Apparently this post has been lost to history. Someone used a “comment” plugin to insert error messages throughout our website, and it’s taken some time for me to restore it.

Not sure what all I said, but probably something to the effect that we didn’t know the disastrous effect that vanilla has in soap making. At least the kind of vanilla we have.

As you can see from the photos, it turns soap very dark brown, not something we’d intentionally do. So instead of the blue sandalwood cubes in a nice white background, we’ve got blue chunks in chocolate.

I love vanilla, however, and it’s a wonderful soap. But it’s so dark that the color washes off when you use it. It makes you think you’re dirtier than you are.

I spent several hours today taking new photos and updating the website. I listed several new soaps and updated others. Many of the paracord bracelets are out of stock. If you see a bracelet you want, please email us the length you need, the style you want and we’ll custom make it for you. The newest soap we were going to call “Moody Blues” just keeps getting darker, so we changed the name to “Turquoise Nuggets.” It’s a wonderful soap!

Yesterday we combined a cubed blue sandalwood-scented soap with a fresh batch of white soap. We figured the blue chunks on a white background would make a nice contrast. The original soap was supposed to be coconut scented, but it was weak.

Although we’ve been making soap for three years, we never understood how to do color until recently (SoapQueen.com). We always guessed and the soap seldom looked like what we wanted. We put in seven teaspoons of pre-mixed titanium dioxide, but it still didn’t turn out as white as we’d hoped. The recipe calls for three teaspoons per pound of soap, so we should have put in more than twice as much.

I also miscalculated how many molds we’d need, figuring we’d fill our two miter-box molds and have leftover, but it didn’t quite fill the two molds.

We hand-mixed the lye and oils instead of using the stick blender because we didn’t want to accelerate trace, so it took longer to reach trace. We also exchanged five ounces of olive oil from our basic recipe and replaced it with five ounces of castor oil, which is supposed to make a very fine lather.

We put the soap into the two molds and put them in the oven at the lowest temp for an hour, then turned the oven off and left the molds in the oven overnight.

When I came down in the morning I was disappointed to see the soap had turned a light milk-chocolate brown. However, when I cut the first slice, I was delighted to see it had some semblance of what we were hoping for, although it still wasn’t as white as we’d hoped for. I’m thinking we might call it Moody Blues.

After too many months of no soap making, we finally made pine tar today. The hot process seems to work best for us making pine tar, but it’s amazing how many details we’ve forgotten over time, even though we make notes every time we make soap.

Pine tar is one of my favorite soaps, with a blend of Tea Tree, Peppermint and Lavender essential oils that completely mask the unpleasant odor of pine tar.

Since it comes only in shades of brown, it’s not a pretty soap, but it’s delightful to use. I’ve used it head to toe, although it doesn’t seem to work for dandruff control as well as coal-tar commercial soaps.

One of the problems in making HP soap is waiting for the temperature to come down past the flash points of the EOs, which I figured was about 150F. Although upon checking afterward, I found where someone listed the flash point of tea tree as 135-142F.

Waiting that longs mean the soap is starting to set up/dry out and is difficult to pack into the molds. We’ll see when we unmold it tomorrow.

(Added Jan 16, 2017) Just recently learned that the theory of adding EOs/FOs below flashpoint is bogus. Flashpoint is when a vaporized liquid could burst into flame. It has nothing to do with adding EOs/FOs to soap. The rule seems to be to add them after the soap has cooled to 150F or below.

We have a new host for our website. We were with Bluehost for two years and they were fine, just too expensive. eHost is much more reasonable, so we switched to them, which wasn’t an easy process. Worked on it for the past three weeks. Thanks to excellent tech support at eHost, they made it happen.

We made three new soaps back in November 2015, but don’t have them on the website yet. We made peppermint, spearmint and a nice one we call Christmas Day, a blend of Christmas Day fragrance oil from Glory Bee, plus cinnamon bark, clove, orange and peppermint essential oils. When you smell a bar, it conjures warm thoughts of the scents we associate with Christmas.

We’ll try to get them up on the website soon.

We made some cold process soap Dec 4 with fir needle essential oil and a hint of spearmint essential oil. We’d hoped to make it bright pink and deep black, but didn’t put enough activated charcoal in the recipe, so it turned out gray. It’s still pretty, however, and smells like walking through a fresh evergreen forest.

There’s a way people can get free soap. It’s been on the “Shipping” page, but maybe that’s not clear enough.

Buy three bars and you receive a fourth bar of your choice free, or two free lip balms of your choice.

Also refer a friend who buys any of our products, and you’ll receive a complimentary bar of the soap of your choice, or two lip balms of your choice.

We’re also going to offer free 1-oz bars of sample soaps so people can smell them, test them so they can make informed buying decisions.

Due to the hassle of figuring out shipping costs for more than one item purchased, we’ve decided to offer free shipping. We’re also offering more methods of payment since a friend tried to make a purchase, but didn’t want to use PayPal. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing if things are working until someone tries to make a purchase. Consequently, we’ll be raising prices somewhat to compensate, while still leaving things affordable.