It seems strange to me that there actually is a soap season. I mean, people take baths and showers year round, right? They wash their hands every day right. Every season should be soap season! But that's not the case. For us here at the soapworks there definitely is a season for our soaps. The season really begins for us the first of March. That's when the spring craft shows show up. At first it's slow, maybe a couple shows and scattered orders here and there. Then about midway through the month we start getting calls from our wholesale customers wanting 20, 40, 60 bars! As the weather warms up here come more craft shows and the farmers markets. You...
Early on in our soap making experience we experimented with spices as all natural coloring. We tried several, a couple of teaspoons of cayenne pepper makes the soap a salmon color. Cinnamon gives the soap a beige color. Turmeric makes a coral colored soap and paprika a deep peach. Its interesting working with spices in soap making. Some spices you steep in the base oils then filter them out, some you just add at the beginning of the process and just leave it in the soap. When making these test batches we just used fragrance oils we had left over. We really liked the color of the paprika bar and the only fragrance we had at the time was some...
We all use soap several times a day, yet few of us have ever actually given thought to where it comes from and how soap came to be in the first place. It turns out that the history of soapmaking is a bit of a mystery because of the many different stories that have surfaced over the centuries. The earliest evidence of soapmaking that we know of comes from Egypt in 1550BC as indicated in Ebers papyrus showing that Egyptians bathed using a combination of vegetable and animal oils, and alkaline salts which created a soap type of substance. Though there is evidence of the Egyptians making soap, the Roman history of soapmaking also provides us with some colorful stories...
