A Liquid Soap Experience

So, the biggest hurdle I’ve found to selling my bar soaps to some folks is that long ago, a certain percentage of the population here in the United States gave up trying to get clean with regular-old bars of soap. Now, these folks had probably NOT tried and became hooked on OUR bars of soap…soaps like Sparkling Raspberry, Lavender and Oatmeal, Gold Rush, Cranberry Marmalade, White Tea and Ginger, and the likes of those, but hey, there are still people in remote areas of the globe that haven’t tried our soap, so I’ll give them a pass and just get on with the point of this post, is which is our LIQUID SOAP.

Over the past 4 years I’ve made quite a few batches of a dark brown liquid soap that smelled a little funny, even after adding scent to it. Forget about color, nothing could cover up that brown. The brown color came from the caramelizing of the milk sugars…after all, we DO make goats milk soaps.  But, lately I’ve delved heavily into adding fruits, yogurt, herbs, fancy oils and spices to our soaps, along with the goats milk, and have been very pleased with the results, and have seen an increase in sales to boot. But, we’re still missing out on selling to those remote people living amongst us who have sworn off bar soap, so I wanted to make a soap especially for them. One that they could write home to mom about (in a Facebook message) and sing it’s holy praises and all that and such. So I went back to my test kitchen, which also doubles as a regular soap kitchen and also just a regular food kitchen on the rare occasion that I decide to cook something other than soap, and started experimenting with liquid soap again. THIS time, some kind of light bulb suddenly went off in my head, and the complicated sets of instuctions for making liquid soap suddenly made sense and I actually made a sucessful batch that neither smelled funny, or looked funny. In fact, I added only a tiny bit of scent and color and as you can see in the picture at the top of the page, it was waaayyyyyy too much of both! Well, you can’t smell it of course through a computer screen, but rest assured, nobody anywhere would ever want their hands or body to smell THAT strongly of Sparkling Raspberry, no matter how wonderful it smells.

But, that isn’t the point. The point is that I have successfully and accidentally made liquid soap that I can actually feel good about selling. No, it does not contain goats milk, but most of the liquid soaps that people buy also do not contain goat milk. In the very near future I will again play with adding goats milk to an acceptable level that won’t discolor the whole batch. Goats milk in bar soap does not act the same way at all because bar soap does not require the long cook time that liquid soap does…and some other stuff that I haven’t figured out yet. Goats milk in bar soap is the absolute bomb, but in liquid soap, as the only liquid, it fails miserably for me. Maybe in the future I can figure out how to get clear soap using goats milk but for now our small and growing soap company will make our liquid soap in the vegan variety in lots of cool colors and scents. It will be packaged in the 16 ounce bottle you see in the picture, and 32 oz refills will be available too.

Ah crud, I’ve gone over my word count goal…so, see you next time!

 

Black Friday Discount Sale! Stock up on soaps!

We are having a special Black Friday Sale, good until Midnight tonight.  Take 20% off all orders of $20 or more. 

Limited quantities.  When purchasing boxed sets of 4 or 8 soaps, please list several alternative scents.

Use coupon code:  BLACKFRIDAYDISCOUNT

See shop at:

shantarassoaps.com

Shantara’s Soaps Is In Viva Glam Magazine!

Our soaps were featured in Viva Glam Magazine this month.  Check it out!

Shantara’s Soaps is in Viva Glam Magazine!

Today’s Homesteading Report

You want to know what I think are just the cutest little things in the world?

Baby chicks and their mamas.

We’ve got them hatching out all over.

The hens, not being very bright at all, decided to set on eggs in the second story of the egg-laying boxes.  I didn’t know how they thought they might get their babies down from there,  so I moved them down to the first level where the chicks just have to step over the little front panel that holds the straw and eggs in the box.

Two of the hens are still there, but the one with the chicks that hatched out day before yesterday was gone when I went to check them early this morning.   She had abandoned the rest of the eggs which had not hatched yet, but luckily were taken over by another broody hen….who abandoned HER small clutch in favor of a bigger one whose eggs were pipping already.

I found the lost hen and her chicks in one of the goat yards later this morning, sunning themselves.  Luckily they chose the goat yard with only 2 lazy goats in it and not the yard with the woods pen attached that contains three bratty kids and a mean old doe.

They might have been in a lot of trouble then.

I’m hoping that out of about 400 eggs, I can get at least 20 chicks.  I never seem to have good luck with chicks raised by their mama’s around here.  They tend to drown in water buckets,  or just disappear, although  I can’t remember a single one ever getting stepped on by a goat or horse, even though they like to peck around the horse feet.

I think the horses like the chicks too and try to be careful of them.

I won’t comment on the goats, except to say that the chicks better WATCH OUT for them.

I’ve also got a guinea  setting on a clutch of eggs.  I don’t think that’s going to turn out very well.  She (or he, don’t know which it is)  has been seen inside the truck canopy under the cedar trees where the eggs were laid in a big nest, off and on, and finally she’s now mostly on.  The eggs would get warm, then freeze for awhile, then get warm again.

Plus, they’re  a mixture of guinea and chicken eggs.

Wasn’t a swan accidentally raised by a duck in the story of  “The Ugly Duckling”?  In this case the ugly duckling will be raising the swans.

Maybe it won’t turn out so bad.

The one good thing about it is that instead of roosting in the cedars above our outdoor-stored hay, she’s now setting on the eggs in the canopy all night.  One guinea can create a huge mess by morning, making morning feedings pretty gross sometimes.

I finally got jugs ordered for the laundry detergent I made in March.  It was a new recipe and I decided to let it cure for awhile before trying to use it.  I started using it yesterday and found that it dissolves wonderfully in water and leaves no residue on clothes.

If the jugs get here in the two days promised, I’ll have them available at the Lynchburg Market on Saturday.  I’m not sure of the price yet.  The jugs are just about $2.00 each with shipping.  I’ll be happy to refill your jug in the future with more laundry soap.

I also have powered laundry soap available but need to redo the packaging.  I just wasn’t very happy with it.

I’ve also got some liquid soap made, but it requires a 6-8 month cure time.  It should be ready in October.  Hopefully I can get some more made since the cure time is so long, but it also requires cooking over a low fire on a woodstove for 3 days….much to hot for that right now!

I got new herbs planted.  Basil, lemon balm, cilantro, thyme, oregano, and pennyroyal, plus some more tomatoes in orange, yellow and cherry.  I also moved some clumps of peppermint from the back of the house to the front.  Hopefully the move won’t kill them.

I’ve got tons more peppermint.  If you’d like some plants, let me know and I’ll dig some up for you.  I really have no idea if they are peppermint or spearmint and no clue on variety.  They were here when we moved in and smell wonderful.

There are tons of the stuff  in the goat pasture, but they don’t like them.  Good thing is, bugs don’t like them either and so they grow very well and are very healthy.

I’ve heard it takes a lot to kill peppermint.

And that’s just about it for today.

Happy farming and gardening!

Rain and More Rain

Well, it was bound to happen.

It’s raining.

I’m tired of it already.

We didn’t even have any grass seeds down.

The chickens insist on roosting where they always roost, even though they get rained on. Even though they have several small houses where they eat and sleep during the day.  They refuse to use them at night.

But at dawns first light the whole pack is standing on the front porch, preening their wet feathers and complaining about what a hard night they had.

A few weeks ago I put them all inside an electric mesh fence made especially for chickens. It had two sheds inside with plenty of stuff to roost on.

The next morning all the chickens were back on my front porch.

I’ve had “the talk” with them several times but they refused to listen.

You know “the talk”, the one where I threaten to put them in a stew pot if they don’t do such and such?

No effect at all.

But, here’s something cool.  My daughter Shannon has decided she’d like to join me in the soap making and marketing business! We’ll be able to double the effort and be in twice as many places with lots more soap and we’re working on several new projects.  She has a lot more ideas than I have and still has most of her brain cells in working order….lots of mine are all worn out, and missing important data.

We haven’t gotten very far with the new online ordering catolog yet, but the good news is that we have lots of soap!

Here’s a picture of the latest. Sandalwood/Patchouli

Black Raspberry Vanilla Swirled Soap

I don’t have a picture, but my house sure smells nice!

Today is actually the first day I’ve made soap in the new house.

The whole house looks like a construction site, so I didn’t really want to add to the chaos, but I’m glad I did.

I was so tired from driving 200 miles trimming horses yesterday that I took a nap this afternoon and woke up to baby goats making a lot of racket and the sky was very dark.  I thought I was way late for feeding, but nope, it was just 4:30.  One of the babies had gotten her head stuck in the hay feeder and they were all upset due to the sudden change in weather.  We were just about to get hit with a thunder storm!

Well, the storm passed with nothing more than rain and I was feeling pretty sick so I puttered around and got my soap molds cleaned and lined and everything in place.  I found my gloves and my colorants and made up a batch of Black Raspberry Vanilla soap.  I put some of the soap into a separate container before pouring and colored it using a deep purple peacock color.  Once I poured the rest of the soap into the mold, I added the colored soap and swirled.

Once the swirl was done I added the dividers so in one mold I have three separate logs of soap.  In about 24 hours the soap will be ready to unmold and cut and I’ll get 24 6oz bars of soap.  I’ve got 4 of these molds and can make 100 bars of soap a day if I want to.

So far I’ve never wanted to.

But, it was FUN!  I love making soap!  I don’t like making Whipped Shea Butter, and although I like making lotions, I dislike the bottling part.  But the soap is fun all the way around.  Despite not being able to find my safety glasses and having to use CG’s REALLY dark sunglasses, and splashing my face in several places with the lye/milk mixture…I enjoyed it and feel like I accomplished something today.

Not that I didn’t accomplish anything yesterday, but several of the horses I trim have foundered, and one of my own is getting more tenderfooted each day…due to the grass I’m sure.  This is disheartening to me and quite depressing.

I don’t know what to do with my own horse.  He’s skinny as a rail and needs the grass as he doesn’t seem to gain on hay, and I’ve been giving him a lower starch grain….I guess I need to figure out something else.

But anyway, soap is happy.  Soap is fun.  If you wanna learn to make it, come over and see me and I’ll show you how…just bring a hard hat!

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Accupressure Hand

My mother sent me this adorable little hand.  Have you ever seen anything so cute?  You can link to it here. Acupressure, and see all the information as presented by Dr. Alejandro Junger.  Pretty interesting stuff.

It is presented on the whole living website, which can be linked to from here. whole living website.

Anyway, it’s rather timely as I’m sitting here thinking about this pain in my neck that I got from jumping off a horse that just happened to be running as fast as it could run after being attacked by an electric fence that just happened to be on and working well at the time.

What you do is……ah heck, I lost the instructions.  Oh well, what you do is look up what to do on the internet, but in the meantime, enjoy this cute picture.

A gutter soap gone bad

Well, I really wanted this to work, but since my engineering skills are just about zero, it was destined to fail from the beginning. I took a length of gutter, duct taped the ends with fashionable pink duct tape, carefully ironed the wrinkles out of my liner paper, got the gutter lined, poured a nice bottom layer, added cubes of another soap, then another layer of the bottom layer, and then my nice purple top layer. It all barely fit into the mold as I forgot to factor in the soap cubes I added. I made a lovely swirl on the top, popped the whole thing in the oven to ensure a cure and to keep ash from forming on the top. Two hours later I pulled it out of the oven (just a warm oven, no continuous heat). The sides of my gutter mold had opened up, making the soap MUCH wider than it should have been. Not only that, I added the same amount of essential oils I would add to my bigger kelsie mold batch…which meant it did not all saponify and left little oily puddles on top of my soap! Grrrrrrr. The oils can be removed with paper towels, most of it has actually gone back into the soap this morning.

The worst/best part about the soap is that it smells so darn good! It is a lovely blend of 5Xorange and lavender. It’s heavenly. I’ll see what the bars look like when I cut them. I’ve been wanting to make various shapes for my valentines soap and lotion gift baskets, maybe this will work after all. It’s lovely, just not symmetrical.

Here you can see how my mold failed. My swirl flattened out too! And it was sooo pretty. Darn it, darn it, darn it.

This is the soap freshly unmolded. Notice the shine. This is the excess essential oil sitting on the top of the soap that did not get saponified. This is easier fixed by patting with paper towels. The shape, however, is not fixable.