Coloring with ROOTS...

specifically Madder Root (red coloring) and Alkanet Root (purple coloring) for the Door County Cherry & Wino soaps. We also used Ylang Ylang essential oils for the Cherry & Clove Bud for the Wine soap. So far the Cherry looks really nice! The Wino I'm not sure what to think of yet but it sure does smell good... like a spicy mulled wine:)

The people online said the Alkanet Root can give more of a gray color in the CP of soap making so that made me nervous but we use the HP so we'll have to wait and see. I was surprised it didn't dye my clothes when I dropped the stick blender on myself:)

The Cherry soap of course still has ground Door County Cherries in it but the Wino we decided didn't need crushed grapes we just swapped out one oil and added grapeseed oil instead... those dried grapes were a pain and not really giving us the dark color we wanted.

We're on FACEBOOK!!

We're finally on Facebook (link above) and we have a bunch of "likes" that I don't even know:) How cool is that? I set up our new Milwaukee event for sales this Saturday and the first Door County sales event at the Sturgeon Bay farmers market. I'm making tons of Door County Cherry soap for that one as it's expected to be our biggest seller. I also experimented with a purple carrot extract dye (all-natural/pure of course) with the Wino to try and get it more purple and it helped... made it marble. Not sure if I like it but I'm dehydrating blackberries right now to try too.

Cherry Soap Status...

Here she is... we need to add more cherry next time (about double) but it's looking good so far! The plain white bar is the base that was made the day prior as a tester it's the olive & coconut oil but no cherries.

Cherry Soap Saponifying

The olive & coconut oil in our base BATCH#4 worked great so I'm mixing up BATCH#5 the same way and this time were adding our dried & ground Door County cherries. According to what we've read you add any scents like essential oils or dried fruit & flowers at the end after the soap is done cooking. I'm assuming this is to preserve the smell and maybe even the color. So far our dried cherries are a nice bright red color and still smell like cherries so hopefully both those traits transfer over to the cured soap.

The book has a chamomile tea soap where they use dried & ground tea leaves about 1/4 to 1/2 cup it says. We've got a little under 1/4 cup dried cherries prepped so we'll see how that amount works and work up if needed.

Batch#4 saponifyin'

We're making a batch this afternoon with olive oil and coconut oil. We also crushed de-juiced and are now dehydrating the grape skins to be ground up later that will be add to make our Wine-Oh soap next week.
Today is all about getting a base down for that batch and the cherry batch. Olive oil has moderate conditioning properties and creates a very hard soap. Coconut oil on the other hand is very low on the conditioning scale and is also high on the hardness scale. They should balance well meaning the end product should leave your hands clean but not strip them too much of their natural oils. If this turns out well it may be our base for two different batches. I also choose these oils because they should create the whitest base for the cherry and grape colors to really show through. We want the crushed cherry to make a really pinkish red color while the grape we'd ideally want to be as purple as possible so the two look different. That is also why we used the dark "black grapes".