Wowzers! After over a year of planning, insane prep this last week and afternoon jitters, Soap Weekend Intensive has started. I kicked it all off with Soapmaking 101 at Otion tonight:
Archives for June 2012
White Ginger and Amber Spray Perfume
This month’s featured sample is White Ginger & Amber. Musky and deep with notes of spice and floral, this fragrance is great on its own and blends wonderfully with many fragrances! Nearly every order* shipped out in the month of June will have a little 1/2 sample bottle included. It’s the perfect size for making these sweet mini-perfumes!
Tools and Ingredients:
18 mL Distilled Water
4 mL Polysorbate 20
16 mL 91% Rubbing Alcohol
2 mL White Ginger & Amber Fragrance Oil
Optional: .5 mL Optiphen ND
4 mini spray bottles
Droppers
Funnel (optional)
Mixing Container
We Have a Question For You
What Classes Would Interest You?
As we are gearing up for our annual Soap Weekend Intensive (a weekend filled with soap and toiletry making classes in Bellingham, Washington – and we just had a cancellation so last I heard, we had one last opening), we are thinking about what we want to teach next year. This year, we are teaching CP soap with milk, emulsified scrubs, 80’s inspired melt & pour soap, swirling cold process soap, and lotionmaking. Above are some examples of the CP soap the soapy team will be teaching in classes.
We would love to hear from you about techniques and products you’ve always wanted to try or a technique that you know and love. We are looking for a brainstorm of ideas for SWI 2013 and would love to have you be a part of the conversation! Just leave us a comment below on what you’d like to see us teach and what you’re interested in. No idea is too zany or basic. We want to design the best SWI 2013 we can. Talk to us! We’re listening.
Talk It Out Tuesday: Preservatives
Welcome to the latest installment of Talk It Out Tuesday! Check out previous TIOTs on melt and pour, bath bombs and colorants. So, you may be wondering, just what in the heck is a preservative? What am I supposed to use them for? Does my soap need a preservative? Preservatives can be a tricky if you haven’t used them before, but fear not, this post will explain the differences so that you can become the expert on preservatives.
What is a preservative?
A preservative is an anti-microbial solution that helps to prevent mold and other yucky things from growing in your products.
This lotion did not have a proper preservative. Yikes.
Why would you use a preservative?
Preservatives are needed in any product that has water in it to prevent bacteria and mold from growing in it. If you don’t use a preservative something icky like this may happen to your product (bummer, right?). [Read more…]
Make It Monday: #Layers Challenge
Who’s ready for a challenge? You are? Then you’ve come to the right place. The Soap Queen Team is hosting our first ever soaping challenge and we couldn’t be more excited (yes, that’s me squealing in the background)!
Every other week we will have a different theme and you will have the chance to have your creation featured in a blog post. And a big thank you to Amy Warden at Great Cakes Soapworks for inspiring our challenge (we read her blog daily).
Layered Soap Cookie, Karma Soap, Romantic Lavender Wedding Soap.
Green Machine Soap, Birthday Cake Loaf, Candy Corn Soap
Gradated Layer Soap, Cute as a Button Soaps, Layers Made Easy
Sliding Down Head First
Woo Hoo! It has been a busy weekend. We started by hosting a dinner party for 10 (I cooked Penne alla Vodka from Epicurious) on Friday night and the weekend kept going at full tilt until just this second. Between daily walks to the park, runs along the water, giving a halibut en papillote (my favorite thing to cook when fish is fresh) demonstration at dinner Saturday night with friends, and a very (yawn) early morning drive to Seattle today to watch a dear friend graduate from her Masters Program in Organizational Systems Renewal, it doesn’t feel like there was much of a traditional, restful weekend in there. But, even if there wasn’t a lot of downtime, there was a lot of fun and joy. This blog post has three videos so if you’re an email subscriber, you’ll need to click through to the blog to see the videos.
We Seriously Heart our Customers
Back in May, the Bramble Berry team and I road tripped it down to Portland, Oregon for the annual Handcrafted Soap Guild Conference. Check out two posts about the fun that we had and drool over some beautiful soap that was entered into the Soaper’s Showcase: Soap Guild Fun and Inspiring Soap Mosaic and Post Guild Report and Catch Up. It was inspiring, entertaining and rewarding to meet Bramble Berry’s customers in person and see what they create with our raw materials. I just wanted to give a shout out to some of our sweet customers that brought us goodies to take home from the conference. You spoil us!
Invigorating Shampoo Bars
Grinning Through the Grimaces
I had a sweet, thoughtful blog comment this last week. In part, it said “I wonder at you and your energy. I’m ashamed of myself for nagging so much lately. How can you manage all those things [kids, household, business, sport and fun at weekend], all together, and apparently so perfectly?” The comment struck me because I want this blog to be a fun, inspirational place to hang out. I never want anyone to feel badly about themselves, to think that my life is magically 100% perfect or that things somehow come more easily to me than they do others. If you haven’t read the (long) story of how Bramble Berry got started, it’s here. There were floods, embezzlements, years in debt, a divorce, sleeping in the office, firings and plenty of times where I felt sorry for myself or alone. It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t glamorous. And it’s still not. And obviously, glamorous was not the look I was going for in the photo below from Bramble Berry’s early years.
SWI 2012 Prep Time
Eeek! Soap Weekend Intensive is 2 weeks away (no, that is not the sound of my hyperventilating that you hear. Cool as a cucumber. Cool as a cucumber.) We’ve been running around like busy little bees pulling products and prepping for the jam packed weekend of soapmaking. It’s really hard to believe that after a year of planning (really, we signed these teachers up last June), it’s here. Breaking News! There was a cancellation this morning meaning we have one spot left! If you’re interested, hurry over to the Bramble Berry website to sign up. Do you need proof that it’s going to be the best weekend ever? See SWI blog posts from the past: SWI 2008, SWI 2009, SWI 2010 and SWI 2011.
Working On Our Core
Happy Monday, Soap Queen Team! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Some of the Brambleberrians and I started our weekend off right with an invigorating Pilates class. The fabulous instructors at Joy of Pilates in Bellingham hosted a Pilates party just for us on Friday (we felt so special). It was such a fun way to work off some excess energy that we had from sitting at our desks all day. We may or may not have gotten the giggles on several occasions (please also notice how nicely Courtney is posing for the photo). Ella and Jen were our wonderful coaches and they led us through an hour of intense exercises and stretching. If you’ve never done Pilates before I would definitely recommend giving it a try. It’s good for the mind, body and soul (and team bonding)!
Courtney, myself, Elizabeth, Becky, Austin and Cheyen. Here we are ready to cut loose and have some fun!
Jamisen’s Year in Photos
Soaping Notes
I’ve been making a lot of soap in the last few weeks – testing out new products, trying fun techniques, putting a different spin on color schemes and generally having a creative time in the Soap Lab. I made the soap below with Labcolors (Canary, Tangerine, Red and Berry Red) and the always delightful Pineapple Cilantro fragrance. You can tell that this was a batch that I was playing with some swirling and design techniques on. That’s the bonus of a wide, flat horizontal mold – lots of canvas to play on.