The BIG Reveal - Traveling Soaps

I love to travel.  I love home, too - my bed, my cats, my own kitchen.  But with being home so much, I really welcome the opportunity to get away, to see new sites, new parts of the state, or even to have that moment of seeing a familiar site in a new way.  Whether it's a day trip, a weekender or a major vacation, I like exploring.

Our last family trip was a weekender in December to Beaufort, NC.  It's an absolutely lovely little coastal town, and the people in that area are just so friendly, too.  In fact, I was driving through the town leading to Beaufort when one of the police officers pulled me over and issued a personal invitation for me to return to Beaufort next week, actually.  Well, he issued me a speeding ticket, but he was really nice about it.  Since getting that ticket, I learned that one of the pilots on the ill-fated space shuttle Challenger was from Beaufort, and as many times as I've been in that town, I've never paid attention to the memorial to him.  I'm going to go check that out next week after I'm done at the courthouse.  I have a friend with a shop in Beaufort, so I'll stop in and see her, too.

Of course, with all this traveling, I absolutely MUST have good soap with which to bathe, so I always take a small bar of my own soap just in case my only other option is the dreaded "deodorant bar."  Thanks to my mother-in-law, I decided it's time to make these small travel-sized soaps available to my customers, too.  My soaps want to travel!  They want to see the sights!  They want to travel the world!  Will you give them this opportunity?

Lovely little 1-ounce bars of travelin' soapy goodness

These lovely little gems will be ready to own by the very end of February, and they will be ready for you to tuck into your travel bag and take with you as you hit the road this Spring and Summer.  As you travel, I invite you to take pics of your soap and you and email them to me (please, no naked pics) to be featured in an upcoming blog post.  Let's see where these soaps find themselves.

Where will your travels take you this year?

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I've got the Blues... Blueberries, that is

Saturday's the day - my biggest show of the year.  This Saturday is the North Carolina Blueberry Festival.  Peter and I are busy putting the finishing touches on production, and tomorrow will be the mega-wrapping day.  Much of our wares are already wrapped and labeled, but there's a little bit left to go.  What's new and great this year?  We'll be selling a limited edition Blueberry Festival soap featuring the Blueberry Fest logo and a yummy blueberry fragrance.

Image by Sara's Soaps via FlickrWe'll have a variety of the much-loved flip-flop soaps, including a newish one that looks like last year's Blueberry Flip Flop soap but with a great scent I'm calling Beach Bound.  There will be many Blueberry and Blueberries & Cream homemade soaps there.  These are wonderful soaps and are a delight for skin.

We'll also have some new lip balm flavors from which to choose.  And, last but not least, we'll have a number of my daughter's Sun On The Go sets.

The biggest deals will be FREE Blueberry Lip Balm with a $10.00 purchase, and the Bargain Box, a full box of great soaps that are less-than-gorgeous and on sale for $2.00 each.  Get 'em while you can; after this show, leftover soaps will be donated to Clean The World.  We'll be there from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., booth #72, near the intersection of Wilmington Street and S. Walker Road.

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Making Soap New School

Last month, I discovered that my Great-Grandma used to make her own soap.  Dad says that stuff would dry up poison ivy in twenty-four hours!  Yeah, it was that strong.  It shouldn't surprise me that Grandma made her own soap.  After all, in the early 20th century, pretty much every good farm wife made soap for the family, for bathing, laundry and washing dishes.  I'm impressed, though, because not only did Grandma make her own soap, but she also made her own lye.

Still, while this was a common practice a hundred years ago and not terribly remarkable, it's somehow thrilling to me to realize that I've got soapmaking in my family tree, especially a lady I loved and admired a great deal.  When Dad was over at our house a few days after telling me this, I happened to be making a batch of laundry soap in the crockpot.  This is soapmaking new school.  He remembers watching his grandma standing over a black iron pot over an open flame in the yard, stirring the soap endlessly, waiting for it to saponify (become soap).  This would take hours!  Keep in mind, a batch had to bathe all the bodies, all the clothes and all the dishes, and the larger the batch, the longer it takes to "become." 

Now, my soaps won't clear up poison ivy in twenty-four hours, and I have to specially formulate the batch to make it suitable for laundry.  Yes, my laundry soap will get you clean, but it's not nearly as moisturizing as my goat's milk soaps.  So what does "new school" look like?

Lye is bought, not made.  You can make lye by pouring water through ashes, over and over, but this makes a combination of sodium hydroxide (lye) and potassium hydroxide (potash).  I don't have an easy source for ashes, so I just buy my lye over the Internet, or, if I'm out and desperate, at the local hardware store.

Stirring is done by a stick blender, not by hand-stirring with a wooden spoon.  Hand stirring soap can take a few hours at best with some batches.  Stirring with a stick blender takes about five minutes, max.  This spares the arms a lot of agony, plus gets the soapmaker on with life faster.

Soap can cure for longer periods.  Folks like my Great-Grandma didn't have four-to-eight weeks to wait for soap to cure before they could use it.  It needed to be ready right then.

The crock pot has replaced the iron pot (at least in my kitchen).  Instead of adding heat by cooking the soap over an open flame, now we let the crockpot do all the work for us.  It's not quite a matter of turning it on and forgetting about it, but it's close.  My soap can cook in as little as 45 minutes or as long as three hours.  Either way, I'm not stirring it constantly.

So...  For what "old fashioned" thing are you grateful we have modern equivalents now?