future plan is to make some "Bug be Gone" scented soap that you rub on your skin before heading outdoors, the bugs leave you alone, then when you take a shower you just soap it off, you'll be clean and have no bug bites (nirvana!!!)  Stay tuned for BBG soap updates!

Making candles really isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it.  We are still learning new things, though. One thing in particular is called a flash point.

All essential oils and fragrance oils have a flash point. This is a temperature at which the scent will simply "flash," or,  burn off.  If we add essential or fragrance oils when the soap or candles are heated up past the flash point, the fragrance dissapates or cooks off and there will be no scent in the finished item.  Since scent is what this whole process is about, we are very careful about flash points.  Several times in our candle making ventures we've had to let the wax cool down before adding the scent; we have to have the scent!

The following picture is "A" carefully pouring "BBG"  into the jars.

Here is the picture of the BBG candles once they had cooled down, very pretty pale yellow.

It's really a pale yellow, the color in the picture below is spot on.

This batch of soap that we made today will be the last one we will have time to make until the Mountain Laurel Festival is over. 

We decided to use one of the scents we both love, and that people have requested - Lemon Verbena.   We have used it in bath salts and sugar scrubs and now soap.  We used the HP (hot process) method today with our traditional recipe of palm, olive, coconut and castor oils mixed with the lye/water.  We decided to use a little yellow colorant to give the Lemon in the lemon verbena a little punch, we also added titanium dioxide (TD) to lighten the soap a little.

The oils melted in the crock pot while the lye was cooling.  Once the oils were all melted, we added the lye/water and gave it a few jolts from the stick blender; it began to emulsify immediately.

We stirred it for a few minutes and got it to light/medium trace pretty quickly, we covered the crock pot and waited about 15 minutes.  When we peeked we found the soap had hardened somewhat and was gelling on the edges of the pot.

If you look closely you can see the gel on the edge, it's a slightly different color and looks almost translucent.

We've been reading a lot about HP soap making and learned that the more you stir the soap the more evenly it will cook, so we are stirring this HP soap quite a bit.  In the picture below you can see the stage called "mashed potato", honestly it looks exactly like potatoes, almost good enough to eat (if it didn't smell all soapy).

While the soap looks like mashed potatoes on the surface, it is still cooking, and slowly the whole batch begins to look like it's gelling. In the picture below, you can see the gelling underneath the "potatoes"; this is why we kept stirring.

The next picture is a close up of the previous one, it shows the gel up close on the right side.

Now the object is to incorporate all the lumpy "potato" clumps into the gelled soap, the soap is pretty stiff at this point which turns the stirring into a mini work out.

In the picture above you can see it's mostly gel with a few lumps, total time elapsed is about 1-1/2 to 2 hours at this point.  We wanted to get all the little lumps stirred down into the soap.  Which is what the next picture shows.

As you can see we have very few lumps left, the soap is kind of satiny looking, very glossy and smooth, we keep on stirring. 

After we reached this smooth stage we kept stirring and testing using PH sticks, which we discovered are pretty much worthless.  So we relied on the zap test, it tasted like soap, but just for good measure we cooked it another 5 minutes!  The point here is to be sure that the lye has completely reacted with the oils to make soap leaving no trace of lye behind.

We added the lemon verbena scent to the soap, then once it was thoroughly mixed we added the titanium dioxide (TD) to whiten the soap.  We took about 3 - 4 cups of soap out and put it into a measuring cup in which we mixed in the yellow colorant.   Once the yellow was mixed we then spooned it back into the crock pot and softly swirled the yellow into the white just enough to make a "lemon" statement.

The soap was ready to put in the mold, and in this case we are using our 18 bar wooden mold from Bramble Berry ( +Bramble Berry ).  Scooping the soap into the mold was necessary as it was too stiff to pour.  We tamped the soap down several times to prevent air bubbles.

The soap cured for 24 hours then looked like this (picture below):  (pretty much the same way it did when we put it in yesterday)

Let us just say this soap smells amazing! It's a fresh, clean, lemony scent that is great!  Here is the group shot.

You can see the hint of yellow threaded through the soap in the last shot. Come by the Soap Lily booth and smell for yourself on Saturday.

We can't close out our Monday post without a giant thank you to "K's" husband "A" 

(oh gosh, these initials are getting too confusing!).   

Ok, a giant thank you to Kathy's husband Arty who presented her with the best Mother's day gift ever... a 10 x 10 shade tent!!!  Isn't it interesting how after 40 plus years jewelry, diamonds, etc don't mean a thing?  Give a girl a shade tent and it's the best gift ever!  We will post pictures of the tent set up with our soap (and Soap Lily banners) next week.  Maybe we can even try to really be on top of our technology and blog a little while we're at the festival.  We'll see... :-)