Economics

We spent a lot of time on Thursday trying to figure out where we can get the things we need at the best possible price.  After all, there is no never-ending penny in either of our pockets, so we must try to be careful.

First, we are in no way connected with any supplier, so the information we share is not intended to promote any particular business or individual.  We are just sharing what we are finding, and we hope that if anyone reads our blog and knows of something better, then he or she will share that with us.

This week, the best price for olive oil and coconut oil that we could find was at Sam's Club.  We know a couple of people locally who own restaurants, so we are going to check with them this week about their prices and suppliers for oils.

We checked on Amazon.com, but discovered something interesting.  One of us has a Prime account and one does not.  We were on our individual computers checking prices, and our computers were each displaying a different price for the same product...hmmm...

We are going to make our first attempt at using colors for artistic effects (we will try to share video), so we needed to purchase a variety of colors.  We found a good variety with good prices and helpful directions on brambleberry.com.  That site also had better prices for sweet almond and palm oils.  We really love the things we have purchased from brambleberry.com; we just wish that the labels on the bottles had the amounts written on them.  Also, with this purchase we found a few fragrances on sale that we couldn't pass up.  We just wish it would get here faster!  We placed the order on Thursday afternoon, and when the order shipped confirmation came through, the tracking information indicated that it will arrive the following Friday - 8 days later.

One new (to us) site that we discovered is based in Indiana - http://lebermuth.com/. We found the best prices here for essential oils.  Be prepared, though.  There is no minimum required order, but if you order less than $300 in products, there will be a $20 fee.  Even with that fee and shipping charges, we found the price at this site to be the best for the essential oils that we wanted.  The site is organized extremely well, and it is very easy to find the oils that will work well for soap.  Material Safety Data Sheets are available for the products with the click of a button.

We want to try some fragrances as well as essential oils, so we also compared prices for fragrance oils.  We found a better price for those at http://www.naturesgardencandles.com/.  The organization of this site is also very helpful.  You can search for scents alphabetically or by type (bakery, fruit, seasons, etc). You can even search by color; for example, pink scents include fragrances like cashmere, bubblegum, "Dare to be Sexy," fluffy pink candy, or floral bouquet.  This Web store offered a discount of $1 per bottle if we ordered at least 5 bottles of 16 oz.  Having never ordered from this company before, we can't comment on the quality of their products (we're about to find out), but the product reviews that we read sound promising.

There are a few other sites that we really LOVE, and we love the products that they offer.  We just aren't quite ready to spend the money that their products cost.  Maybe we'll talk about those on another day.

Again, we are not employees of any of the above mentioned sites and we have no vested interest in them (other than being interested in which one has the cheapest prices on the things we need!).  Hope this helps.

Not All Talk and No Action

We aren't only thinking about it and planning for it.  We are actually making some soap that we LOVE.

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).

Cyber Name

Arrrgh!  I never knew that there were so many different places in cyber space that will host domain names, web sites, and blogs!

We spent ALL DAY yesterday conducting research on how to get a domain name and build a web site that has e-commerce capabilities.  We looked at the different service providers and reviews and top 10 lists and reviews then new providers then more reviews...We ended the day overwhelmed with information.

Here's the funny thing, though.  When we first decided on a name (finally!) we checked everywhere we could think of to be sure that Soap Lily was not already being used.  We couldn't find it.  So we started this blog using the name.  As we were conducting our research yesterday, we were on a couple of domain hosts' sites and typed in soaplily to make sure we could get it should we decide to go that route.  When we typed it in there, we found that someone must own it.  It isn't being used for a Website, but we could purchase the name through an auction.

What?!

I think some little spiderbots are crawling around the Web, and when they see someone type in a new name they buy it up so that person has to shell out cash for his or her own idea.  Does that sound too conspiratorial?

We're still just too small to shell out over $200 for a domain name (it's okay and I won't be offended if you want to go ahead and infer that by "small" I really mean "broke"), but I'm afraid if we don't get something that is close to the name we want, we'll end up with nothing that even resembles soaplily.  With that in mind, I paused here, mid-paragraph, went over to godaddy.com., and just registered and parked a domain name that we can live with:  soap-lily.com.  Sure we wanted it without the hyphen, but it's better than something like "the1soap-lilysoap.com".

Why godaddy?  Because, after having read about namescheap, 1&1, iPage, bluehost, fatcow, Webgator, Gandi, and all of the others, a good friend who is an expert told me to to go with godaddy.  That was enough for me.

At any rate, we have the name now should we decide to build a Web page.  We just have to remember to renew the registration in a year.  Anyone who knows us probably started laughing as soon as they read the word "remember."

What is in a Name?

What is in a Name?

Ok. So, now we have decided to become soap artists. What do we do next? 

 Actually we did the boring part first. We created a spread sheet comparing prices of the basic ingredients we would use. We learned very quickly that we need to find a wholesale supplier.  Maybe we need to repackage and sell the supplies ourselves to help cover the costs of our artistry. Instead of soap artists, maybe we should be suppliers for the East coast.

Oh, fiddle dee dee. We'll think about that another day (right, Scarlett?).

We wanted to do the fun part and come up with a super-creative name that instantly screams success and product identification. Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with a name that is creative, says what you want it to say, and doesn't pop up on the first page of a Google search?! We were shocked and, quite frankly, discouraged. If there are so many soap makers, is there even a place in the market for us?

Nope. We won't even think about it that way. On with the brainstorming...

We started with our last name – since we're married to brothers, at least that is the same. Guess what?! Taken! SO we switched to our first names, but then we had to decide which one of us should be first. Alphabetically? Age before beauty? Nah. We didn't go there.  Our real names were not really the way we wanted to go, so we nixed that pretty quickly. 

 What about nicknames? Every variation of our nicknames showed up in either a Google search or on Facebook. It was quite the bubble buster because we think of ourselves as such original individuals. Oh well, we move on.

We really didn't want a geographically identifiable name because if one day our dreams come true and we are able to own a house on a beach, the name wouldn't travel well. 

We looked out the window and started naming birds. Hummingbird Soap Works, Woodpecker Soaps...taken. Trees were taken. Kitchen Door soaps was taken. Even Kitchen Sink! (I think – or maybe we vetoed that idea because we didn't want it to sound like we throw everything into our soaps.)

My particular favorite was Bubbles Galore, but the one of us who uses real greenery at Christmas thought it sounded too much like a stripper. SO?!

One of the reasons we decided to make soap was because we like the idea of using something that is home made with natural ingredients.  With that in mind, we turned back to nature. There is a group of plants that will lather or suds up when rubbed between the hands with water. My son, the Boy Scout, came up with that idea. 

 Acording to wikipedia, “the juices of the bulb contain saponins that form a lather when mixed with water,[7] and both Native American people (e.g. Miwok tribe [8]) and early European settlers used the bulbs as a kind of soap; this is the origin of the plant's name. It was particularly used for washing hair, since it was held to be effective against dandruff.[9]”

One such plant is known as the Soap Lily. We like the name, we like the botanical qualities, we like the logo possibilities. And, thus, Soap Lily was born.

A budding Soap Lily

So, what happens when two sisters (-in-law) decide to embrace their creative sides and make homemade gifts for everyone for Christmas?

YES! They become obsessed. (their husbands might say POssessed, but it's all in your point of view.)



You might say that our creative streak is a clean streak because we decided to make homemade soap. How hard could it be? Claire made it in the Outlander series, and just a few generations ago people regularly made their own. We imagined how great it would smell, how wonderful our skin would feel, how much our family and friends would love us, and we were not wrong.

We made some DANG good gifts this past Christmas. Then we began to imagine all of the possibilities, and the obsession (POssession) was born.

We could write pages and pages explaining the soap-making process (and we may at some point), but that information is easily available in any of a number of places.  Our experience, however, is our own, and we plan to share our journal (NOT our "journey."  Gag - I am SO SICK of every reality personality referring to what they do as a "journey."  Can no one think of anything original to call it?).

When the Christmas excitement died down, we just couldn't pack away our soap supplies with the boxes of ornaments and greenery (okay - only one of us uses the fake stuff, so only one of us packed away any greenery).  Instead, we made more soap!

It wasn't long before we began to wonder whether it is possible to actually sell our creations to earn at least enough money to pay for the supplies and continue to feed our creativity (habit).  Follow us along on our journ...no!  Did I really almost say that?!  Follow us along on our transmigration.  No, that doesn't work either.  Our sojourn, our junket, our venture, our adventure, our...heck!  Just follow us.  We don't know exactly where we're going yet, but we think it will be fun to find out.