Liquid Soap

My first solo foray into liquid soap. This recipe has olive oil in and is fragranced with May Chang, so is lovely and lemony. I had a bit of a mishap, because I forgot to heat the water so the soap past became a large solid blob. Once that was sorted, the paste dissolved nicely and liquid soap was made. This is the glycerine method, so in theory, it is usable straight away and there is no curing time.

I love the colour of natural, handmade liquid soap. None of this pink and blue nonsense, just various shades of gold which look beautiful with the light shining through.

Now that I know how to make it, I need to play about with some receipes to see what I like best before getting my assessment. I would like to try a bit of shea butter, but wonder if it will go cloudy?

I really must....

.... Get more organised. I have come to the realisation that I am not going to earn a living from the business unless I stop allowing myself to get distracted by the minutiae of things around me. I find myself sitting down for five minutes with a cup of coffee only to find it is an hour and a half later and that I have been sitting staring mindlessly at the television.

Yes, I know it is my own fault, and that I have the attention span of a gnat,  that I allow myself to easily become distracted, but it has to stop. I have a day job, run a small petsitting business and I have the soapy stuff, and there are not enough hours in the day for all of it. I go to bed annoyed with myself because I have vegged out instead of ploughing through an ever growing list of things to do. On the plus side, I do seem to manage to write the lists at least. They just do not seem to get any shorter. A start would be putting the laptop on the desk rather than sitting with it on my knee in the lounge, thereby allowing the t.v. to get in the way.

My head is stuffed to the gills with ideas for things I want to do if only I had the time. I have a couple of fairs in June, and I want to re-package the bath salts to see if they sell more.

Did you miss me? I have been missing for half an hour to wrap some half-sized soaps which are going to go into travel sets, packaging to be decided. Looking at them, they would make perfect guest soaps too.

A strange beast

And here is the cut soap. The colour is unever which I like because it makes it interesting and gives texture. The very top looks almost white (ash I think) so the swirls visible yesterday are hardly showing. The jury is out.

Freedom

The weekend has rolled around again and a couple of days of freedom have arrived. It feels like it has been a long week.

Last weekend, I made liquid soap for the first time. It was good fun, and is something I really need to master before I can get the legalities under way. At the moment the soap is unfragranced, and I am waiting for some bottles to arrive so that I can decant it and try out various fragrances. It will be really interesting to see if the essential oils behave differently in liquid soap rather than solid cold process soaps.

I want to have a go at making bath bombs type things at the weekend. Sometime last year, I made shea bath melts which are nice, but not quite as much fun as having a fizzing bomb release its fragrance. I was recently sent one to test and it was gorgeous. That, of course, is the fun part. I test my essential oil combinations in the bath (well there do have to be some perks) and I did the same thing with the bath melts I made.

There are so many things I want to have a go at making, but there are just not enough hours in the day. I have plans for new products, and I am slowly learing how to make them, but then you have the testing side of things and anything which not anhydrous has to be challenged tested which is not at all cheap.

Today I made a batch of Lavender and Patchouli cold process soap. I was going to try to do the same as last time with a nice solid layer of uncoloured soap on the top. Yeah! Fat chance. You see, I can do things once and they are usually a happy accident, but try to plan to do it again, and it does not work. So I am going to have a very thin layer of uncoloured soap on the top with the alkanet infused soap at the bottom. Goodness knows what it will look like.

That is what I like about this soap making lark. You are never really sure what you are going to end up with. You can use the same ingredients each time you make a batch of soap, you can try to make the new batch look the same as the old one but the soap has other ideas. You effectively get what you are given, like it or lump it. I like it.

The trouble with long weekends

The trouble with long weekends is going back to work. It is bad enough after a standard weekend, but when you have had four days away from the office, it is so much harder to chain yourself to a desk again, especially when the sun is shining. I have never liked the routine of office and paperwork, but I have a mortgage, ergo no choice. So, tomorrow the chain will be out and I will be back into the routine.

On a happier note, soy wax candles are available to buy on the website. The first fragrance we have released is the lovely Lemongrass and Ginger. It is a light, fresh and uplifting fragrance.