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.

Carrot extract as a purple dye?

Yep that's one of the things I'm working on today. I'm re-melting a couple bars of Wino to add this organic carrot extract that is supposed to be a pure all natural purple vegetable dye. We'll see if it works! It says if heated it may change colors so I'm not sure what to expect. I'll of course add them at the every end but they'll still be heated for a short time. Outpost had a few food colorings like this. There was a red and yellow one too.

Second on the agenda for the day is waiting for the outcome of the beer soap I made this morning. Alpha Brewer is chilling in the refrigerator right now. We got a really amazing smelling cherrywood smoked barley from Northern Brewer (a home brewery supply store). It smells fabulous so hopefully by adding it at the very end of the cooking process when I was ready to pour it will retain it's smell. I then put it in the fridge asap to keep the heat from killing the smell but I'm still waiting for the outcome. We also got some simon hops to map a soap I'm wanting to call Hop-a-licious:) I want it to green but who knows how it will react with the heat.

Update on another special soap... Lush Lilac is cut and curing right now in my lab. It looks really cool with the flower petals in it but it doesn't smell like lilac. It smells more like a potpourri. It still has a smell that is nice though so it's a success as far as I'm concerned. We'll see how it sells on May 15th at the second flea market we're selling at. I'm going to have that one and hopefully 2 beer soaps along with the standard ones available. All for $5 a piece and if one or more of the special small batch ones go over well maybe I'll have them become regulars and add them to the website.