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.