First Batch of Home-Made Soap!!

OLIVE BAR #1 was born in our kitchen this afternoon!

We used the slow cooker method... so we mixed the lye & water let it cool to 100 degrees and also at the same time heated the olive oil in the crock pot to 100 degrees. I expected it to be really smelly but it wasn't so bad at all pretty mild smell. The vinegar & water solution for safety smelled stronger. We combined the lye/water solution & olive oil and stirred it for about 10 minutes with the immersion blender. It then took about an hour and 45 minutes of cook time for it to get totally saponified.

Then we cut our PCV pipe down to 1 foot sections and covered one end of each with wax paper... securing it with multiple rubber bands. Then we poured the saponified soap into the molds. We cut down 3 molds and only filled about 1 and a half. It said to let cool for 4-6 hours then possibly cure for 2 weeks. I guess the curing for 2 weeks makes the soap lather more. It starts to cool and harden fast so when we were done pouring it into the molds we used a little excess to wash our hands and it lathered... not real well but it was white and soapy:)

It doesn't smell like olive oil but it does have a mild scent but It doesn't smell like anything in particular.

Web Site Design

So after doing some research on companies in the Door County area I started designing the Peninsula Soap home page. I like the font but I'm still looking for one maybe a little easier to read but the P in the name in this font will be a really nice icon.

Also I want to look through my photo archives of Door County and get a sunset photo over the lake thats a little more vibrant... but I don't want it to compete with the clean artsy nature design. In the small boxes I'll have photos that depict the subject above them.

What do you think of it so far?

Logo & Design for Packaging

We are experimenting with some font & images for the wrap around package design. Sticking with the round soap is going to be a little more limiting as for as space goes on the package. I think keeping it simple may be the best though... we like the idea of a rubber stamp with the design & logo on it and this is what I've come up with so far. The design is from a rubber stamp and if we could get our name in this font I think it would look really nice together.
We haven't gotten our scale in the mail yet so this is still our hand-milled soap.

First Batch of Hand-Milled Soap!

The first batch EVER for Peninsula Soap Co. is cooling in it's PCV pipe mold in the kitchen right now with 4.5 hours of dry time to go. We're starting with the hand-milling process just to get a feel for what it's like to work with soap in the melting/cooling stages and also to experiment with color, oils and dry ingredients. This weekend we'll be trying the soap making process from scratch in our garage. The first batch has ground espresso and coconut oil in it... I ground some of the espresso coarsely (to add texture and exfoliators) and some espresso more very finely (to add color). I'm thinking Espresso Buzz sounds like a good name for it. After all what's better then espresso in the morning!

All soaps will be vegan and cruelty-free plus they will have no chemical or artificial anything. All the ingredients in them will be things that are "pantry common".

Last week we formed our LLC and bought our website www.PeninsulaSoap.com
I'll have to learn how to create the website soon so we can start selling these yummy soaps!

We just did some tweets to record our progress too:)