One of the great things about working at Bramble Berry is connecting with other soap makers. For some, it’s a fun hobby. For others, soap making changed their lives. This is the case with Donovan, an 11-year-old soap maker who started making melt and pour creations after he and his mother fell on hard times. Now, he makes creative and fun designs and donates half his profits to the Supportive Housing Coalition of New Mexico.
Search Results for: Hanger swirl
Facebook Photo of the Week (Aug. 2nd ~ Aug. 8th)
While soap is our first love (and soul mate!) we’re not solely about the soap here at Bramble Berry. This week there were several non-soapy tutorials and recipes, including a Blackberry, Lemon and Basil Sorbet. Full of sweet blackberries, tart lemon and a hint of earthy basil, this sorbet is an excellent way to stay cool during the hot summer months.
Soapy Social Media Roundup
I hope everyone had a lovely and safe Fourth of July. We put the kiddos to bed early (thanks to a city-wide personal fireworks ban, that was possible this year). Today, we did a fun play date on Lake Samish (complete with a slip’n’slide for the kiddos). I am continually amazed by the beauty of this place! The weekend isn’t promising to be as hot as last weekend, but since it’s not over yet, I still plan on doing lots of gardening and taking a few sunset evening walks. At Bramble Berry, we’re gearing up for a series of tutorials next week to give your skin a beautiful bronze glow, so keep your eyes on the blog and sign up for our newsletter.
Enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend! With the help of my very active set of kids, I know I will =)
Pins:
Facebook Photo of the Week (May 10 ~ May 16)
This week we celebrated another week of awesome sales and promotions. While the promotions are over, there is still time to enter our Make it Month Contest. It has been so fun to see all your creations made with the Sunny Herb Garden and Carnation Fragrance Oils…keep em’ coming! We’ll do a blog post featuring all the entries in early June.
If you are looking for more soapy projects inspired by the garden, this week was full of floral projects. The Rose Garden Cold Process Tutorial is an advanced project utilizing soap frosting, mica swirls and the hanger swirl technique. If you enjoy the hanger swirl technique, this Tiger Stripe Hanger Swirl Tutorial is right up your alley. If you are looking for an easier project, these Elegant Coffee Filter Flowers can be made in minutes. The Victorian Heart Melt and Pour Tutorial is another project perfect for the beginner crafter. If you have never made melt and pour soap before, the Free Beginner’s Guide to Melt and Pour is full of information and tips.
Bath fizzies are another fun and easy project, and our Facebook Photo of the Week from Holly of Lotion Bar Cafe is a great example of a bath fizzy done well.
Rose Garden Cold Process Soap Tutorial
Two weeks of deals, sales and tutorials ends today with this beautiful Rose Garden Cold Process tutorial. This is a two-part recipe so it is more time intensive than other cold process recipes, but the flowery result is worth it.
The first part is making the soapy roses out of cold process frosting, and the second part is creating the beautifully swirled base and topping it all off with exquisite mica painting. This tutorial combines several advanced soaping skills, including soap frosting, working with rose water lye and the hanger swirl technique, so it’s great for anyone looking to expand their soapy repertoire. This is a multi-day project; you need at least a day for the roses to be set up enough to move.
Facebook Photo of the Week (January 4th ~ January 10th)
Looking to to get your soap in tip-top shape to sell? Of course having a quality product is crucial, but it also must please the eye. This quick video shows you how to put together our cute and sturdy cardboard soap boxes that give your products a professional look.
Looking for more packaging inspiration? Check out the Make it Monday: #Packaging album on Bramble Berry’s Facebook, and scroll through our packaging products! After you’ve packaged your creations, it’s time to learn how to properly label them. This guest post is full of valuable information regarding how to label botanical ingredients in your products according to government regulations.
This week we also announced our Winter 2014 S.O.A.P panel search. Eight lucky soapy fans will be chosen to help us decide on new fragrances for our Spring 2014 line. Sound like fun? Head over to this post, enter to be a part of the team by tweeting, pinning or blogging about your favorite Bramble Berry product, and you might be chosen to help us test the mystery fragrances.
As for our Facebook Photo of the Week, there’s no mystery here: this soap is simply stunning!
#Christmas Schwag Winners
Christmas is coming! Christmas is coming! I can hardly believe that this year has gone by so fast. It seems like yesterday that we were started our very first Make it Monday challenge but it was actually this summer. It’s been so much fun seeing you all participate in these challenges and coming up with such clever and fun products all year, and we can’t wait for our next series (starting next year!) to see what you have up your sleeves. Are you ready for the winners of Make it Monday #Christmas Schwag? Drum roll please…
Top Row:
Jill Lemaster-Moore – ‘Yultide Soap Balls’
Yurie from Kumamama Soap
Krista Scott – Adaptation of Cool Yule Peppermint Loaf from Soap Queen
Middle Row:
Katie from Royalty Soaps – ‘Holiday Cheer Cold Process Hanger Swirl Soap’
Patty from Lather Rinse Clean – ‘Snowman Cupcakes’ with Fresh Snow Fragrance Oil
Heather from Blackbird Soap Company – ‘Enchanted’
Bottom:
Amanda from Bubblina’s Soap Boutique – ‘Christmas Tree Soap’ with Santa’s Spruce Fragrance Oil
Ludmila and Pablo from Epuyen Jabones Artesanales – ‘Christmas Magic Wands’
Jenny Rose from I‘d Lather Be Soaping – ‘Christmas Cheer Soap’ [Read more…]
Facebook and Instagram Photo of the Week (Nov. 28th ~ Dec. 4th) + Colorant Contest Winners!
We got so many amazing entries for the contest to win sixteen new micas and pigments; over 800 entries on the blog and 500 on Facebook…WOW! For both the blog and Facebook, we used a random number generator and chose the comments that corresponded with those numbers. Our Facebook winner is Evelyn Rose Soaps with this gorgeous Tea Tree & Activated Charcoal bar. Our blog winner is Victoria. Her favorite color is Coral Mica. We can’t wait for you to give the sixteen new micas and pigments a try. Thanks so much to everyone who entered! You can see their entries in this post.
Facebook and Instagram Photo of the Week (May 16th ~ 22nd)
Spring is an inspirational time of the year. The flowers are blooming and the sun is shining (in between the rain of course). This week featured several spring-inspired tutorials, including the Monarch Butterfly Melt and Pour Tutorial. Orange and black soap – classic monarch butterfly colors – are piped into the Guest 5 Butterfly Mold. The butterfly details are topped with a shimmery blue base, and the soap is scented with my current fave, sweet and warm Pure Honey Fragrance Oil.
Soapy Social Media Roundup
This week has been a complete whirlwind. The photo shoot for the upcoming book (coming in 2016) was both amazing and exhausting. Thirty-three cold process recipes were prepped and created in four days (39 if you count embeds!). That’s an average of 8 cold process recipes everyday. The team did a great job of prepping all the recipes beforehand; This enabled each recipe to be ready as soon as the previous was made. All the hard work paid off; each soap turned out amazing and I can’t wait to share the book with you!
This weekend I’m attending the HSCG Annual Conference in Indianapolis. So, if you’re here, come find me! I was so thrilled to run into Lela from Lucky Break Consulting, Ellie who has helped save 70 orphaned baby elephants with her soap, and Toushonta who spotted me in the airport after a long day of flying. I’ll be here tonight and tomorrow so if you’re at the show, please come say ‘Hi.’ I love talking soap!
Here on the blog, we have been sharing a collection of milk recipes including this Goat Milk & Oatmeal Cold Process Soap. This Buttermilk Bastille Baby Bar on Soap Queen TV shows you how to create soap using fresh buttermilk and carrot puree. Want more soapy inspiration? Check out my favorite pins, ‘grams and tweets from this week!
Pinterest:
Left to right, clockwise:
- I love the simple yet sophisticated look of this Palm Free Lavender and Vanilla Cold Process Soap by Humblebee & Me. The mica painting looks fantastic!
- Speaking of beautiful purple soap, the color combination in the Flirt Gourmet Handmade Soap from River City Soapworks is so eye catching.
- Purple tones also look stunning in food. Want proof? This Earl Grey Lemon Cheesecake is topped with frozen blueberries, giving them a lavender hue.
- Mother’s Day is less than a month away. This Mother’s Day Matchstick Holder and Candle Gift is a clever and adorable way to show her love.
Instagram:
If you follow me on Instagram, you know I was busy soaping up a storm making soap for my new book. Below is one of my favorite recipes, a Dandelion Zebra Swirl soap made with real dandelion petals and an annatto seed infusion.
On the left, is a negative space embed recipe colored with natural colorants. On the right is a soap made with pale ale instead of water. I was so relieved that the swirl design turned out for the shoot…that technique requires a steady hand and I was a little shaky!
Twitter:
- The article, “Secrets of Woeman Running Billion-Dollar Companies,” is full of great advice and insights into the pros and cons of being a CEO. In particular, I related to how hard it is to have true “balance.”
- Being constantly creative is hard! If you need some tips on keeping your creativity flowing remember…no idea is too weird!
- Love shopping online? I do! These three apps are online-shopping game changers.
- The “experience economy,” is a term used to describe consumers growing love for experiences, rather than only services. Click through to learn more about wowing your customers with experiences. It’s what we try to do at Otion with our classes & crafters corner!
- Jerome Jarre has mastered Vine and SnapChat with 7.2 million followers. The going rate for one Vine video is $25,000! But it wasn’t always that way; click here to read his fascinating story.
To keep up with the latest soapy social media throughout the week, you can follow me on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Vine and YouTube. And Snapchat! To watch my ‘stories’, which include sneak peeks into future projects (including all the soaping I’m doing this weekend), add me. I’m Bramble-Berry on Snapchat.
Facebook Photo of the Week (Jan. 3rd ~ Jan. 9th)
Tutorials were definitely the focus for the week. With everything from lotion to salad, hopefully you have some crafty inspiration for 2015! Skin-loving clays can be used in a wide variety of tutorials. They add a gorgeous natural color to your soap or some gentle exfoliation to scrubs. For more information and several tutorials using the ingredient, click through the Clay Recipe Roundup.
Facebook Photo of the Week (Nov. 22nd ~ Nov. 28th)
It’s hard to believe it’s almost December and Thanksgiving is over! After all the food, fun and festivities, it was nice to enjoy Baked Pumpkin Pecan Oatmeal. This dish, which is like a heavenly combination of pumpkin and pecan pie, has a gooey center and a crunchy nutty topping. It is easy to make and even easier to eat, making it a perfect warm breakfast all winter long. I promised to make it for my Dad this morning so I had better get going!
Sew Seasonal: A Givember Sewing Project
These past two weeks have been full of crazy Givember activity, and we hope that you were able to take advantage of our special deals, coupons and holiday-themed tutorials. The last ensemble is super kid friendly and includes tutorials on soapy candy canes, bath fizzies, fun-colored Gingerbread Men, some swirly melt and pour and of course, these adorable little stockings. Happy giving!
Sunday Night Spotlight: Brazilian Clay
Shorter days and longer nights don’t have to be a bad thing — hopefully that means more time to spend with family and maybe even more time to soap! If you’re looking for some stunning natural colorants that can be used in both cold process and melt & pour recipes, you will be interested in these new colorants that have been added to the Bramble Berry line: Brazilian Clays. Our Brazilian Clays are versatile, natural, beautiful and non-bleeding.
These clays are naturally colored and do not contain any artificial dyes or pigments. The various shades are actually achieved by variations in the minerals found in the soil in the different regions of Brazil. Bramble Berry carries five different natural clays — Natural Brazilian, Purple, Yellow, Pink and Dark Red.You can buy each color individually, or buy all five at once in our Brazilian Clay Sampler.
The clays are stable in cold process soaps and make a great addition to any clay mask or cream. Clays can be a bit tricky if you haven’t used them before, and you’ll need some additional preparation before using them in your cold-process soaps. Clays are incredibly absorbent and tend to accelerate trace when added dry. They can also cause cracking if they aren’t dispersed first. To prevent this, disperse your clays in distilled water using a mini-mixer. You can use a ratio of 1 teaspoon of clay to 1 tablespoon of water per color. Make sure that the clay is completely saturated with water before mixing or you might end up with a messy cloud of clay.
If you are making melt & pour and want to add any of Bramble Berry’s clays without clumping or settling, we suggest dispersing the clay in a small amount of rubbing alcohol before adding it to your batch. We recommend a dispersion ratio of 2 teaspoons of clay to 1 tablespoon of alcohol. To learn more about natural colorants in melt & pour, check out this blog post.
Below are some fun tutorials that include our Brazilian Clays. If you get a chance to try out the different colors (Natural, Purple, Yellow, Pink, & Dark Red), we’d love for you to leave us a review on the product’s page or share a picture with us on Bramble Berry’s Facebook page. Happy soaping!
Top Left – Clockwise: Cute as a Button, Under Your Spell – Melt and Pour Clay Tutorial, Tiger Stripe “Hanger” Swirl Tutorial, In-The-Pot Swirl & Hot Process Series: Oven Process Layers