Handmade Goats Milk Soap, getting ready for a show

I've had an interesting week in making soap. I found that mixing soap is more fun than cooking, and clean up is a breeze!!

Here you can see two batches I did today. One is pale lemon yellow and the other turned out more like a butterscotch or taffy color.

The two batches are exactly the same, but the lighter color was cold processed and the darker was hot processed in a crockpot.

Below I'm stiring a small batch in a plastic bucket, this was a test to see if I liked using coconut and olive oil together, and I do!!





















Here is a small bar of soap that didn't work out too well, I'll be using this one in the house as there were lots of air bubbles in all the molds, slao see the dolphins below.


















You can see that I've got quite a few bars done, but this is only the latest batch, there is about 40 to 50 lbs of soap in boxes all shrink wraped and ready to go to the show next weekend. I will continue to do about 8lbs of soap a day for the next 4 to 5 days.

Natural Goats Milk Soap, made on the farm.

Here is my latest effort at making soap. I've got a small show coming up with a group of artisans and I'm trying to make as much soap as I can. Since the show is only a week away I decided to try my hand at HP or hot processed soap. I searched the Internet and found the oven method on Diane's Naturally http://www.dianesnaturally.com.au/. For those who don't know CP or cold processed soap takes 4 to 6 weeks to 'cure', while HP takes 24 hours to set up and cure. It's a lot easier to do CP but it's quicker to do HP.

As you can see from the photos below I've got what I think is a temperature problem, but I'm no expert and will ask others what this two tone soap means and if I should turn it into laundry soap (grate it all up into powder). The second photo shows the smaller molds turned out nicely, but the large block mold is discolored.

Pacific Northwest Fiber Arts

I never have time to sit down and actually compose a blog post for myself - time management isn't something I'm good at! But I'm going to persevere and make a promise that I'll post something at least once a week!!

I've been concentrating on getting some fleeces processed, I've got 7 mohair fleeces from this spring that need to be cleaned and spun up as well as 4 Shetland fleeces that also need to be spun up. A few days ago I started washing and picking two black wool fleeces and yesterday my daughter started carding it up for me (on our Patrick Green Cottage Carder) while I started processing one of the brown ones. I love the Shetland wool, it's so soft and I can't wait to get spinning this stuff up!

We are also working on the mountain of angora we've accumulated, light as a feather but takes a lot of space! Lindsey & I died some blue the other day and it's about as yummy as can be! Lindsey is going to spin it up and skein it for a show we have coming up in November. I hope to have a good time at the Art In The Woods Studio Tour this year: http://cafnw.org/AITW-New-2007.htm this is kind of getting out of my comfort zone as I've never done a show before, just sold things online and to other designers.

Below is a picture of some coopworth I forgot about, it's clean and ready to spin up!