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.