First Soap For Fall

Yes, the title of this post is lame-o, but I am still pondering the name of this baby. It didn't quite turn out the way I wanted. One of these swirls was supposed to be orange, but I used extra virgin olive oil as opposed to the pomace variety, and I ended up with this. The scent is TO DIE FOR! I went very dark on this one. I am usually the sweet, sometimes musky type of scent lover, but this one is scented with 50% anise essential oil which I am in love with. It reminds me of those black jelly beans. I hated those damned things when I was a kid. I would pick them out of my Easter basket and give them to my uncle or my mother, and they would gobble them up. Puke! Anyway, my tastes have grown much more refined in my old age, and while I still can't stand black jelly beans, I love the smell of anise and black licorice. Oh yeah, the other 50% is a blend of orange, cinnamon, ginger, and clove.

 
I CPOP'd this soap because I personally cannot wait to use it. I'm thinking of making a scrub and a candle out of this blend too. It's that delicious...

Is It Autumn Yet?

I love warm weather, but this is ridiculous! I never want to know what Hell feels like, but I feel like I'm living in Hell on Earth. Anyway, I'm actually preparing for my autumn offerings. On the horizon:

Caramel Apple soap and lip balm! I can never get enough of this scent. But being the me that I am, it won't be traditional caramel apple (except the lip balm). It'll be my personal blend....

Orange-y, spicy, something, but with a Halloween-y appeal in both a soap and Gloss Bath and Body Oil. It won't be an obvious "Oh-yeah-this-is-Halloween", but I feel that I have to represent the occasion, ya know?

Firewood Soy Candles will be back. I love this scent. It smells like a smoldering embers with droplets of blackberry. Very nice....

Pumpkin Sugar Scrub is also making an encore appearance. I'll go lighter on the cinnamon because it can be somewhat irritating to the skin (Ask me how I know...) Pumpkin and orange spice smell too much alike to me, so I may actually use something else other than pumpkin. I may do an apple cider-type scrub. Love, love, love that fragrance...

So, that's about it for now. I'll be posting later this week on my revamped Chai-riffic soap. Love, love, love the aroma of chai tea! What are my other soap making sisters working on?

Do Not Eat This Soap!

Pepper jumped up on my work table the other day after I un-molded this baby and was sniffing hard-to the point where I swear her grubby, little tongue was going to start flickering in and out at any minute. You would have had to call the Human Society on me if she did because it took me forever to make this soap!

I adapted it from this WSP recipe, and I'm pretty please with the results. Apple Pie is my most favorite pie in the world (with sweet potato and lemon meringue running a very close second), and I had planned on making a cold processed version of it, but I wasn't sure if the scent would hold up and I was still toying with a design for it. Thank goodness, I found this one because that cp version would have probably never gotten made.

Without going into a lot of detail (visit the link for all that fun stuff), this soap took me about 3 hours to completely make. I already had mold to make apple/peach slices, so I cheated on that part. The longest and most annoying part of making layered melt and pour soaps for me is the setting up between layers. If you don't let each layer set up firmly enough, your next layer could just seep all the way through and ruin the batch. If you let each layer set up too long, then you'll have an obvious line of demarcation like my last layer. I didn't intend to do that but the finished soap would have been very squat-looking-like a half bar, and I wanted the apple slices to stick out on top so I created a new layer. Anyway, here they are: Pretty Brown Apples: apple pie-scented-with-a-hint-of-snicker doodle topped with brown sugar soap! And yep, they're available now.