10th ave. soapworks

So what are the odds that two girls from the same high school church youth group would grow up and each start a business selling soap? Well, that's what happened to me and my friend Vanessa. I moved to the other side of the midwest after graduation and we lost contact for several years during those dark solitary days before Facebook. She was off and running with her soap venture when we met up years later and I was between my first soap business experience and my current 10th Ave. Soap business. Fast forward a decade and here I am. Still. I never thought I would be making soap for so long. My little business has evolved and changed over time, as it should. But I'm still here on 10th Ave. churning soap out and making the long-suffering UPS man lug 50# blocks of fat and bulky boxes of lye to my front door regularly. Vanessa contacted me last year and told me that she was thinking of hanging up her goggles and rubber gloves. However, she had a few fantastic products that her c...

I bought some beeswax....awhile ago.  As in a year ago.  A friend of mine in the honey business was learning how to take care of the beeswax and had lots of extra.  Local beeswax?  At a good price with no shipping charges?  I was in.  As it turned out, she had done for the first step in cleaning it, but to get the best quality, cleanest beeswax, it needed a second step.  I finally got around to doing it this fall, as I'd run out of my previous stash and all the cleaner pieces I had. Yellow jackets that died a waxy death. Cleaning beeswax isn't hard, but it does take a lot of waiting.  The first step for me was cutting it into smaller chunks to melt it down.  Wrenching off pieces of beeswax with a butcher knife is a workout like no other.    My "double boiler"--a #10 can in an old saucepan Melting the beeswax down took awhile in my makeshift double boiler.  When melted, the pure beeswax stays on the top while th...

Last spring, I had the idea of creating a soap that represented some of the variety in my town's farmer's market.  The more I looked around, the more overwhelming the possible combinations--herbs, vegetables, dairy, fruits, even fats.  I could come up with a new combination every week as I looked around.  Maybe it was because my choices kept changing that I never settled on a set of ingredients and just did it. Dehydrated ground pumpkin--it makes a wonderful addition to angel food cake I recently narrowed down some of the abundance into my first version.  It may be March, but with the snow of the last two days (and still falling as I write), fresh vegetables are just a dream of the future.  So I used honey, dehydrated pumpkin and egg--all from the market--and dried kale.  (I used my own kale in this batch, not because it wasn't available in abundance at the market last summer, but I really couldn't justify buying anyone else's with a dozen fru...

I know that any color added to soap can morph into a surprise, but there is an added element of unknown when using botanicals to color my soap.  Some people jump out of planes or ski off mountains, but this is how I live on the edge these days.  Hmm.  If I weren't having so much fun, I'd be embarrassed. I recently had my first go with madder.  So....whatsa madder?  It's a root--the root of the madder. Ahem. (I love puns...) I infused 8 oz. of olive oil with 2 t. madder root powder for almost a week.  This amount worked out to be 20% of the oils in my batch. I wanted something in the way of embeds to add visual interest.   I dearly love my soap balls but I don't want to over do a good thing.  I've recently done square-shaped embeds, so this time I cut a bar of white soap into slices. I panicked a little that it wouldn't get dark enough--it was kind of a dusty peach--so I added 1/4 t. dried powder right before pouring. Madder powd...

I'm completely out of my herbal balms and I miss them!  Right now I'm infusing oils for more batches.  Arnica is the most recent herbal infusion I have brewing.  I know it's fabulously good for bruises and such, but the dried herb is rather expensive so I've never tried it before.  But recently I was wandering around my local Mexican grocery store to get one of the staples of life, corn tortillas (the real ones), and a little bag of dried arnica caught my eye.  I had never noticed the shop carried it before, probably because I'm so focused on my beloved tortillas, but it got me pretty excited.  (Really, I ask you, who else goes to a Mexican market and comes out with bath and body ingredients?) I am using the slow method of infusion, letting time and sunlight do its thing on the arnica.  I've heated infusions up on occasion, but it often leads to deep-fried calendula petals...