Like Kathy has already said, we have just been so busy that we haven't been taking the time to stop and share every day. I do want to write about a soap that my son and I made. Well, he mostly made it. I got him started, and then left him with it while Kathy and I worked on the beautiful mica hanger swirls that we made.
As much as I love the creativity and artistry of the beautifully colored and scented soaps that Kathy and I make, I also feel a strong pull to make some naturally colored and scented (or unscented) soaps that have skin soothing and healing properties. That is a personal thing for me as I have dealt with acne off and on since I was 13, and now have a daughter who must deal with eczema daily.
If you ever shop in Clarkesville, you may have noticed Roots 'N Remedies on the square. It is a very nice shop, and the owner Krupa and top sales associate Victoria are both extremely helpful and knowledgeable about the herbs and natural products they carry in the store. (By the way, if you are looking to pick up a few bars of Soap Lily soaps, you can look in Roots 'N Remedies!) +Roots N Remedies as they carry 12 different scents.
While in the store Krupa spent a great deal of time talking to me about different herbs and products and about the benefits of turmeric specifically. As a child in India, if she had a scrape or cut, she said that her dad would just rub straight turmeric directly onto the wound because of its antiseptic and healing properties. Hmmmmm...I thought.
See where I'm going with this?
I decided to make a soap with turmeric to see if it might help with some skin blemishes and irritations. I have also been wanting to use teas, so Conor and I decided to just go for it with this soap and try the tea as well as the turmeric. We started out by using distilled water to brew a nice batch of chamomile tea. Then we set it aside to let it cool.
We used a recipe with four basic oils. For the lye/water mixture, we used the chamomile tea rather than plain distilled water. Chamomile is such a soothing drink, we imagined it being soothing for the skin if we used it in our soap. That's why the water doesn't look clear in the picture below. Don't worry! The water isn't polluted.
For even more skin soothing-ness, we added colloidal oatmeal to our batter.
Conor measured out the star of today's show and added it to the soap batter,
stirred it all together, then put the lid on the crock pot to let it cook.
We made it a point to stir it every 15 minutes and make sure that it was evenly mixed. After about an hour, it was getting closer to the "mashed potato" stage that we look for, but with the color of this batch of soap it was harder to tell.
At this point Kathy began to voice her opinion about the smell of this soap. Conor quickly joined the chorus. Personally, I thought it smelled like walking into Earth Fare, but they were very descriptive about what they thought it smelled like.
It was a weird moment for me. My husband refers to me as the human bloodhound because if it stinks, I smell it. Yet here I was, rather enjoying the natural scent of this herbal soap, and everyone else was telling me how terrible it smelled.
I couldn't win, so Kathy and Conor decided to add some fragrance to the soap. They finally decided on Litsea Cubeba which gave the soap a very clean herbal lemon scent. I will admit that the final soap does smell very good, and when I gave a bar of it to my dad, the first thing he said was, "Mmmm. This really smells good."
The recipe made a small batch, so we used our silicone mold, and below you can see how the soap looked when we pressed it into the mold to cool and harden.
We later cut it into bars, and then Conor used his iPod to take pictures of his final product. We have actually been using this soap ourselves, and we really love it. It does seem to have soothing, healing properties. Sometimes we have to be our own guinea pigs, but perhaps we will make this soap again soon for others to enjoy.
I have made several tea soaps. There is something that you can do to avoid the initial unpleasant smell. One way is to make your tea with only a small portion of your water for the batch, add your lye to the remaining water and add the tea after the soap has emeulsified. Another thing to be aware of is while it does smell somewhat unpleasant for a few days after a few days on the curing rack the smell changes to a very mild pleasant scent. I was really disappointed with my first tea soap initailly, but when I smelled it after a few days the smell was like a light pleasant cup of tea. You can go check you the results on my blog @ cabinofbows.blogspot.com :) Happy soaping!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your reply! We appreciate your experience and information. I will definitely try that next time and am actually very excited about it. Can't wait to check out your blog. Thanks for sharing it with us.
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