My Soap Box

Howdy, friends!  I hope everyone is still healthy and holding up well under whatever your area’s current conditions may be.  We’re all okay at my house.  A few days ago, I woke up so swollen I couldn’t walk, but by the time I was able to get in to see my rheumatologist, things started to get a wee bit better.  (It was a little creepy sitting in the waiting room with other people, though most of us were wearing masks).  My doctor ordered the standard Lupus blood work, and my sed rate and CRP levels (which measure inflammation markers) were about three times the highest “normal range” number, so that explains things.  At any rate, I started a steroid pack, and am feeling much better now.

Last week, I started discussing my “artsy” projects.  I forgot to mention that as far as the house repair or remodel projects that we’ve undertaken, I found the most awesome website called See Jane Drill, and it’s geared toward teaching novices how to do carpentry jobs.  The woman who teaches in the videos is a master craftswoman and a journeyman plasterer, and she’s an amazing teacher!  She’ll tell you to “mix the drywall with water until it’s the consistency of pancake batter or buttercream icing,” and you know exactly what to do.  As a matter of fact, she’s not just for the ladies!  My son now watches her for tips for the jobs he does around the house.

But moving along, not too long ago, I shared how Sister Michelle and I were making and selling homemade soaps, but I didn’t tell you where we store them.  Originally, we just had a small variety of fragrances, and those were fine to store in a closet somewhere.  But when we decided on making our favorite twenty-two designs and scents, we needed a dedicated place to keep them, and it needed to be conveniently located where guests could peruse them if they wanted to purchase any.  We agreed that it would be pretty cool if we could find an old library card cabinet and do something with it, but any we found had a large price tag and took up a lot of room.

So, I started searching YouTube for hacks to make my own.  Turns out Ikea had a cute little “blank canvas” which gave me a good jumping in point.

We purchased five of them and Sister Michelle painted them black.  I then turned the drawers around backward so the little finger hole didn’t show.  I bought some black, white, grey, and red scrapbook papers and lined each drawer then covered the front of each drawer to match the lining.  I made sure some papers were textured to add to the visual interest.

I purchased three types of card holder drawer handles, and after deciding how to arrange each drawer and which type of handle to use, drilled the holes and installed the handles.  I attempted to use the grinder to cut of the backs of the screws inside each drawer, but the tool was too large and bulky for the thin wood, so I found a Dremel bit that worked well.

All told, I’m pleased with how it turned out, and I believe it looks good in my living room.  Each drawer holds seven or eight bars of soap (depending on if they are beveled or wavy cut).  When the drawers on the top are especially full of heavy soap, it does get a little difficult to open and close the lower drawers, but once a few bars are removed, they all work fine.  And, of course, when I start to mention “my soap box,” I can weed out the crowd if I don’t want to be around them because they will assume I’m talking about getting up on the other soap box.

Let’s talk:  Do you ever look for furniture hacks on the internet?  Have you ever re-purposed or refinished a piece of furniture to make it look completely different than it looked before?  Have you ever heard of See Jane Drill?  Have you had to see a doctor since the Covid-19 outbreak hit your area? 

Rub-A-Dub

Happy Throwback Thursday, friends.  I can’t believe it’s been nearly five years since I last shared my homemade soap-making adventures with you. At the time, I’d been making my own soap in three different fragrances – gardenia, lavender, and almond with oats & honey for a few years.  I made one batch of each fragrance about twice a year, so about six batches a year in all.  Sister Michelle and I made them mostly for ourselves due to allergies, and we’d occasionally give a couple of bars away to friends who expressed interest.  We used homemade wooden molds, we used a knife to cut them, just eyeballing the size, and they weren’t necessarily pretty.  In fact, they were pretty ugly. Looking back, I realize they didn’t even smell very strong because we cooked the oils so long to burn off the lye that it got so hot, it burned off the fragrance.  But it was moisturizing and had a nice lather.  We called it “hippie soap.”

This was our old “hippie soap” in my old house.

About a year and a half ago, I was in the middle of a “too much in pain to really do anything productive” mood when I sporadically looked up any updated soap-making techniques. There’s actually a lot out there now as opposed to when we started.  (Back then, everyone was so secretive with their success secrets.  I guess once the cat was out of the bag, there was no reason not to spill the beans, and the secret-keepers then decided to capitalize on getting the most hits for their how-to videos.)

I learned a LOT of amazing new techniques, and I also played around with ingredients until I developed a much better recipe.  The results:  We now make really beautiful bars of soap that smell amazing and are still very sudsy and ultra-moisturizing.  So, Sister Michelle and I took our soap show on the (metaphorical) road and opened a soap shop.  Or maybe it’s a shoppe.  We haven’t decided yet.

We started off just selling to friends and family, but we’re starting to get referrals from them now, so we had to set up a Facebook Page (which is still short of about half the photos I need to add because we had less than four bars in stock of each of those, and I like to include four in each promo photo).  However, I don’t really want a full-time career in soap-making, so I have no plans to take it to Etsy or any of the other on-line sales sites (especially because postage rates are so high now), or even to the local Saturday markets that sell such goodies (because I have no desire to come into contact with all the germs).  It’s just for a little extra income and because we have fun making it.

We’ve developed about twenty fragrances so far plus other seasonal scents.  Sister Michelle loves “Autumn Pumpkin” the best, so even though we were done selling that fragrance in November, she still uses it.  My favorite is “Gift of the Magi” which was a Christmas scent of frankincense and myrrh with stripes of gold mica and gold-covered frankincense nuggets on top.  I have one customer who comes a couple of times a month to buy the Dark Chocolate Birthday Cake soap and a sea sponge for her many girlfriends’, daughters’, and granddaughters’ birthdays.  (And I think also because she loves chocolate!) But Coffee Shop seems to be just about everybody’s collective favorite.

A lot of people tell us they smell good enough to eat, though I wouldn’t recommend it.  They may look and smell delicious, but I can almost guarantee that they still taste like soap.  Our regular fragrances include Goat Milk Oats & Honey, Coffee Shop, Casanova, Berry Blue, Spearmint, Lavender, Country Apple, Goat Milk Dreamsicle, Lemon, Naked, Gardenia Garden, Raspberry Beret, Lavender Lemongrass, Peppermint Orange, Peppermint Lavender, Hawaiian Luau, Pink Diamonds, Garden of Eden, Dirty Hippie, Spruce Forest, Dark Chocolate Birthday Cake, and Hazelnut Toffee Birthday Cake.

At any rate, I wasn’t really writing about this today to promote anything, but just to show you the (HUGE!) difference between my former “hippie soap” and what I’m making now.  (Though if you wanted to Like my Facebook page, I wouldn’t mind in the least.)  I went from six batches a year to a minimum of that each month.  It’s a lot more artsy-looking now, don’t you think?

Let’s chat:  Have you ever made homemade soap?  Have you ever used homemade soap?  Do you have allergies that prevent you from using any particular store-bought item and force you to make it at home instead?  Would you ever use soap that smells like food?