Soap Lily: A little bit of this, and a little bit of kudzu

Kudzu scented HP soap

Monday October 6, 2014

The Foxfire Festival was great! Not only did we sell a LOT of soap, but we also made many new friends, saw incredible handcrafted art, made new business contacts, and oh, did I mention sold a lot of soap!

We headed to the Civic Center in Clayton, GA on Friday afternoon to go ahead and set up so we would be ready to go on Saturday morning. Once we arrived we found my (basket making) friend Randy who showed us where our booth was and introduced us to Gene, the other person sharing the booth.

Randy, as you might imagine, was selling her beautiful hand made cards, cork wreaths and topiaries, and of course her hand crafted baskets. Gene had colorful woven cloth baskets, bowls, and trays as well as nifty hand-woven (macrame type) wine bottle holders. The wine bottle holders are really unique as they can hang anywhere, but they also make it easy for someone with large hands to grab the carrier and go.

We all got busy setting up our areas and arranging things, and before you knew it we were ready.

Our booth was located right next to exit doors which made unloading (and loading)

a breeze. Above you can see the end of the booth where we set up our

"office" (note the chairs). A few minutes later Gene graciously loaned us extra

table cloths for the area where the chairs are parked.

Here is the view looking towards our "office" from the aisle. You can see how

close the exit doors were and how much soap we had.

The above photo looks directly into the booth from the aisle. We had not yet been in a festival set up where we had to worry about covering both sides of our tables, so were most

appreciative when Gene offered her extra table cloths. Having the tables covered

all the way around was visually more appealing.

Saturday morning the four of us met for breakfast then headed to the Civic Center. We noticed right off that Clayton was full of people - this we took as a good sign.

This is what our shared booths looked like, Randy and Gene had most of their stuff on the left side and we had the right side.

Once we arrived and stashed our purses and water bottles, it was almost time to start, and as soon as the people came in it was non stop all day! We had a little time to walk around inside our building, but not much time to walk outside and view all the great vendors who set up behind the Civic Center (and there were lots of them).

The day flew by and before we knew it, it was almost five. As usual after shows like this, there was a mad scramble to pack up and get home. Some vendors had driven a long way, but luckily we only had to drive about 20 miles to get home. All in all the Foxfire Festival was a great experience for us and we hope to do it again next year.

During the festival, we completely sold out of our Kudzu soap. It was fun to see that we aren't the only ones who love the sweet scent. Given that there is another festival coming up soon, we are assuming that Kudzu will continue to be well loved, so today we made our third batch of HP Kudzu soap.

The scent comes from +Natures Garden and is described as having

"top notes of muscadine, strawberries, and fresh peach; middle notes of

jasmine, muguet lily, and violet, with a base note of sheer musk."

We know most people don't stop to smell the Kudzu when it blooms, but if you did, you would be pleasantly surprised at what a sweet scent it has.

We mixed up our lye/water, then added it to a combination of coconut, castor, olive and sustainable palm oils that were warming in the crock pot.

It didn't take much mixing with the stick blender until we were at heavy trace.

We let it cook for 30 minutes, then checked it.

We used Enchanted Forest Mica from www.rusticescentuals.com, It has

become our "go to" green because we really like how well it blends, and

the finished color once the soap is cured.

This is the Enchanted Forest Mica mixed into a tablespoon of Safflower oil, it will be added to the soap once it is finished cooking.

We let the soap cook for 30 minutes without touching it.

The photo above shows what it looked like, puffed up and already in the gel stage.

We put the lid back on and cooked the mixture for another hour, stirring every 15 minutes.

Once the soap was done, we tested the batter with PH strips, then performed the zap test. All test results were ok, so we declared the soap done.

We added the Kudzu fragrance oil mixing it into the batter thoroughly.

Next we removed about 3 cups of batter and combined it with the Enchanted Forest Mica, again, mixing it in very thoroughly.

Pictured above is the Enchanted Forest Mica portion of the batter.

Once the green batter was evenly mixed, we added it back to the white batter in the crock pot and gently folded the two colors together for an "in the pot swirl"