Three soaps with one stone...err mould!!

People have already hit two birds with one stone, so that would be boring to try again. Plus why would I want to hit a bird??

All the pent up soaping energy had to put somewhere, so many ideas swirling in my head and many more scribbled into many books. If I had to try one new idea at a time, I would be dead long before all the ideas get exhausted (exaggerating here). And what happens to all the new ones that keep popping up all the time?? So I decided to put three new ideas into one cauldron.

- Wheatgrass powder to get that green
- Room temperature method
- In the pot swirl

The stone was thrown right back at me. Ouch!! I could hardly seen any swirls, so decided to mix the whole thing up to get a homogeneous extremely light, barely there green (almost cream) color. A castile soap that refused to harden after more than 24 hours. No gel due to the room temperature method. Did I forget anything else...ah yes, some oils were slowly seeping out. I wanted to wait it out and see what happens. Patience is a virtue, which is definitely not mine. So.....

I threw the whole thing into a big pot and set it on fire. Not really! I hot processed it and added some more wheatgrass with a little water for a darker green. The beautiful scent of Mint and Tea tree was replaced with a grass smell. Yuck!! But luckily it sobered down and the nice scent surfaced out again. The soap is still resting in the moulds. I might have to leave it there for a couple of days.

Let me share some before and after pics:

Not much of a color contrast there,
so I stirred the whole thing up. It turned
a lighter green the next morning.

Post HP with added wheatgrass. Still very gooey to
unmould.

Patience is definitely not my virtue but 'repentance in hindsight' for sure is!! All the joys of soap making!!
Will share pictures of cut soap as soon as it sets up...maybe in a year or two. LOL!!

Hanging up those invisible shoes

I finally hung up those invisible shoes that kept creeping onto my feet so often. Here I am back in India, in the city where I was born, grew up, went to college and got married. It feels great to be back after leaving this lovely city almost 9 years ago, right after I got married.

The past month was exciting and chaotic and I barely had enough time to breathe. After our tenants moved out, the house had to be painted and cleaned and furnished, well partly-furnished...I still have a ton of things to buy. I hated and loved every minute of the past month though. Hated that I had to get all the things done by myself in the fantastic heat and humidity, but loved laboring to get the house my husband and I so dearly dreamt of, in order.

Now that I have time to breathe and a little more to spare, things are going to get soapy again. :)

Before going back to Austria in January I made a couple of batches of soap so they would be cured and ready to greet me on my return to India. I tried my hand at the spoon swirl and let's just leave it at that. The color contrasts were very subtle, almost too subtle to notice any swirls. Plus I just wanted to finish using up the Lemon-Eucalyptus EO.

Another one was a coffee soap, made with brewed filter coffee. I love the scent and surprisingly after 3 months of curing it still smells like coffee. Maybe it is due to the 20-30% chicory added to the coffee beans in India. The soaps got generously showered with coffee beans for decoration, which have been falling off with every fondle.

Some of these coffee soaps I gave as Mother's Day gifts to my aunts and a cousin, all wonderful mothers who spend so many hours in the kitchen.

I leave you with a picture and promise to be back soon with more soap pictures of new creations.

Please don't notice the ribbon edges...again no time to breath
applies plus couldn't locate the scissors.

Soda ash on the top.... not too bad.
Missing coffee beans....no comments!! :D

Jugaad

If you are a north Indian I won't have to explain what it the title means, but for the rest of us (I hail from south India) this is what my husband had to say when I asked him what it means (I'm not going to give it out right away...I need to build up the excitement).

As soon as I got married I moved to Gurgaon, a city very close to New Delhi and Hindi is the spoken language there. Luckily we studied it in school and even though my Hindi was very broken with a strong south Indian accent, I could follow conversations. At this point of time I would like to thank the Bollywood industry whose films I watched over the years and learnt more Hindi from here than at school. Now who wouldn't like to watch some lovey-dovey scenes and peppy dance numbers instead of learning sentence formation. Grammar is for dummies anyways!! :D

So I kept hearing this term 'jugaad' almost everywhere I went. 'We cannot find a part for this vehicle...no problem we can do some 'jugaad' 'is what the mechanic would say. Some days back this word was floating in my mind while still in bed, so first thing after waking up I asked my husband (who spent most of his childhood in north India and speaks Hindi better than his mother tongue Telugu) what would the English word for jugaad be. While he pondered, I asked if it meant creativity. He said, it could mean creativity, but also something more.

Just found out there is a whole Wikipedia page for this word. There is also a vehicle called 'Jugaad'!! :) I saw it a couple of times around some rural areas, but never got a ride in it. So basically my post is a waste??? Hey wait!! I will show you how I did jugaad! :P

You know the whole pledge I took about not making soap till I get back to India because of weight issues (not mine, but the soaps that have to be carried back in my bags). But soon enough the soap itch was getting too much to bear. So I scratched some internet pages to see if soap bars could be converted to liquid soap....Hallelujah they could be!! Some of my very first batch of goat's milk soaps were lying in the cupboard and had lost almost all the scent, so I scraped them up and added them to just about steaming distilled water, like the recipe said. I don't know where I found the recipe...just google it if you want to try. 

The old Goat's milk bar. I added 3 bars, about 200 gms
to about 7 tea cups of water. The recipe wasn't strict about the water

Soap shaving...I am craving something caramel right now

Into the pot of hot water

I stirred in a little bit of pumpkin seed oil (the recipe said you could add any oil for some moisturizing). In the end after the solution cooled down in went about 10 ml of Lemon essential oil.

I think it's ready

After some time, two layers...separation??
I don't know.
I just shook the heck out of it till it mixed again.
;)

Well the soap solution is quite nice. We have been using it for a few days now and it isn't drying out my skin like the store bought liquid handwash. This is how I tackled the no soaping situation.

Jugaad, according to Wikipedia is an innovative fix or a work-around a problem. Many solutions to everyday problems lie in this widely used concept in India.

Do share your jugaad stories...would love to read them!!

I'm off to jugaad something for lunch! ;)

Wrapped in paper

For a long time the soaps I made were only mine so I didn't bother too much about how to wrap them. After the soaps cured they were cling wrapped and stored away until it was time to cover myself up in bubbles.  Here is how I used to wrap my soaps.

Fast forward to December 2011. It was almost time for the first sale and I was reluctant to use cling wrap on all the soaps. First coz it was plastic and second it doesn't wrap the square shaped soaps so well. The fit is pretty perfect for a round soap where the label can be placed inside directly on the soap and then cling wrapped and knotted at the back but not so easy when it is a square or rectangle. I leaned very much towards something made of cloth, but then the bags were pretty expensive to buy or even get stitched. Handmade paper is also expensive, plus hard to wrap the soap in. Did I mention I don't have very artistic hands. Add to that my paper thin patience levels!

Then one day I went to a stationery store and there they had lovely tracing paper. Bingo!!
Thick enough to be used as a wrap, but easy enough to wrap the soap in. Plus it was an A4 size that could be printed on. I got the whole bundle and after many trials came up with this:

A strip of A4 sheet and the label

The soap tops are exposed for anyone to see the pattern if there is one and also to smell the soap.  A small pattern is punched into the wrapper.

The little pattern on the wrapper

The labels are also printed on the same paper and are slipped in from the top.Since it is tracing paper, the text on the labels is visible.

That chubby hand is mine :D

Only problem is that the print somehow seems to be slipping off this paper and onto the fingers when touched. Must think of some way to stop that. Printing on plain white paper works well but the tracing paper looks prettier.

For now I am happy with this wrapper. Need to do something about the label though. You might have noticed the name 'Amoda' is used.  Will tell you why and how we settled on the name in my next post.

Happy soaping!!

Soap withdrawal

I realize...I'm addicted to soap. Well which soaper isn't? After moving back to India (in September 2011) and having a sale and making a few batches of soap and dreaming of starting my own line of soaps, my husband broke the news to me!! We had to get back to Austria again for a few more months. Whaaat??

So here I am back in Austria. Packing up 13 kilos of soap in my bags was quite a task (had to throw away so many clothes of mine). Just couldn't leave behind any of my soaps, so I took the whole lot back to India. We will be here in Austria till the end of April and I don't want to throw away any more of my clothes, so I'm not going to soap for the next few months. It has been only 3 weeks since I got here and have serious soap withdrawal symptoms...LOL!! I don't want to give up on blogging and also want to keep this blog dedicated to something soap only. Let's hope I don't bore all you lovely people out there with my posts. :D

Here is the link to the article on my soaps published in the Yo!Vizag magazine in Dec 2011:

Article in Yo! Vizag

Have a pleasant day!!