Cupcakes

I made cupcake soap!!! First ones ever... turned out super cute... learned to make "whipped soap" for the frosting from one of the many forums I am a member of... thank you "Soapmaking Forum."

A website that gives great instruction on whipped soap is Nizzy.com... fantastic instructions!

To make whipped soap, you start with the lye/water mixture and let it get cold... ice cold... I put mine in an ice bath in the sink and just let it sit till it was very cold. You don't melt the oils with this soap either... start by putting the "hard oils" like palm and coconut in a bowl and using the whisk attachment for the mixer, whip it up till it's light like whipped cream, then add the "liquid oils" such as olive, and essential oil(s) and any other additives you wish at this point (I added some cocoa powder to make mine "chocolatey" and peppermint essential oil)... continue whipping for a bit... then slowly add the lye/water mixture... soon you have a consistency similar to cake frosting and you (wearing gloves!!!!!) scoop the mixture into a cake decorating bag with a star tip attached and pipe a swirl on top of cupcake "cakes" previously made using cupcake paper liners in a muffin tin (these I made using my honey oatmeal cold process soap recipe) and there you have it... adorable cupcake soaps!

The whipped soap takes a little longer to cure... they need a few weeks (4-6) before using them... but they are so cute and look good enough to eat!

My Apprentice

My dear Hugh is a wonderful man, loving, giving and kind to me... He's smart, funny, and knows how to do a lot of things. Only one thing comes to mind about him that could present any problem... when he is doing something he likes to be in charge... not a problem... usually...

I have been making soap for a lot of years and have my soaping routine down to a "science." I know what goes where and when.

Hugh has been serving as webmaster/shipping clerk/marketing person and more in this business venture at Southern Heart Soaps and he is a master whatever hat he is wearing. But up until this past weekend he was NOT allowed in the soapmaking "lab!" That's my domain... that's where I rule, where I reign as queen! I wear the crown here!

He expressed a wish to learn soapmaking from me, the master! LOL! How could I say no? His argument was valid... at this point in our venture, he has more time than I do, what if we had a deadline and needed product and I was too busy?

Well All Righty Then... but... you have to do what I say... EXACTLY... no question... no putting your own ideas in there... I am the queen here and you are the apprentice... OK? OK! Let's make soap!

We set about making two batches of beer soap... one with Guinness, a tried and true recipe, and one with Blue Moon. We decided to grate orange zest into the Blue Moon and add orange essential oil for scent... who doesn't love a Blue Moon and Orange?

He did great... followed the recipe and my directions perfectly, he understands the care needed when working with a chemical like lye so no problems there, as a matter of fact he works a bit "cleaner" than I do, so that was a plus. I was very very proud of my apprentice! Our soap is now curing nicely and looks and smells delightful.

But I am still queen! The formulations are mine, the technique is mine, the "soap lab" is mine... but he done good! Maybe a promotion to knight is warranted... or at least soapster... not soapmaster yet! Love, Love, Love that man!

An Experiment in Rosemary Hair Conditioner

So... all this research and reading about sodium lauryl sulfate and other such skin and hair irritants that seem to be found in almost ALL commercial soaps, shampoos, and conditioners, plus all the unnecessary artificial fragrances, colorants and chemicals, has me wanting to make my own hair care products.

Shampoo will be more of a challenge, because it's made in a similar way to my cold process soap, but with potassium hydroxide instead of sodium hydroxide. Don't have it on hand... YET! But I will! Liquid soap and shampoo are projects I must put on the back burner of my mind for now.

But... a little more research and I found that hair conditioner is made pretty much like lotion... I think... I thought... maybe!

Googled hair conditioner recipes and mostly I got things like "mash up an avocado and put it on your head" or "mash a banana" or "crack and egg" or use vinegar, beer, lemon juice, etc. Not what I wanted, I was searching for a recipe that I could bottle and use and maybe eventually add to my product line... so... searched the soapmaking forum I am a member of... nobody had any answers there either... Google again... this time searched for emulsified hair conditioner recipe... about the 25th one down on the list was a recipe that looked like what I wanted... I tried my version of it... this is what I mixed together...
2 oz. oils (I used 1 oz. coconut oil, 1 oz. avocado butter)
8 oz. water
Preservative (used the Germabin II that I use in my lotions)
I added
a little bit of glycerin
2 Tbsp. emulsifying wax
Rosemary essential oil (which is wonderful for hair!)

It smelled wonderful... as soon as it cooled down, I jumped in the shower, washed my hair with my regular shampoo and applied my new conditioner!!! It felt good, smelled great, seemed to rinse out nicely...

Toweled my hair and pulled out the hair dryer... dried and dried my hair... still looked wet! Yikes... it was time to go to work!!! It was a rainy, humid day so thought my long, thick, wavy hair was just taking longer than usual to dry... so hairbanded it back and headed to work...

Never did dry! It wasn't wet, it was oily! Horrors!!! Soon as I got home from work, jumped in the shower and shampooed it all out. My hair looked great! Felt great! Soft and silky!

So... what did I learn from this experiment? The conditioner did condition ... but it's too oily... what to do next? I'm not sure!

I found ONE more recipe with similar ingredients... BUT... the first recipe did a 4:1 water to oil ratio... the second has a 16:1 water to oil ratio... will that be the one? Dunno... but I haven't given up yet... The experiment continues... I LOVE rosemary essential oil and am determined to find a way!

Children's Home BBQ

Southern Heart Soaps were vendors at the South Carolina Children's Home's 23rd Annual BBQ fundraiser at the State Fairgrounds on Saturday... it was their first time having craft vendors and gave us the opportunity with no booth rental fee. Most people were there to eat and not much else but we did OK, not great... had a lot of browsers and a few buyers and gave out some cards and brochures. It was fun but HOT. We keep learning as we go along and this event was another learning experience. And for a worthwhile cause!

Good clean fun, the old–fashioned way

The purchase of two bars of homemade soap from a couple running a booth at Stone Mountain, Georgia one weekend, began a quest to learn this craft for myself.
Always fascinated by simpler times, the olden days, and self–sufficiency, I began asking questions. I learned from the couple at Stone Mountain that they lived on a farm, rendered fat from their cows and pigs, mixed the fat with lye, added natural scents and colorants, stirred, and soap was formed.

I didn’t have cows and pigs, and even if I had, I would be most hesitant to slaughter them for their  

tallow and fat. I turned to my favorite way of researching this ancient craft, the Internet.

There was an abundance of information on the World Wide Web to feed my new obsession. I learned about vegetable oils such as olive, coconut, palm, as well as exotic oils like almond, avocado, hemp, and mango. Each of the oils provides its own unique benefits to soap and to skin. I learned the terms sodium hydroxide (lye) and potassium hydroxide (potash) and the chemical reaction they form when mixed with the oils and fats (saponification).

Essential oils were my next discovery. These are concentrated oils distilled from various plants, offering a natural way to scent soap, as well as giving it additional beneficial qualities for the skin. Orange oil, for example, is a deep cleaning oil; ginger stimulates circulation; peppermint soothes tired muscles; lavender calms and heals; and tea tree is a natural antibacterial and anti– fungal oil.

There were many artificial fragrance oils available, providing smells from baby powder to Irish Spring. Artificial colorants were also offered. These additives would make it possible to manufacture pretty soaps with pretty smells. All well and good, but I was determined to craft a product that was all natural, as close to the old timey method as my modern day equipment would allow.

After discovering, through my research, that most of the soaps and shampoos we purchase today, are not really soap at all, but detergents, harsh to body, skin, and hair, my determination increased. I wanted to make real soap, with natural ingredients, natural scents, natural coloring, soap that would be gentle and moisturizing to the skin, soap that would cleanse without stripping the skin of its own natural oils and moisture.

I bought a stainless steel pot (lye reacts badly to aluminum! Don’t ask me how I know), a ceramic bowl, and a hand–held stick blender. I used a candy thermometer to gauge temperatures. I then gathered my ingredients, olive, palm and coconut oils, lye, and water. I experimented with several ways of molding my soaps, using wooden molds, baking pans, etc., finally settling on empty Pringle’s potato chip cans, which with their cylindrical shape and cardboard construction, worked perfectly. I could peel off
the cardboard and slice my soaps into perfect rounds. Pam’s Soap Kitchen was born.

Adventures in my mad scientist laboratory have resulted in quite a number of successes and a few disasters. I destroyed a couple of aluminum pans I tried to use as soap molds; I burned my lips, more than once, hovering too closely over a newly mixed batch of lye and water (lye gives off caustic fumes before mixed with oils and it gets really hot).

Successes outnumber disasters greatly. Some of my favorites include: for my dad who works outside a lot and gets attacked by mosquitoes… I made a soap with citronella oil and lemongrass to ward off those pesky insects; my sister has extremely sensitive skin… I developed a facial soap with geranium oil in it that she uses and loves; I developed a shampoo bar using rosemary and peppermint with avocado oil that leaves hair lustrous and healthy–looking with no need for conditioner; and my lavender/oatmeal soap 

is a big hit with many of my friends… it smells great and is super moisturizing with the exfoliating quality of oatmeal.

Conjuring soap concoctions in my laboratory/ kitchen, has led to experimenting with lotions, lip balms, creams,


bath salts and more… They all include many of the same ingredients.
It’s all good clean fun.

Since these photos were taken, I have purchased a stick blender and use it to mix my soap, I have searched and researched and experimented and learned, I have begun using 3 inch PVC pipe for round molds instead of Pringle's cans, and I have begun an online business selling all natural cold process soap and some lotions, lip balms, etc. I named my Blog after the early days, "Pam's Soap Kitchen" but my cold process soap selling business is Southern Heart Soaps, Lotions and Potions. www.southernheartsoaps.com

What We Learned From Craft Fair #2

Attended our second vendor event today... Spring Fling at a local church fellowship hall... with 8 or 10 vendors participating. Everyone arrived and greeted one another and set up our tables, our displays, our wares. There was a friendly atmosphere as we all prepared to sell our products.

This event, unlike the crop we participated in a few weeks ago, was open to the public and not limited to the 40 or 50 people who had been invited, we expected a good day... what a disappointment!

We were there for 5 hours and the only people who came in the door, besides fellow vendors coming in and out and their family members... were two teenage girls and the mother of one of them.

We DID ask ahead of time what to expect in terms of traffic flow and were told there were people in and out all day at their previous event... not so today!

I'm not sure just exactly what the head of this event did to promote the Fling... but I'm pretty sure it wasn't much more than a small poster or two at the edge of the church parking lot, placed there, she told me, on Wednesday afternoon.

We learned something... if you head an event you are responsible for promoting it... that's why we, as vendors, pay a booth rent, right?

Would we have sold much today? We don't know, but if the people don't know about the event, they don't come, and if they don't come, they don't see, smell and touch our products, and if they don't see the products, they don't buy them... we'll never know now will we? Because the event wasn't properly promoted. Actually wasn't promoted much at all.

Next time we sign up for an event, we will ask along with "what kind of traffic numbers do you expect?" we'll also ask "what venues are you using to promote and advertise this event?" Good lesson, but not very good sales today.

On a more optimistic note, we did meet one or two vendors who seemed to have their act together and were interested in networking and sharing ideas via Facebook, email, Twitter, and other venues. We took and gave a few business cards and made a few more contacts... always a good thing!

And I bought some really good smelling candles from Brenda, the Party Lite lady!

I Love My Shower!

I work in a newspaper office, an air-conditioned building, on a computer all day, 5 days a week. I'm the assistant editor. I wear dress pants and sometimes heels to work. I rarely sweat!

Our newspaper is a small, weekly, community paper. We publish about  15,000 newspapers once a week. We have a young married couple who deliver our paper to our 300 or so newsstands around town. They start about 8:30 am on Thursday of each week and finish up by Friday afternoon. They take a vacation two or three times a year, on those weeks, the entire staff at the paper pitches in and delivers the papers. Today was that day!

I paired up with our receptionist this morning and we set out in her car, loaded with about 3,500 papers... our section was 68 drops! She drove and I jumped out, counted out the papers and filled the stands, or boxes, or carried them into businesses and placed them on counters, tables, or desks. A newspaper weighs very little and it's made from paper... how hard could it be?

A bundle of 50 newspapers weighs quite a bit more... and newsprint rubs off on you so your hands, your shirt, your jeans and sometimes your face if you have to scratch your nose... get black... soot black!

By the time we returned to the office late this afternoon, I was black from head to toe, sweaty, smelly and tired!

I walked in the door when I got home, greeted my sweetie-pie and headed straight to the shower!!! Grabbed up my favorite Guinness Stout extra lathering soap and scrubbed head to toe, hair and all with it!!! Ahhh, the luxury of being clean! and my hair is shiny, my skin is soft and smooth!

I love my shower and I love my homemade soap... squeaky clean!

All Natural?... or Just for the Smell of It?

During my reading and research over the years trying to learn and perfect my cold process soap making craft, I've compared all the soapmaking websites and businesses I could find, to see what they offer, to learn pricing and molding and all sorts of information so I could be educated in my decisions of what products I wanted to make and offer.

I made a conscious decision to make a product that was as "all-natural" as I possibly could. I chose to only use vegetable based oils for my soaps and to scent my soaps with essential oils. I don't add any artificial fragrances or colorants to my handmade soaps. And if I choose to color a soap (which is seldom the case, I like soap to be a natural color, but that's just me), I use natural products to add their color, like carrot juice (makes a nice yellowy orange) or cucumbers for a pale creamy green. I like to make soap as simple and nourishing and skin-loving as I possibly can without adding unnecessary chemicals to it. We get more than enough chemicals from so many places already. Through research, and trial and error, I've learned that artificial fragrances and colorants can be downright harmful to our bodies and I do my best to stay true to my decision to offer an "all-natural" product.

It bothers me when I see products claiming to be "all-natural" and then when you read the list of ingredients you find words like "fragrance added." And even when you don't see those words you find products that say they are "all-natural" with pomegranate scent, or baby powder scent, or Granny Smith Apple and more! Bugs me to death... There are no "natural scents" for any of those fragrances! My thinking is these soapmakers simply don't know the difference, which in itself is cause for concern, or they're trying to fool the consumer.

What are essential oils? I'm glad you asked... essential oils are natural essences of plants, derived from the flowers, leaves, stems, bark, roots, or resins of plants, real plants! Each essential oil offers its own unique therapeutic or skin-nourishing benefit. And they smell like... well like real plants! Real lemons, real peppermint, real lavender! Because they are!

What are fragrance oils? again, I'm glad you asked... apparently for whatever reason, natural smells weren't enough, so chemists analyzed the chemical makeup of many many many different scents and formulated chemical-based oils that mimicked the fragrances of all those lovely things we like to smell! But they're chemicals, many petroleum-based, and many providing harsh, skin-irritating qualities. They tend to cause allergic reactions and are pollutants. And we put these pollutants on and in our bodies without a thought! To be honest, much of the time, and for most people, there isn't a horrible rash or a life-threatening reaction, but "fragrance oils" offer no beneficial qualities whatsoever.

A few pros and cons for both... there are hundreds and hundreds of fragrance oils and only about 150 essential oils. Fragrance oils cost less, therefore soaps and other products formulated with them would cost less. Essential oils are real, from real plants and offer real benefit to our bodies. Dunno 'bout everybody, but I like knowing that grapefruit oil is good for fighting cellulite and water retention, that lavender heals the skin, that citronella repels insects, and that geranium soothes and heals aging and sensitive skin. And maybe there are fewer choices, but the choices smell like the real deal... because they are the real deal!

My point? Read labels, don't be fooled by pretty bright colors and chemical scents. Just because something claims to be all natural, doesn't mean it is.

May We Appreciate Great Friends

I have some great friends... many of my family members are also my dear friends... I'm going to be marrying my very best friend in just a couple of months.

In my soapmaking life, I am declaring May to be "Friends Month!" And in doing so I would like to dedicate this writing attempt to three dear friends who have supported me in my soapmaking ventures for many years. And sometime soon, I plan to formulate a soap in honor of each of them...

First, my friend Kitty... who has been there for me through thick and thin, listening to my emotional ups and downs, giving advice, talking till all hours... I've called that wonderful woman and 2 am crying over a man and she listened and never once complained that it was 2 o'clock in the morning! Whatta great friend! Kitty marches to a different drummer, she's a unique, mother-earth sort of lady... lives her life her way and never worries what other people think or say. She's a librarian, an avid reader of books, a little "out there" in her perspective on life and I love her dearly for it! Kitty wears flowing clothes and wears her hair long and straight and parted in the middle, just like she did in her younger days... Kitty is an old hippie, an earth mother, with a sometimes foul mouth and a heart of gold! I think I will formulate a soap with an herbal scent and maybe a little hemp oil in honor of her. She has encouraged me to get my soap out there ever since I started trying to make soap years ago... she has dreams of opening a coffee shop one day and wants my stuff in it... she found some consignment shops and got them to put my soap there along with her "hippie shirts" She's a wonder to know!

Then there's my dear former workmate Pam McNeil... from the time I began giving out soap to anyone who would take it, she's been a believer in my abilities! She has been buying Lavender Oatmeal soap from me for years and is always ready to encourage me in moving forward with my ideas and dreams... Lavender Oatmeal in honor of Pam!

And there's Claire... I have always called Claire my "cosmic friend." Claire lives in an organized community with her daughter and other "housemates." She and I worked together for a while and I learned that I could talk to her and laugh with her and sometimes we would even try dancing (what a laugh!!!) She has also been an encourager in my life. Claire is all about nature and energy and organic and peace and harmony... I'm thinking an unscented pure classic soap in her honor.

In the month of May... May we appreciate all the many and varied friends we have and learn to appreciate them for the things we have in common and for our wonderful differences.