Another Amazing 50p Sale!

I've decided to run another 50p sale at our workshop on Saturday 16th November! There is no point accumulating all these fragrant but wonky items that didn't make the grade to be sent out with our orders. Best to offer some great bargains to our dedicated followers and make some space. Just click on the 50p Sale page above to see how it works and then take a look at the Sale Gallery to see photos of some of the items we're including in the sale. I'll be adding more items over the next few days.

Anybody unable to get down to our workshop on the day will be able to take part online. ONE DAY ONLY!!

Autumn Chocolate and Oranges

As the nights draw in and pumpkins abound it seems only natural to turn to Orange. I am burning orange oil in my burner and it seemed about time I made a new version of my Choc a l'Orange soap. This soap was born more than a decade ago, but looked quite different to the way it looks today. Originally, it was made from those hand rolled chocolate balls from Tobago, but I ran out of those a long time ago. Now I have to make do with Green and Blacks cocoa powder, which smells just as good and gives the soap its rich chocolateyness. It's hard not to sink the teeth in. The soap is now becoming a bit of a tradition at this time of year. I just loved smoothing the top layer on and creating those chocolatey peaks with my spatula.

Chocolate topping

Choc a l'Orange Soap Bars.

Warming up for Winter

I hadn't realised how long it has been since I posted on here. Summer is disappearing and I'm getting used to the shorter days. It's hard to think of the cold and dark to come, but autumn and winter does have its bonuses; the pears are ripening, the wild mushrooms are popping up in the woods and I can mark the changing season with some new scents and designs for soaps and bath treats.

This week I have mixed up a a warm and inviting blend of Orange, Tangerine, Clementine, Cinnamon and Vanilla oils to bring on the autumn/winter season. I made some squirls, squiggles and buttons out of a natural melt and pour soap that I have to add some interest to the top. Some of it half melted in the gelling stage, so has made shapes that I couldn't have come up with if I had tried. I've pushed in some short pieces of cinnamon bark and added a few seeds. The body of the soap is layered and then I have pushed a shaped bucket handle through the layers to feather them. I'm calling it Winter Spiced Posset, although I am not entirely clear what a posset is.


                

Solid Shampoos Crammed Full of Herbs!

It feels great to make these shampoos. I use as much herbal material as I think the recipe can manage, to get as much benefit from their properties as I can.
For the Chamomile, Rose hip and Lemon, I half fill a big jug full of chamomile flowers and pour on nearly boiling water and leave them to infuse for a good hour or so before straining off the liquid, adding some of the flowers back into the infusion. Ground rosehip powder is added to warm oil and left to macerate a while. Then I whizz up lemon peel to make a puree. All this goes in to the cocoa butter rich soap mix and the resulting shampoo comes out a lovely reddish colour, smelling sweetly of the chamomile and lemon.

In the summer months, we can go out in our rubber gloves and pick fresh nettles from the nettle beds up at the farm and with a fresh bunch of parsley, make a dark fragrant puree for the Nettle Parsley and Rosemary shampoo. I am a fan of nettles. The puree is strained and some of the ground up leaves added back to the infusion, along with some dried nettle powder for extra oomph. In the winter months, we have to use dried nettles of course, but they smell almost as good.

Our latest shampoo is Green Tea, Eucalyptus and Peppermint, likewise steeped, pureed and soaped. I'm so pleased with the rich dark colour of this new one.

Handmade shampoos can leave a deposit on your hair - a reaction from the minerals in the water. Best thing to do if this is the case, is to make a simple rinse of a few tablespoons of your favourite vinegar in a jug of warm water. Pour slowly over your hair. You will probably find you don't need conditioners. They were invented to counteract the effects of the detergents in commercial shampoos!

Chamomile Rosehip and Lemon;
 Nettle Parsley and Rosemary;
 Green Tea, Eucalyptus and Peppermint Shampoos

Gelato Scoop Bath Melts

These have been so long in the planning, getting the recipe just right to make the mixture scoopable, so it doesn't puff up, so it doesn't collapse, so it hardens up nicely, so that it fizzes gently, so that it makes your bath feel creamy and fragrant, so that it makes your skin feel soft and moisturised and so that it doesn't leave your bath greasy and too slippery to stand up safely. We've done it! They come in a range of lovely colours and scents and we couldn't be happier. They are available now for order to our trade customers and come in boxes of 12 X 60g scoops. These are Love Dream, Midsummer and Dr. Love.

Fondant Bath Melts

We've been just so busy for the last couple of weeks, I haven't had any time at all for fiddling around with photos and writing up what's been going on. Apart from keeping up with orders and getting all our paperwork in order for the new EU regulations coming into force, we've been perfecting our lovely new products ready to show off, finding the right packing boxes for them and making their labels. Would you like to see?
These are our brand new Gardenia Rose Bath Fondants; little gorgeously fragrant melting fizzers, which slowly release their scents and (cocoa and shea) buttery goodness into your bath.

Super Rich, Skin Spoiling, Whipped Body Butter

This is when we pull out all the stops and use some of the very best ingredients in our pantry to whip up a smooth and outrageously rich body butter to spoil your skin and help you to relax. What's it got in it and why is it so good? How long have you got? Well, we'll keep it short.

Let's start with the cocoa and shea butters, and that's a really good start. Velvety and moisturising, cocoa butter is what many of our products are built on as it is so amazing, lovely to use and great for the skin. Shea butter apart from being just gorgeous, is anti-inflamatory, emollient and a humectant, asides from acting as a limited natural sun block. Now line 'em up, because this body whip also contains an amazing blend of our precious cold pressed oils. Grapeseed, Jojoba, Avocado, Hemp and Rosehip Seed Oils.
Grapeseed Oil, light, delicate and moisturising; Jojoba, the closest oil to our own skin's natural sebum; Avocado, high in sterolins which are reputed to help heal sun damage and scars; Hemp oil, rich in Omega 3 and 6; and, holy among holies, Rosehip Seed Oil (Rosa mosqueta) used to help with a variety of skin conditions, dermatitis, acne eczema, mature skin, burnt skin, wrinkles. It's high in Vitamin A, Vitamin C and essential fatty acids. Many claim that it has excellent regenerating properties which can help slow the signs of ageing, maintaining a smoother, firmer and more youthful complexion! With those kind of credentials, you've got to love it!

But that's not quite enough. Just for good measure, to nourish the skin and to keep those oils in tip-top condition, we add Vitamin E, and let's not forget those essential oils; soothing, healing, calming and relaxing Lavender and very precious Chamomile.  We don't add water, fillers, emulsifiers or preservatives. Just let all those beautiful oils do their work.

Whipped Body Butter. Glorious!

Hearts and Rebatching

I feel a good bout of rebatching coming on - it's not actually as painful as I remembered and feels pretty instant. Why don't I do a bit more of it? I'm sure it's something worth exploring to see what I can come up with. Here's a pic of some rebatched lemon soap to which I've added some berry fragrance, swirled in some pink colour and extra grated soap and blobbed some heart and ball embeds in the top. And glitter? Why not?

Avocado Oil

Have you ever made a sweet milk shake or ice cream with avocados? Me neither, but apparently it is thus used in The Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia and Vietnam. That's according to Wikipedia and at first sounds a bit odd, but that smooth creaminess might just whizz up nicely into a nourishing treat.
Here at You're Gorgeous Handmade Soap, we like to get our hands on beautiful cold pressed Avocado Oil because we know how wonderful it is for the skin. I'm all for smoothing it on to the skin 'neat', as it were. We've heard that it can reduce age spots and heal sun damaged skin and there's a study which found it can increase the amount of collagen in the skin significantly. It is easily absorbed into deep tissue and is rich in vitamins A, D and E as well as potassium. All good.
When it came to designing a soap using this gorgeous oil, all I could think of however, was Mexican food and how well avocado lands on the palate accompanied by other flavours. Well, it seemed obvious to team it up with fresh and citrussy essential oil of coriander and lovely, lovely mouthwatering lime. We whizz up a puree of fresh leaves too, to give the colour a bit of a kick. This looks great when the soap is freshly made, but of course, all that green does fade over time. Oh, and I nearly forgot - poppy seeds!

50p Sale!! Handmade Soap Going Cheap!

Come and join in on our 50p Sale, coming soon to our Facebook page!
Soapmaking by hand doesn't always go to plan and we end up with all kinds of soap that doesn't turn out quite how we expected. When the outcome is a little wide of the mark, we put the soap aside to do something else with it. We've got quite a bit mounting up, so we have decided to have a 50p SALE!
Well I know that's cheap -very, very cheap - ten times that amount would still be a reasonable price to pay for some lovingly prepared, mild and creamy handmade soap, but we do want to clear the decks and let you get your hands on our lovely soap for a fabulous price.

Our sale will be one day only, so to make sure you don't miss out, go to our Facebook page, Like our page and use the drop down menu from the Like button to add us to your Newsfeed or Interests List.
http://www.facebook.com/soapglut

This is what we used to know as a Ten Bob Note. 10 bob = 50p in today's money (for you young whipper snappers out there).

It's All About Rose

Forgive me for being old fashioned. I do try to be modern sometimes, but the rose-tinted past is often a much more comforting place to be. There is nothing like an old fashioned rose to take you back a few decades, when everything smelled sweeter and photographs were fuzzy around the edges.
Here are some delightful ivory roses studded onto our equally delightful Bois du Rose and Geranium scented Shanghai Silk handmade soap.

Shanghai Silk Ivory Rose Handmade Soap

Keeping it Orange!

Oranges may not be the only fruit, but it's hard to imagine things without them. Personally, I would love to be able to reach out of my bedroom window of a morning and pluck myself a few for breakfast juice. But that isn't going to happen any time soon, so instead I reach out for a bar of our Fresh Orange Butter Soap for an early morning citrus hit in the shower. Essential oil of orange is so uplifting and refreshing and at the same time promotes relaxation, is anti-inflamatory, anti-septic and anti-depressant. Can you think of a more cheerful fruit?
Orange oil is also a remarkable and beautifully fragrant degreaser and right this very morning, I used it to remove gummy adhesive after peeling off some very sticky sticky tape. Worked a charm and smelled fantastic.

Body Buffer

Where have your legs been all winter? Thick tights, leggings, jeans and trousers? Maybe they are looking pretty powdery and maybe you have dry, snake or crocodile skin. Maybe you haven't really even had a good look at them for months. Well, mine were pretty bad, so we've made enough Body Buffers to go round and put all that flakiness to rights. Hey, and don't just think it's your legs that need some attention. It's time for some General Exfoliation and Moisturisation!!
This is no soap, but take it in the shower or bath and use it on wet skin. The ingredients of our Body Buffers read like a hearty skin breakfast, with natural oatmeal, ground linseed, ground fennel seed, honey, poppy seeds, ground walnut shells and just loads of cocoa butter. Your skin is going to get a wake-up call! The Body Buffer gives you a great scrub down to invigorate and brighten your skin, get rid of all those no-good dry skin cells and give it a good nourishing massage with cocoa butter. It also smells so amazing with toning citrus oils of Lime, Grapefruit and Litsea Cubeba that it might be hard to resist taking a sneaky bite.

Just poured Body Buffers

Body Buffers ready for action.

Spring ButterCups.

It's been a lovely sunny day, even though there is plenty of snow on the hills above the Conwy Valley. We thought we would cheer spring on here at You're Gorgeous and invite you all into the garden with our new ButterCups. These are fizzing bath melts full of cocoa and shea butters. Designed to match our Fresh Butter Soaps, they contain all the good essential oils that are lavished on their soapy sisters. Here we have Marigold ButterCup with Litsea, Lemongrass and Rosemary; Rose ButterCup with Geranium, Petitgrain and Ylang Ylang; and Lavender ButterCup with Lavender, Lavandin and Cedarwood. They really smell beautiful.

ButterCups

Budding up!

Our full sized soap block weighs in at over 6KG and our most popular soap, Fresh Rose Butter needs at least 360 individual red rose buds pushing into the top.  It's very laborious and budding up a 6KG block takes longer than it actually takes to make it. Some of those rose buds can be a bit dry and crumbly and we have to select the firmest ones, so they will last the longest.
There is other soap out there that has rose buds pressed into the top but we like to think we go the extra mile to make ours as luxurious as we know how. A lot of other soap doesn't have as many buds as ours and most of it, we notice,  has the pink rose buds. We love those pink rose buds, they have such a beautiful colour but sadly they do fade and turn brown, so we also fork out for the much pricier rich red buds, sprinkle them with yet more rose petals and stand back to admire the results.

The Little Apple - Chamomile

Chamomile, referred to as 'Manzanilla', literally 'little apple' in Spanish, well known for it's calming properties, is anxiolytic,  that's a fancy word for anti-anxiety, and its effects are pretty convincing, according to medical studies. It's also antiseptic and anti-inflamatory, which is of course what would interest any soapmaker or anyone who has the skin's best interest at heart. We make a huge jug of strong dark tea of chamomile flowers, which just smells fantastic, before adding it to our soap pan and then rather classically and classily, match it with lavender essential oil - and you know just how good lavender essential oil is.
We are really wholesalers at You're Gorgeous Handmade Soap, but we have thought it only fair to make our soap available to those who don't run businesses and just want chunks of gorgeous soap in smaller quantities, so you can find individual soap logs or gift packs on our website. http://www.youre-gorgeous.co.uk/#/shop/4562889252

Soap Bags.

I have some little soap sized muslin bags in the cupboard and I wanted to see what could be done with them. They are nice, but are crying out to be prettified. The office stamp and a little bit of hemp twine seemed a good place to start. I put the bags on a slightly soft surface (a mouse pad) and held the stamp down for a second or two on the fabric.

Bath Bomb Activity

Among other things, we've been busy with bath bombs again this week. First up, a big batch of Calendula Big Bath Bombs. When it came to choosing their fragrance, we passed on adding Marigold Essential oil. It's very powerful and useful for treating wounds and infections - also for keeping the white fly off your cabbages, but it doesn't smell that great and wouldn't make for a relaxing bath. We thought something more floral would be in order, so we added a lovely Lily of the Valley fragrance along with handfuls of golden Marigold petals. These bath bombs are big - around 250g so create mucho fizz in your bath. See more photos on our Facebook page or on our website.

Calendula Big Bath Bombs

Some of our medium sized La Bomba bath bombs were ready for packing too. Big Citrus loaded with four citrus essential oils of Lime, Grapefruit, Litsea and Tangerine for a wake you up blast, and Night Time, laced with Lavender and Clary Sage for relaxation and sleep. Don't the colours look great together?

Unscented Soap

There is something so good about unscented soap. Like a loaf of good fresh crusty bread or warm laundered bed linen, it's one of life's simple comforts and pleasures.
There are so many wonderful ingredients that an enthusiastic soapmaker can find plenty of scope and inspiration for making beautiful bars without even adding any essential oils or fragrances. Our three unscented Naked Soaps are quite simple. The Cocoa Buttered Soap has extra large portions of cocoa butter added to it which makes it hard and very conditioning for normal to oily skins.
Every soapmaker has at least one Goat Milk soap in their repertoire, and pure honey makes the perfect accomplice to the milk giving a gorgeous creamy and nourishing bar for sensitive skins. The Hemp and Comfrey soap is my personal favourite of the three. The infused hemp leaves and root give a smooth and creamy soap, super soothing and moisturising and a slight earthy scent.

Here is the outcome of the batches we made the other day. Nothing sensational - just lovely clean soap.

Cocoa Buttered Soap

Goat's Milk & Honey

Hemp & Comfrey

Glassine Bags

I love to pop soaps into glassine bags. They're cheap, simple and elegantly give a little translucent glimpse of their contents. These ones are self-sealing, so it doesn't take but a few seconds to stick on a label and bag up a bar.

Big batches of bath bombs.

Pass the pineapple! Make with the mango! Crack out the coconut! A fresh batch of Tropicalito bath bombs, our Caribbean fruit cocktail fizzzzing bath explosions in the basket.  La Bomba! 
Bath bomb making can be a bit of a chore, especially when we've got thousands to do and are making 40 KG batches, each bath bomb pressed into the moulds by hand. But when they are dry and out of their moulds, all piled up and smelling fabulous, we get a great sense of accomplishment. Look what we made!

Getting Naked!

Stocks were low of all three of our Naked Soaps, so today we made batches of all three of them. Our Naked soaps are not scented, they just rely on the beauty of the oils and the simple ingredients we add to them to make them gentle and mild - and interesting too! So this morning we gently melted down our hard oils and weighed out three big buckets of oils. Our recipe contains a blend of six oils.

Here are a few pics of the batch of Goat's Milk and Honey. If we can get it, we use local honey, or if not, we choose a good quality runny honey and warm it up a little bit. Then we add some lovely fresh Goat's Milk, whisk it up and warm it through a little bit.

                           Here's the Goat's Milk and Honey soap mix in the pot nearly ready to be poured into the moulds. It smells a bit odd at this point, but it soon gets over that stage! Once it's hardened and out of the moulds the smell is more like a freshly baked batch of biscuits!

After lunch, we started on a batch of Hemp and Comfrey soap. Many of our customers who suffer from  eczema tell us that our Hemp and Comfrey soap has helped them. The Comfrey gives the soap a very smooth lather and helps to keep skin supple. First we made the infusion, by pouring boiling water onto the comfrey leaves and root and leaving it to infuse for half and hour or so. We strain that infusion and add it to the lye solution before adding it to the oils. We throw in a few comfrey leaves for good measure and mix, mix, mix.

And here it is poured into 3 six-kilo moulds.

Then is was Cocoa Buttered time. This is a good, hard soap leaving you feeling really clean and moisturised with loads of cocoa butter in the mix and extra cocoa butter added at the end for superfatting. The pic on the left is the extra lovely cocoa butter going in at trace and the creamy, custardy soap in the moulds. I'll add more pics when it's out of the moulds.

Making A Lot of Tea Tree Soap!

Lots of lovely essential oils of Tea Tree and Lavender

Poured soap waiting to be tucked in and insulated.

Soap in 6kg moulds cooling its heels on the floor.

Daffodils and Leeks

March 1st is Dydd Dewi Sant,  the feast day of St. David's, the patron saint of Wales. The day is celebrated in nearby Colwyn Bay where children come out from schools to join in the parade and to wave their Welsh flags. Y Ddraig Goch, the Red Dragon flag is believed to have been the battle standard of King Arthur and was the banner of Henry Vll of England whose ancestry was Welsh.

 Personally, it's a day to bring in big bunches daffs, our national flower. All that yellow feels so good after the grey and gloomy winter months. Some varieties have the added bonus of a beautiful scent. We should also be cooking with leeks, our other national symbol. Perhaps we could try and grill them over charcoal as they do in Cataluña with their delicious calçots and dip them in almond and red pepper sauce.

These two plants are connected in the Welsh language. The word for leeks is Cenhinen, the word for daffodils, Cenhinen Pedr, Peter's leeks.

Popcorn and Leaves Organic Loose Fill Packaging

We are always inspired by people and companies finding new uses for different materials and avoiding landfill in the process. It's great that starch based packing peanuts are now easily obtainable and apart from re-using any packaging materials we receive, this is what we use when packing our boxes. The starch peanuts do smell a little of breakfast cereal and squish down a bit more easily than the old fashioned polystyrene ones, but we are grateful that they will just dissolve in the rain at the end of their useful life. But a UK packaging company called Leavs has gone further and are supplying beautiful loose fill products made from organic natural botanicals like straw, leaves and popcorn.

What's this plant called?

Does anybody know the name of this plant? It is growing in the beds outside our workshop and has little white flowers in the summer. Those flowers turn into these wonderful little blue berries on red stalks and against the green shiny leaves, makes for a glorious colour trio. Are the berries useful/poisonous?

Here are a few fragrant scoops of a fresh batch of our Scented Garden Citrus Bath Salt we made today. While outside it was hissing sleet, the wind was rattling the guttering and the temperature was unmentionable, we were adding sunny citrus essential oils of orange, pink grapefruit and tangerine to our Mediterranean sea salt. No better remedy for a grim February afternoon.

Too late for Valentine's!

I found these fabulous bath fizzies today on a site which I have just discovered called  Two Peas in a Bucket, posted by a busy contributor called Pink Mochas. Too late for Valentine's, but they are just about as pink and sparkly as anybody could wish them to be, so I was happy just to have seen them. They look like a gift from a fancy bonbonnerie, and surely one could make some edible ones. Plenty of inspiration here!