Product Shots & Lab Organization...

all getting organized today. We got some great light coming through this afternoon so I took the opportunity with the recent printing of the labels for Olive Bar to get product shots done for the website. I also spent most of the afternoon setting up my lab:) We needed a stop to make the soap so that I could have soap saponifying at any time and the kitchen wouldn't have to be off limits to food. It looks like it's going to be a great way to use our sunroom which is probably the least used room in the house and until recently just had plants in it. After hanging some shelves we should be able to make the soap, dry, label & package it for shipping all in one place instead of having everything scattered in every room.

Business Cards ORDERED!!

We ordered our business cards from www.overnightprints.com today. We're excited to get them in 5-7 business days:) They have such a sweet deal of 500 cards for free it only cost us $7.75 for shipping.

The website also went live over the weekend with paypal so we can now sell Olive Bar online! Were making some finishing touches to it now and we'll be taking better pics tomorrow when it's sunny.

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.

No Green Soap 4 Us...

Were only seeing PURPLE today while working on the Wine-Oh soap. It's made with olive, coconut & castor oils. Plus dried grapes for a fabulous purple color... I hope!

Also, our molds are sticking to the soap too much so I'm trying a more flexible plastic mold that is also smaller today so I'm hoping that works too.
WISH US LUCK!!

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".

Batch#3

Saponifying our next base in the kitchen this afternoon. We're experimenting with a olive, coconut, canola, palm & soybean oil mixture this time. It's a bright golden color right now (almost the same color as the walls). This should be a pretty hard soap with a good lather and also condition moderately. Since Batch#2 was soft as clay we had to scoop it out of the mold and form it into balls to use at home... well now we know. Hopefully this batch is hard enough to get out of the molds in 1 piece and have a great color!

Cutting OLIVE BAR

This morning we cut down the Olive Bar and found that with our molds about 1 inch sections are 4oz. We also found that to be more accurate we need to build a cutter. More on that later... but we did take a trip to Home Depot to find these yellow plastic caps for the ends of our PCV pipe molds that will work much better then wax paper and rubber bands:)

We also found this rubber piece that is supposed to be used in toilet tanks and a metal dowel that when combined make a nice tamper! Very lucky we found pieces that were so exact in size! Now next time our soap should be smoother around the edges without air pockets.

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.