Happy 4th of July!

Wow! This weekend has been a whirlwind.  So much has happened over the last 4 days:

1. Our website, www.nutmegnaturals.com went live
2. I set up a PayPal account
3. I set up an Etsy account
4. I listed items on Etsy
5. After I listed our Cranberry Bog soap, it was picked up in someone's treasury in about 5 minutes.  So excited! This literally made my day.
6. Made a really cool looking soap (see below)

I was going to do a spoon swirl, but got lazy and just took turns layering and pouring the 3 colors I made. I'm really happy with how they came out.  It reminds me of an underwater scene.  See that little curve under each bar of soap?  Well, my soap mold liner must have curled up a bit in that spot...but you know what?  I really like the way it looks.  Kind of an ergonomic soap with a place to hold it in your hand!

Mom was busy making soap too.  She made another batch of her mouth-watering coconut lemongrass.  I really must refrain from wanting to take a big bit out of this soap.  Isn't it gorgeous?

Mom also made another batch of spring garden, but adjusted the color to a beautiful, soft purple.  She mixed her own fragrances for this soap, mixing lilac and sweet cut grass together.

Tomorrow will be a very busy day.  Back to work after the nice, long weekend, and back to school.  I'm taking a summer class towards my Accounting degree.  It should be interesting packing 5 months of school work into 4 weeks.  Wish me luck!

Soap-making weekend

So Friday I packed up my car and went over to mom's house to make some soap.  The plan was to make a batch together for her 4 lb. mold and then make a batch for my 4 lb. mold.  I think we cranked out 8 lbs of soap in a shorter amount of time than it took me to pack up my car.  The batches we made came out great.  The first batch we made consisted of 4 different colors - definitely a two person job in my opinion. We did a mix of red sparkle, yellow, green and purple and planned on doing an in the pot swirl.  But when it came down to crunch time we forgot what we were doing (despite laying out detailed plans first) and we ended up pouring the base mixture into the mold. After panicking a little, we then began pouring the colors in as fast as possible, using a skewer to mix the colors.

 After these shots were taken, we had a little time left so I pulled out another skewer and made a nice looking top on the molds.

The following day, we cut some pretty cool bars! Every single bar was slightly different, but we were happy for our first attempt at using 4 different colors.

Finished product is below.  We're calling it "Groovy."

After Groovy was complete our next attempt was a blue and white swirl soap using Soapy Clean fragrance. This fragrance accelerates trace so it was a race against time to get this into the mold. I think we barely made it! One problem, however.  Although I packed 6 boxes of soap making stuff, I forgot to include the wood divider for my mold, so we ended up making the blue and white Soapy Clean soap in slab form.  The final cut bars are not my favorite shape, but still turned out pretty nice.

Other soap babies from last week:
Our Tiramisu soap.  OMG, this smells so good, I have to remind myself this is not food!  Has a scent of cocoa, coffee and a little bit of spice. We added a little bit of gold sparkle mica about 1/3 of the mixture to create a faint gold vein running through the dark brown soap.  Love, love, love this one!

Coconut Lemongrass:
This just smells fantastic...so fresh and clean.  It smelled more like Lemon to me at first, but now that it is drying a bit, I'm picking up more of the coconut.  Smells like summer in a bar of soap!

In the mold today: a double batch of Old Lime!