Catching up for Feb.

#catchingupontheblog #handmadesoap #soaplilysoaps #Februaryrecap

We haven't been good bloggers. No, not at all.

What's the problem, you ask?  One big item was Alison's high school senior son had a pretty nasty accident and conked his head, and when we use the term conked, we mean big old skull fracture, overnight in hospital, concussion kind of conk.  Naturally Alison was preoccupied with keeping an eye on her son and making sure he followed all the doctors instructions so he could recover with no complications.  Happily almost 2 months after the accident he seems quite himself with (thankfully) no residual problems……whew!

Kathy was somewhat occupied with a more fun occupation - helping her daughter move. Yes, it was actually fun!  Our energies weren't quite 100% on soap making in early Feb.

The time just slipped away, in addition to tending son's and daughters's we were busy making all kinds of soap, working on the youtube videos, making sachets, making more soap and generally staying pretty busy, just not blogging.  So the next two posts will briefly catch you up on what Soap Lily has been up to, this one focusing on February and the next one on March.

In early February we started out making what we hoped would be a cool design, we call it the sundial swirl.  However like some great ideas, this one didn't work very well.  You can watch the making of the Sundial Swirl on that link.  The soap smelled great and the colors are just what we wanted, however, the swirling plan we hoped for didn't quite turn out.  

Cold process Sundial Swirl

We rarely get discouraged, though, because no matter how far our creations go from our original idea, in the end it's still soap, and it will do the job it's supposed to.  So, we forged ahead. One of our customers loved the Orange 5X essential oil, jasmine FO, and sweet patchouli FO blend we used in the Sundial swirl and wanted it to sell, so we whipped up a batch of HP soap using the same colors and fragrances.  It's much harder to do artistic swirls with HP so we decided to do an IPS (in the pot swirl) and it turned out fine. We're happy to report it is selling quite well (always a plus).

 Hot process Sundial Swirl

We pushed on into February and made a batch of HP Honeysuckle soap.  It seems as winter drags on our customers want to push spring's arrival with this familiar warm weather scent.  There is nothing fancy or earth shattering about this soap, it just smells good and continues to be one of our best sellers.  To make it we used Honeysuckle FO from Natures Garden which we love, the batter was brightened up with an IPS (in the pot swirl) of Yellow Vibrance and Moss Green, both from Nurture Soaps.

Hot Process Honeysuckle

The next soap could have been called Fat Tuesday soap because the colors are reminiscent of the colors of Mardi Gras. That wasn't planned, just a happy accident.  We used the tall and skinny mold for this one and scented it with a new combination (for us anyway) of essential oils: Lemon, Lavender, and Litsea Cubeba.  Oh boy, does it smell good! It's such fun to play with EO's; we don't always know if it's going to be a hit or miss, and this was a big hit.  The picture below shows the CP swirled soap on the R.  The HP bar on the L is from a batch we made for one of our customers.  She smelled the freshly made CP and wanted it to sell "as fast as I can get it" the resulting HP batch we made for her using an IPS.  They both smell great.

HP (L) & CP (R)

Lavender, Lemon, and Litsea Cubeba

Since it seemed we were on a roll, we used a FO that people seem to love called Oatmeal and Honey. We bought it from Lebermuth and LOVE it. We usually make this soap using the HP method, but this time decided to go with a CP batch so we could get all swirly.  Although it is called Oatmeal & Honey, the smell of almond is very noticable, so given the design we decided to call this soap Amaretto Swirl.

We forgot to add the colloidal oatmeal to the soap batter (big oopsie) so sprinkled some on the top once it was in the mold.  Sprinkling the oatmeal isn't as beneficial as adding it to the batter, but we hope customers will still get some exfoliation benefit from the dusting on top. Next time we will remember - add to batter.  Since neither honey, almonds or oatmeal screams bright colors we used arctic white from Rustic Escentuals in the base batter and then used aborigine amber from RE lightened with titanium dioxide from Brambleberry, and black star red from RE to create a soothing monochromatic swirl.

Amaretto Swirl

We found a great FO scent at Aztec International called Walk in the Woods.  If you follow the link you will see it's a great blend.  We think our customers will like it as much as we do.  We took some to some of our local customers and they immediately wanted it for their stores.  Since we live in an area where outdoor activities are a BIG tourist draw, we hope that this soap will prove to be a hit. We sure do like it.  Since our batch was HP we did an IPS using patina sheen from BB, aborigine amber mixed with gold sparks mica from RE, and the third color had no added colorant. After all, it had to be a little rustic looking, right?

Walk in the Woods

A soap we made last year for one of Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club entries is called the Clyde Slide, named for a technique that Clyde Yoshida of Vibrant Soap developed.  We had a ball making the first batch using a delightful FO from RE called Cranberry Salsa.  Once again, the soap was a big hit (yay) and we had to recreate it for our customers so they could provide "that great smelling colorful" soap to their customers.  Obviously we couldn't recreate it exactly, but we sure tried.  You can watch us make this soap here.  We used the same colorants Clementine Pop, Desert Sunbeam, Arctic White, Pistachio, & Sunburst Sparkle - also all from Rustic Escentuals, and the design we were trying to achieve for the soap challenge came out better this time, as they say practice, practice…...

Clyde Slide #2

Towards the end of February we tried Star Wars soap much to the delight of Alison's son and Kathy's grandson who both LOVE all things SW related.  Alison found some silicone molds online and away we went.  We played around with colors for a while and here we make the soap.  It was fun, and we learned that the X Wing Fighters have to go into the freezer before un-molding or the delicate wings will break off.  The detail on the soap is amazing, we have a list of people who are waiting for these soaps.  We tried making it using HP, it worked, sort of,  but we lost some of the detail we got with CP.  We tried it again HP and added some of the liquid at the end of the cook to keep it more liquid and that worked.  So now almost every time we make a batch of HP soap Alison sneaks a 1/2 cup out of the batter and churns out more SW soap.  

Star wars

Even though it's spring time we have people who love, love, love pumpkin scented soap (not mentioning any names, but one of the Soap Lily's could be suspect, right Alison?) However, finding a good scent that really smells like pumpkin proved tricky. We read tons of descriptions, reviews etc. and  finally decided on a Sweet Pumpkin FO from Rustic Escentuals.  We are very happy with the resulting PUMPKIN soap, yes,  there is a little vanilla, and it's going to turn dark, that's ok.  The main thing is it isn't all spicy, maybe there is a hint of nutmeg, cinnamon etc. it is mainly PUMPKIN and that's what we wanted so from now on this FO will be our go-to for Pumpkin soap.  We made a HP batch and of course did the ever popular IPS.  We tried to get a nice warm pumpkin-esque color but that was a pretty big fail because (as we knew it would) the soap has turned a nice dark brown color.

Sweet Pumpkin

Since it is spring and it seems we are going to launch right into summer (temps as this is written are in high 80's already and it's only mid March!) we know mosquitos and other summertime pests are going to be around so it's time to make our Bug B Gone soap.  In the past we just made a plain bar of white soap, but this year we got a bit more creative.  We designed the ever familiar "NO" symbol of a red  circle with a slash across it in over our own version of a bug (please use your imagination).  We have to say that the Really Red mica we used from Nurture Soaps is the best! It's RED, yes really red, they named it perfectly. We used a pre mixed EO blend from the Lebermuth company then we added some tea tree EO to that, hopefully blending a trifecta that will discourage annoying insects.  We used the Ebru technique on this soap and you can watch us make it here.

Bug B Gone

It seems whenever we use the squirt bottles, which we did making the Bug B Gone, we have left over batter.  So we felt it appropriate to use the left over batter in our silicone bug and insect molds.  The colors are crazy - University of GA fans are sure to love it (UGA colors are, can you guess Red and Black).

Bug B Gone extras

Moving right along towards the end of February we decided to make a batch of Cucumber Melon soap.  It smells so good, makes you think of slicing into a ripe, juicy melon and it's one of the first things you smell when you walk into the curing room!  Both of us love to swirl, and a specific swirl Alison has been itching to do is called the Taiwan Swirl, well she got to do it and it is spectacular.

We blended colors from several places to achieve the shades we wanted trying to match up the cucumber and melon colors.  The colors we used include the following: Lemon Sherbert from RE, Neon Yellow from Crafters Choice, Harlequin Green from RE, Moss Green from RE, Chrome Green from Nurture Soaps, Patina Sheen from BB, Moon Kissed Nights from RE, Apple Green and Green Vibrance from Nurture Soaps.  We love this soap! It looks so pretty and actually smells better than it looks.

Cucumber Melon Taiwan Swirl

Planning ahead - hmmmm, sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't. This time Kathy actually remembered that the first week of April she's going to be attending her 50th (talk about time flying, where did the last 50 years go?) high school class reunion.  What better way to commemorate the occasion than a bar of soap for special friends.  We got busy and designed the soap, again we used the Ebru technique (thanks again to Amy Warden for having this in the soap challenge).  We blended a nice combination of EO's that may make it into our regular line up.  We had left over batter so once again used our "extra soap" silicone rose mold with the end result being quite pretty.

Reunion soap and bonus bars

And finally, to wrap up February we finished up with what else but Total Hot Man.  We know we are going into the time of year when we have numerous shows and this soap is a big seller, so we're trying to be smart and stock up.  We've made so many batches of Total Hot Man we've lost count.  The popular FO comes from Natures Garden, and we should just buy it by the gallon. Yes, it's that popular.  For this batch we made HP soap and used an IPS with Copper Sparkle Mica from BB, and Passionata and Toffeelicious micas fromRE. We try to use what we think are "manly" colors; the end result is great and this scent continues to be one of our most popular sellers.

Total Hot Man and our new method of wrapping

So that is our February recap.

We created a lot of soap, and we will have youtube videos to add to some of these.  Alison is our video editor and there is only so much time in the day, so we run behind on posting them.  

One of the changes we've decided on is to move away from the fabric wrapped soap.  It was a great concept; however, as the soap cures it gets smaller and inevitebly we wind up with loose fabric that looks sketchy.  The fabric wrap took a lot of time and effort not to mention depleting our fabric stash. So for now we are going to wrap the bars with raffia and attach the label on a tag.  We may come up with something more exciting in the future, but for now this is our new look.

The next post will be what happened in the Soap Lily kitchen during the month of March. So much excitement….hope you will check it out.