Pretty in Pink

I have always wanted to make a round soap - they look great, something a little different from the standard soap bar. So I duly munched my way through a tube of pringles to use the empty tube as a mould (the things I do to make a soap!)

Here's the results - the sides of the tube didn't pull away as well as i had hoped, so the sides of the soap look a little rustic (being polite), yukky if I'm being honest. But for a first attempt, I'm pretty happy, so much so that hubby and I scoffed another 2 tubes of pringles at the weekend and the Lavender & Patchouli soaps are saponifying as I type.

If these soaps take off, i will need something else to make rounds soaps in - as much as I love pringles, my waistline doesn't.

Back in internet land

My husband and I and our little boy Matthew went away for our Easter break with my husband's family and we all had a great time. We stayed in a converted stable in a rural part of the Scottish Borders and we had lazy mornings, long walks, the occasional potter about in gift shops in the nearby towns, lovely home cooked dinners and probably a little bit too much wine some nights.

We also all had to listed to my 4 year old's obsession with the Wii game Skylanders. If we didn't know the names of all 32 Skylander characters before the holiday, we do now. But he is also funny and charming and a little rascal so we didn't mind listening to him.

But I did miss my internet. Not at first - the break away from everything is great and much needed, but I started to miss my daily blog reading, catching up on Facebook and ogling other people's soaps. It felt like so much was happening without me, and looking through FB etc, it seems a daunting task to catch up. So, it may take me some time (as real life is here now that we are home - dishes, washing up, housework, and sadly the ironing) but I hope to catch up on everyone's blog posts soon.

And of course, I need to make soap too

Sadly there are no pictures. On our last afternoon Matthew decided to sneak into our room and take my camera. He had accidently deleted all our holiday photos, and turned the language on the menu into Japenese!! The menu has been fixed, but sadly no photos. But we all have our memories and it was such a great holiday that we don't really need pictures. Just please, nobody mention Skylanders for a while ...

Plain Chocolate and the Raspberry that didn't ripple

As part of Amy at Great cake Soapworks challenge, I tried an In the Pot Swirl. I have done this a few times, with varying results. And with some new fragrance oils to try, I opted for Raspberry. this was meant to be a pale pink colour with deep pink and white swirls. I got my jugs, poured in the soap batter, turned round to add in the colour and the soap has totally siezed on me. All three jugs were a mess. I ended up getting the large pot out and plopping the whole lot in and mixing it all up like a crazy woman. The result was this very very vivid pink colour. I have trimmed it up so it looks ok, though you can see little flecks where the soap was ricing on me. It smells delicious though, very girly.

So I started again, and this time i decided not to use any scent. to be honest, I have very little left that is not for my Miss Polly range, so I opted for some cocoa powder and I tried the swirl thing again. And, well it's ok. not great and not very swirly, but it's fine.

Here is a link to the other soaps that were made as part of the challenge http://www.greatcakessoapworks.com/handmade-soap-blog/

Thank you Amy for the challenge and I'm looking forward to the next one

Now available on Etsy

Here is one of my favourite soaps. This is Pink Grapefruit & Sugarcane and i could soap with it all day. It behaves so well, it's a gorgeous scent and it sells well too :) I try to make each batch of it a little different that the one before so to this batch I added Rose Petals. I already have plans to make a different soap with the FO once I get more supplies. I have listed it on Etsy, but I am thinking of adding it to my site under a 'nearly natural' banner.

One scent, 2 looks

One of my favourite EO blends is Grapefruit & May Chang. It's fresh, summary, light, lemony without the LEMONY smell you get from May Chang on it's own (though I do love that in a soap too) and is one of the first blends I did when I was first learning so soap, so it brings back lots of summer memories.

So, in reference to my post about the natural ingredients in a soap, here are 2 soaps with the same EO blend, but one is coloured with pink clay, the other is coloured with yellow soap dye. Both are the same base recipe, both smell divine and both are simply fabulous for your skin. But with less than 0.5% of a soap dye, a substance not sourced from nature, to give it the yellow colour only one of them can be defined as natural. It does seem a pity because handmade soap, as we all know, is a million times better for you than commercial soap (most are not even called soap but cleansing bars), but that's how it goes. It is still such a lovely soap that I think i might even prefer the yellow soap. Which do you prefer, I'd love to know xx

All natural?

In a previous post, I mentioned that all Miss Polly products are made using 100% natural ingredients, and for me, that means using essential oils instead of fragrance oils, natural colourants over soap dyes, and that is still true. Everything in my Miss Polly range, the products on my website, those which have proper branding and professional labels, have no synthetic ingredients whatsoever. In fact they contain some of the most luxurious natural ingredients available.

I also, however, LOVE making soap, love it. I love using colour, and lets be honest, there are some scents which are so gorgeous, it is a shame not to use them, and if that is a fragrance oil, then so be it. And so, I've been posting some of these soaps on my blog and on FB. I did this without thinking it through properly, so I never thought that by making these soaps and blogging about them that somehow I was negating all the natural goodness that goes into Miss Polly Proper. I was simply having fun.

However, a comment on my blog today asked me, well, really I suppose to justify why I used dyes and FOs in products which claim to be 100% natural. I was taken aback, as in my head I had separated the two ranges, the fun and the proper branded range. But I failed big time in the theory of other minds, and just assumed that other people would know to seperate the two. Well, duh, that was a bit silly of me. If I sell a soap under the Miss Polly name whether on my site or on Etsy or at a craft fair, people should expect the ethos of each soap to be the same, and as that is likely what people WILL think, then I would hate to think that I might mislead people into thinking that the pink coloured Pink Grapefruit & Sugarcane FO soap is as natural as the Grapefruit & May Chang (EO) soap.

This has brought me to re-visit an idea I had a while ago. I love making Miss Polly products and love the natural ingredients I use, and I will keep making them, formulating and creating new products, and promoting how great and beneficial they are. But I am thinking of creating a different brand just for soaps. And this will be for fun, I will make soaps simply because I feel like creating something new. And I will promote the use of natural oil and butters, but I won't be calling these soaps 100% natural. They will simply be handmade. And the name of the new brand? Well, I'll reveal that very soon ....

Some cut soaps

Hmmm, ok, I cut up my Fresh Apples soap and I am a little disappointed - the swirls are a bit non existent, I would have been better off leaving the swirls just on the top of the soap. Still, it smells amazing, and I have enough FO left over to make another soap, so I'm going to try something with green and pink clay, maybe.

And here is the Pink Grapefruit & Sugarcane soap all cut up. And it smells sweet and fruity and fizzy and I love it. I could smell it all day.

And here is the packaging for my Lemongrass Soap. I was hugely disappointed in how rough this soap looked, the wire cutters are making for a kind of warped look, not what I want, but I made the packaging more rustic and handmade and actually, I think it works.