More future

[greenstorm]

I'm making more soap.

The last soap I made had sugar in it for extra suds, sunflower seed oil to make it more nourishing/moisturizing and to make it spoil faster (it felt right), salt in it to harden the bar, and both kinds of grit. Plus it had every scent to make me feel nourished: roses and joint soothing and benzoin to remind me of Tucker and fir needle to remind me of the woods. It's for getting through memories and hard times and is every colour, the kind of confused mix of cranberry seeds and walnut that reflects my current inner state. It will not last forever, I'll need to use it up before 2 years.

Today I'm making shea butter soap, so rich like a blanket. Sugar for suds, no grit, and sweetgrass and sage and birch for cleansing and the first sap of spring. It'll keep well and won't spoil. One day I'll be ready for it and it will be there, white and clean and gleaming.

Soapmaking is a thing we did together and it will always bring him to mind.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

that sounds lovely! both soaps. sugar in soaps doesn't affect your body? (i am super prone to yeast infections, so i avoid sugar, honey, & glycerin in soaps & other body care products.)

that scent, sweetgrass & sage & birch, sounds amazing.

[greenstorm]

Sugar in soaps doesn't seem to bother me, no, but my body luckily doesn't seem to have to have those sensitivities. It does the same thing as lactose in milk soap, though, so your goat milk soaps are probably already covered on the sugar-enhanced-foam front.

[yarrowkat]

oh, good point. thank you. lactose doesn't seem to affect me that way, thank goodness. i keep forgetting to advertise my soap as glycerine free, but i should, as that is definitely a thing.

[greenstorm]

Actual Soap (TM) Free Of Too Many Weird Things For Us To Remember And List Them All.

[yarrowkat]

for REAL. anyway i keep selling out every time i put them up for sale, so it's clearly not urgent. :-) i'm pre-sold-out on a batch of jasmine loofah scrubs that's curing on my kitchen counter now. i can't release them until the 20th, in case someone gets excited and puts it to use right away. and i think for next winter holiday capitalism festival, i will pre-make a TON of soap, so that it is mostly cured 3+ months before it goes into the world, and then start the sales in October so i get both the early birds and the late people. i'm expanding into salves any minute now (i now have suppplies on hand to make balm of gilead salve; just looking for some time to make a tiny test-batch; terra who has arthritis in the thumbs will test it for me for consistency, strength, and scent, and when we're there, i'll start selling it) and i expect those to change my profit margin for the better. :)

[greenstorm]

I am taking a course on salve-making with some folks midmonth; we'll be wandering around the woods in the snow gathering ingredients, then making them up over a bonfire. I am looking forward to this.

I'm glad your soaps are doing well! Are salves cheaper to make than soap, or do they sell for more, or how does that fit together for you?

[yarrowkat]

ooooh, that sounds really fun! i look forward to hearing about it.

yes on both re: salves. you use less materials making them; those materials are cheaper (olive oil & beeswax & cottonwood buds i picked from fallen bits of our trees, in this case, vs the shea butter, coconut oil, lye, apricot kernel oil [an indulgence but it's soooooo silky i just love it], scents, etc in soaps). so it takes less money to make them, and the tins are about 50 cents apiece so that's a small investment (less than the soap molds + cutter + mixing containers for initial investment in soaps; i already own a double-boiler with a pour-spout), and then you can sell a little bitty tin for $5-7 and a medium tin for $12-14. i think i'm actually making a profit of less than a dollar per soap at my current price point. (i'm also planning to raise the price next year but i want to get really good at this first, so that it really feels like well-spent money to the people who buy them. pretty scents, pretty appearance, and colors. i'm getting there. i need a better cutter.) profit on the salves should be more like $3-10 per tin depending on the size of the tin.

it's why so many soapers sell lotions, i have learned. better return on investment; fewer inputs and a higher end price.

i appear to be really parenthetical today, sorry. :) i hope i'm still legible.

[greenstorm]

(I'm always parenthetical because I love context)

That explains why I think my experience would be so different, cost-wise. Most of my soap is a "waste" product, lard, with just enough coconut and castor oil to alchemize it a bit. I'd have to buy in everything for salves plus the containers. I do think it's a different kind of patience, too, but I will learn that when I do the workshop.

I haven't yet learned how fast I'll go through molds, just that if someone else tries to use them they break. And I don't use a double-boiler or anything like that, just normal kitchen stuff. Interesting. I thin the patience on picking cottonwood buds is more patience than a dozen batches of soap takes me, and my patience is probably the commodity I am scarcest on, after time.

Soap is expensive to ship, though. Luckily it keeps.

[yarrowkat]

yeah. i'm interested in making a lard soap, but also intimdated by it, because some lard smells very "porky" and that smell upsets my stomach. (i can't be in a house where bacon is cooking; it will make me ill.) i dislike baking with lard, even though it's the best thing for pastries, for that reason. (i'm violently physically allergic to pork, which is the source of all this.) since lard isn't a byproduct on our farm, it would also be something i'd need to buy or trade for. i do know someone local who keeps a pig every couple of years (the aforementioned Robin, actually).

the new mold is so i can do 3 loaves in an afternoon; i currently only have two molds. one a wider than it is tall one from Brambleberry, spendy but really nice, and the other the more usual box lined with removable silicone kind, taller than it is wide. that one has a removable insert that can be placed in the bottom, that then becomes the top of the loaf and turns it into a melange of flowers and butterflies. very pretty, but it makes short stout bars that way, so slightly impractical. people do like them, though.

the double boiler is in the house for baking, but it'll be very useful for making herbal oils. i haven't used it for soap (i melt hard oils in the microwave usually).

i think the quality that has netted me 3 quarts of cottonwood buds is persistence, mostly. i'm not picking from the live trees, only from sticks they drop (which is lots, and we live under 9 large cottonwoods). so my eyes are on the ground a lot and i just pick up aaaaallll the sticks, and then pull the buds off in the kitchen and throw them in a jar, and fling the sticks back out the door. a medium-sized branch fell last month and that had a ton of buds on it. i tend to be rather dogged with tasks like that; i will just keep doing it until it is done. they smell lovely in the kitchen.

[greenstorm]

I broke into a batch of tallow soap I made awhile ago and it was really lovely, and suet/kidney fat is so often an excess product. Perhaps that would work instead for you? Better to put something on your body that it isn't upset about anyhow.

I find how I render the lard is important to how it smells, but after saponification I can't detect a pork scent anymore. Sheep came through a little when I did sheep soap though, so maybe I'm just inured to the pork?

I've been using milky way individual molds because 1) they're super pretty and 2) I don't have to cut anything up, just pop them out. Before that I used milk cartons, the waxed paper kind. I'm thinking about getting a soap stamp or two and going back to milk cartons so I can do really big batches, my normal pot takes roughly 3kg of oils and I have molds for that but not for more at once.

They would smell so lovely! I'm not good with that kind of long persistent task unless maybe I'm doing something else too. Maybe podcast-and-picking in the spring would make it work.

[yarrowkat]

the cottonwood buds do smell good! i'm using loaf-molds, which make about ten bars each, and then cutting. it's a process for sure.

we do produce a lot of turkey fat. it smells very turkey-ish, however. someone rendered a bunch for cooking oil one time and apparently that was lovely and adds turkey flavor to everything. great for soups and stir-fries, prolly not for soaps. :)

i have thought, if i stick with this soap-selling thing, of getting a stamp made with our farm logo, so i can avoid packaging soap, just stamp it. at least for local sales. except that i want people to know what the ingredients are; i'm sensitive to so many things that i want to give people the option of knowing, not just when they buy it but whenever they eventually use it, what it contains. i do not have a labelling/packaging thing sorted out yet.

[greenstorm]

Cottonwood is one of the easiest trees to identify at night when nothing can be seen. I hve fond sense-memories of so many cottonwoods.

Yes, turkey really has a distinctive scent, doesn't it? Basically schmaltz with personality. I bet mashed potatoes made with it instead of butter would be so good.

Here in Canada it's not legal to sell soap without weight and ingredients listed on the packaging. It's one of my big hold-ups in selling more. Also the recipe needs to be submitted to the federal cosmetics database under the business number of the person selling. I also don't have a labelling/packaging thing sorted out, but I'm considering either little cotton parts bags or those glassine bags pastries come in at a coffee shop: something easy and stampable.

[yarrowkat]

i bet mashed potatoes with turkey fat would be delicious!

people sell soap at craft fairs and so on here, with the ingredients listed on a card on the table, but no particular packaging. other people package theirs all kinds of ways - completely folded in paper, or just a thin paper band, or plastic wrapped, or those little cloth bags. the bags definitely look easy from the maker's side of things! and stickers are an appealing way to get the information to the buyer. as a buyer of soap i find the bags slightly annoying - they ought to be useful as a reusable object, so i keep them, but then they mostly aren't all that useful, which has kept me from wanting to use them for my soaps that i'm selling. i am working on developing a right-sized little paper band with ingredients & our website, but it's kind of a pain. the bags would keep cat hair off the soaps though. >_> (i keep picking them off. there's ambient atmospheric cat hair in my house.)