My First Batch of Soap....????

Ok so I made my first batch of soap this afternoon and wow how stressful was that!! Like I mentioned in my last post, for my first attempt I chose to make a goat milk castile soap. So that's an olive oil and goat's milk soap. Using milk in soaps is apparently very tricky as there is an added reaction with the milk and the LYE which turns the lye solution yellow/orange and it makes the solution really hot.

Thankfully i had watched a million and one videos on youtube about making goat's milk soap. I added the lye to the milk and the water very slowly and yep what a surprise it almost instantly started turning yellow.

I should have taken a photo at this stage for me as well as for you but as I'm sure you can appreciate I was a little stressed at this stage as my lye mixture was turning more and more yellow bordering on orange and the temperature was way up near 180f. So I put my lye solution in an ice bath as I had seen done on you tube and it did bring the temperature done quite quickly but I don't know if it helped with the colour at all.

I don't think the solution turned bright orange but it was definitely on the orange scale of colours. I thought what the hey it didn't say anything bad would happen to the soap if it went a bit orange in fact it said that it probably would and if it curdled to blast it with a stick blender. Luckily I bought one this morning...how glad was I! I nearly didn't buy it coz i was feeling tight this morning and didn't want to spend anymore money after buying a 14 euro chicken!

So when my oil and beeswax and my lye solution were within a couple of degrees of each other 125degrees about I poured my lye solution into my oil then got to it with the stick blender. It didn't take to long to reach "trace" this is when you lift out your blender or spoon and dribble a bit on the surface it leaves a...yep you've guessed it trace. Trace is like the consistency of custard...hmmm custard.

I have a number of friends and family that suffer with eczema and I wanted to make a soap for them so once I had reached trace I poured roughly half the mixture into the moulds before I added some essential oils to the remaining half.

I used bergamot and cedar wood essential oils both of which are supposed to be good for the treatment of skin irritations. As you can see from the picture my soap turned out a kind of a honey colour it started to curdle a little bit but My ole mate the stck blender soon sorted that out.

So as far as I am aware I think I have just made my first successful batch of Goat's Milk Castile soap but we won't really know for 4 weeks. I think I'll get me some PH strips tomorrow.

Virgin soap

I am sooooo excited about tomorrow!! My husband has gone away for the weekend to a school reunion (snore snore) and I am going to take this opportunity to make my first ever batch of soap! I didn't think my delivery of ingredients was going to get here in time but to my joy it was here when I got home from work. YAY.

I am going to make an olive oil soap, they call these "castile" soaps. But I have the fear. The recipe I have chosen is from a book by Melinda Coss and it sounds yummy, in fact i have chosen it because i have many friends that suffer with really bad eczema. I have heard that goat's milk soaps are really good for eczema sufferers. But I have also heard that milk soaps are notoriously difficult to master.

So am I getting out of my pram a little bit here or am i worrying for nothing? All the you tube videos I have watched say you should freeze the milk, but the recipe I have calls to heat it up agghhhhh!!!! Its not a pure milk soap so perhaps the fact that the liquid content is half milk half water changes things.

I will try and take some photos as I go along tomorrow and post them tomorrow evening then once I have had a few goes I might even try and make a video of my own.

So watch this space...I'm popping my soap cherry tomorrow.

Where have I been lately??

So any of you that pop by regularly may be wondering where I have been lately. I mean its been like 6 months...WOW where does the time go.

You may have read earlier posts about where I live and what I have been up to and there for might have seen that last year my husband and I bought an unfinished apartment in Chamonix Mont Blanc.

Well that is what I have been doing lately. In between bits and pieces of work we have been building our new nest. But we are still missing a few vital twigs here and there, like a kitchen for example!

So as you can imagine living on a building site doesn't do wonders for the ole creative juices. It has been torture knowing that I have a box full of felting supplies and soap supplies just waiting for me to open them and give them some love.

But now I can glimpse some light at the end of the very long tunnel I have started making again. I have an annual sale in december so I have started to make stock. Once I have enough I will start to put them on ETSY again as I am sure I have been forgotten.

please keep checking up on me because once the nest is all lined with feathers I fully intend on getting back on the horse with vigour. Look out for some new tutorials and join me as I take my first steps in to the world of soap and bath bombs.

What's been happening with me lately?

So things have been a bit quite from me lately on the ole blogging and Etsy front, this is because after two years of living out of a back pack yoyoing too and from france and the uk I am finally back in Chamonix. Still how ever living out of a back pack and abusing our our lovely friends.

Though getting back here was no easy task! The van we hired to bring all of our stuff back broke down 200km away from our final destination...nightmare. Luckily for us I speak french so it wasn't too much of a drama to get rescued. We broke down at 3 pm and by the time the breakdown assistance had sorted us out with a hire car we didn't get up to cham till 9.30pm. We stayed with friends that have a trailer so we could go back down to the garage to retrieve our belongings. This took two trips 200euros and almost 800km of driving but we got there in the end.

Now we have been home for a week we have started work on our apt, the electrician is nealy finished first fix and Jon has started the plumbing. I have been stricken down with the flu from hell, what is the point of mucus I ask you? So I write this blog post from my sick bed....AHHHHH and that's why I haven't ben very active this past week.

Promotional Frenzy BNR treasury result

So anyone that might have read my last post about being featured in an ETSY BNR treasury on monday might like to know the result.

I made a sale! I sold one of my cobweb felt scarves. I was over the moon.

But this post is more about joining an ETSY TEAM. By joining an etsy team it gives you strength in numbers. So rather than posting the odd comment in some of the forum threads hoping that some one might notice you; by joining a team you are almost assured of getting noticed...if not only by the team captain.

What a team offers you ( well depends on the team I guess) But the promotional Frenzy team offers me not one lonely person trying to promote my shop but 71 people all trying to promote all of our shops.

I have to admit that since making the effort to complete as many as the challenges as I can my views and sales have increased. Wether this is due to the fact that I myself have been promoting my shop more or that I now have a whole bunch of people also promoting my shop I cannot be sure but I am very glad to have joined in.

So anyone new to ETSY or just a bit miffed by the hugeness of the of it and feel like you are drowning in all that etsy is. My advice would be to join a team and why not the Promotional Frenzy Team at that.

See you there!

First BNR treasury on ETSY!

OOOOOh how excited am I, I have made it into my first BNR treasury on ETSY. For those of you who aren't familiar with "Treasuries" it is a way of promoting other Etsians and their items. By compiling collections of 16 items the powers that be at Etsy choose treasury collections to go on the front page.

So when you go to the ETSY home page the items you see will be a treasury compilation made by one of the shop owners. The beautiful thing about this system is that you cannot promote yourself in these collections.

This is why I am so honored to be listed in a BNR treasury. BNR stands for buy and replace, so if anyone wants a real chance of making a sale they have to buy something from one of the featured shops then their shop replaces that from which they bought from.

So a big thank you to my Promotional Frenzy forum pals for including me!

'Out of Whole Cloth; Fiber-Lovers BNR ' by Giftbearer

Artists who work in Knit/Crochet/FeltThis will be Monday's Specialty BNR Opens 4:00 PM - 1 AMJanuary 31st$15.00 Buy-in MinimumFirst 4 buyers will get 2 spots! Please click, comment, and promote!

Slouchy Newsboy Cap - B... HogansHandiwor... $28.00	Heart Felt Multi Brooch SensoryFelteds $20.00	Chunky Heathered Red Et... bagsofblessing $38.00	Follow in my Footsteps ... crochetedbycha... $19.00
White Chiffon Trio of F... prendasbyenid $18.00	Purplelious scarf and b... IsabellesAttic $32.00	Swirly Twirly Scarf Blu... PowersOfLove $15.00	handmade wool felt bag/... sammi10 $30.00

Treasury tool is sponsored by Lazzia.com.

What I will miss

As you may have read in previous posts, I am shortly going to be going back to Chamonix, France where I have been living for the past 12 years.

I am very excited to be going home to the prospect of being able to go snow boarding on my days off, I'm looking forward to start building our new flat. I'm excited to be amongst friends again that I have missed immensely.

But there is one thing that the UK has that I sorely miss when I 'm in France. Aside from the rest of my family and friends I have had since I was a little girl, the UK, no matter which town or city you visit, has a wealth of second hand, charity,thrift shops and they are so much fun to trawl around. I spend hours sifting though the treasures that you can find in them, from books to buttons, clothes to cottons.

For the past few years as I have been going back and forth to and from France and the UK I have bought only a handful of new clothes, most of my wardrobe now consists of items I have found in second hand shops. I even use some fabrics I find there in my creative projects.

I can't wait to go home but in the same breath I can't wait to be coming back to do the second hand shop circuit.