Alabama Soap Meeting

Darlene was selling Shea butter fresh from the calabash, so her hands were greasy.



Darlene: Just put it in my pocket.



Jen: What do you mean I have to get change?!



Sadly, I did not win the grand prize on either day. Friday's was a $250 gift certificate from Snowdrift Farm, and Saturday's was a "Tank" cutter donated by the soap meeting itself. DebbieT is demonstrating hers in the picture above.



Debbie also organized a business card swap, and made the cutest little card holders I've ever seen. Isn't she brilliant?



I think I changed a setting on the camera by mistake (I took Hubby's since it's small), so a lot of the photos didn't turn out well. All the ones I accidentally took of my feet were perfect, of course.



Mar crowned (and knighted!) our new President, Sandi, while our outgoing boss, Jen, was giddy with joy. She's been our President, our benevolent dictator, and fearless leader for the past 11 years, and has never steered us wrong.



We were so lucky to have Anne-Marie from Brambleberry as our main speaker. She taught us how to make massage candles, and also spoke on the topics of Goal Setting and Rules to Succeed in Business. She should know, because she had a company grossing over $1 million when she was only 25 years old! I believe that was about six years ago, and her success continues to build. She is smart, smart, smart, but also very personable, kind, and sharing.

Soap gathering

This is how I spent the day yesterday: putting together the goody bags for the annual Alabama Soapmakers meeting.



To start, I make stacks of all the printed materials. Magazines and heavy catalogs go first, business cards and coupons on top.



Persnickety, me? All liquid and possibly-melty things must be segregated in ziplocks! (It's rare that something leaks, but you never know.)



This takes me all day.



My feet are really tired when it's done.



But it's worth it!

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Our 10th annual meeting is this weekend. Anne-Marie from Brambleberry is coming! I'm hoping some of her energy will rub off on me.

I wrote about our soap meeting once before here.

I'm so thankful to all our sponsors, who donated door prizes, samples, catalogs, coupons, and all manner of cool stuff. As Vendor Donations Coordinator, I've begged, pleaded, beseeched and harrassed them for the past three years. This year, the economy has sagged. I heard "no" (or silence) more than usual. I can relate -- everybody is pinching pennies. But I'm especially thankful to those vendors who came through for us this time.

Old soap

Earlier this spring, I attended a gardening convention held at Landmark Park in Dothan, Alabama. The old Martin Drug Store was moved there from Enterprise, and reopened four years ago. An operating pharmacy from 1898 to 1983, it's now part museum and part ice cream parlor.



You might guess which display I gravitated towards: the historical soap! None of it's for sale, alas. More of these than I'd realized are still made today: Cashmere Bouquet, Octagon, Grandpa's Pine Tar Soap, Palmer's Skin Success Soap. I'm not sure what happened to the others... soaps with charming names like Sterne's Carbolic Soap, Drexel's Wonder Soap, Flotilla Floating Bath Soap, and Packer's Charm Soap.



According to the book Boiled Peanuts and Buckeyes, the people at Martin's "were notorious for not throwing anything away and keeping meticulous records. They held onto every receipt, medicine bottle and cosmetic that ever entered the store... They had the most comprehensive collection of pharmaceutical artifacts in the nation."



I can recommend the Peach ice cream!

Put upon

This poor little Trillium decumbens (Trailing Trillium) made the mistake of growing in an area with an overabundance of grasshoppers. It looks a bit frazzled. I feel the same, when thinking about everything I need to get caught up on in the coming week.

Stormy weather washed out the traditional best-sales-day of our last spring craft show Saturday. But like one neighbor observed, it could have been worse -- the tents could have been upside down. One bright spot was meeting an artist whose work I'd previously admired on her Etsy shop. I spent some more of my George money on one of her pieces similar to this one.

I'm thinking of trying Etsy myself, for one-of-a-kind soapy things, or the "bargain bars" that I normally sell only at shows. (We call them "cosmetically challenged" soaps because we hate to call them ugly.) Just one more item to add to the list of "things I should probably be doing instead of blogging"...

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If you like the creepy crawlers, check out the Circus of the Spineless!

Yellow Daisy

Sorry for the unexplained abrupt halt. I was busy preparing for and then attending the Yellow Daisy craft show.

We had a good show - the weather was warm, but thankfully not in the 100s and not too humid. And I got to meet Dr. Flowers in person!



I should have gone out in the evening and taken pictures of Stone Mountain, but my feet were always too tired by the end of the day. I did make it to the A-loop stage area one afternoon to watch the cloggers for a few minutes.



Girls of the flying feet.



Hillbilly themed dance.

Soap stuff

The soaps I make now are all made from the same recipe. The oils I use are olive, palm, coconut, avocado, castor, and stearic. Only the scents, colors, and additives change from bar to bar.

But lately I've been playing.


Red palm soap
It's made from red palm oil (virgin palm oil), which makes it turn this cool yellowy-orangy color. Other oils are coconut, olive, rice bran, shea butter, castor, and stearic. It's scented with a mixture of Ylang Ylang, Patchouli, and Ginger essential oils, and I got cutesy and stamped it with a Red Palm (dipped in mica).


Hemp soap
The oils for this one are olive, palm coconut, hemp, shea butter, castor, and stearic. The scent is a mixture of Vetiver and Ylang Ylang essential oils, and the color comes from French green clay.


Island soap
The oils are olive, palm, coconut, macadamia, shea butter, cocoa butter, castor, and stearic. I used red Moroccan clay and scented with a mixture of Rose Geranium, Ylang Ylang, Lavender, and Patchouli essential oils.


Sunflower Shea soap
I think my new stamp is kind of defective. It's supposed to be a sunflower but the middle portion is sunk very low and doesn't come out on the soap. Bummer. I decided the outline of a sunflower was better than nothing at all, then towards the end I worried that anyone who'd seen The Ring would be afraid to buy it. Argh! The soap smells great, though - Clary Sage and Rose Geranium essential oils. I used Rose clay, and the oils are olive, plam, coconut, sunflower, shea butter, castor, and stearic.

These are all experiments. I've been playing with this idea for a while - to make soaps using pricier scents and ingredients. I'll have to sell them for more $$ so we'll see if people are willing to pay more.



I heart my infrared thermometer, it's one of my favorite soapmaking tools. But guess how many times I've headed off to town with that in my pocket instead of my cell phone.

Why I'm busy

My soap's in the Father's Day gift guide.

Of the June issue of Better Homes and Gardens magazine!



Holy cow. I'm hoping that business will be good, but not so good that I can't handle it. It's coming out this week... wish me luck!

The 39 steps

My commute.

This really made my day

In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably tell you that this envelope was sent to me by a cousin. (She added "Incredibly Good Smelling" to the actual business name.)

But still. It really did make my day!

My cup runneth over

Our Amazing Kitchen Soap is featured in the November issue of Cooking Light magazine!

It's very exciting. My sister-in-law was nice enough to send me this scan, since I still haven't received my copy yet. (My mail lady is possibly holding it hostage.)

I knew it was coming, so made plenty of extra Kitchen soap. What I didn't anticipate was that so many people would be ordering 10 or 12 at a time.

So with that and two big craft shows coming up, I may be too busy for a lot of blog writing or reading in the upcoming weeks.

But if I'm missing from here, just imagine me as that figure on the left of the page, with a big smile of gratitude on my face.



Oh yeah, I can also report that besides garlic and onions, the Amazing Kitchen Soap works well on other smelly odors you might get on your hands... fish... bleach... smoke... that odor you absorb when trying to wrangle smelly dogs who've been rolling around in things you'd rather not think about...

Toot, toot

That's my own horn you hear blowing...

Dana, who writes for the online southern journal called Dew on the Kudzu, interviewed me about our soaps. I feel like such a celebrity!

I've never met Dana before, but she grew up not far from here. She's now living in Chicago, which is why her blog is called Southern Gal Goes North.

Here's a link to the interview if you want to read it.

No autographs, please...

Homestead Hollow

We are set up at the Homestead Hollow craft show this weekend.

But we are not in our normal spot - they moved us.

We are in space "Barnyard 201", which is nearer the front of the show than we normally are.

This picture is from a couple of years ago, but our booth looks pretty much the same.



Just look for the royal blue tablecloths with the white lace covers.

How to get your electricity back on

How to get your electricity back on:

Move 600 pounds of soap to another location.

They got our power back on last night! Thank you Alabama Power.

Now I'm so far behind in my show preparations that I don't have time to write much though.

We've done the Yellow Daisy craft show the past three years and have a lot of fun there. People come from all over. But I'm not sure that they're going to drive across several states with gasoline going up 20 cents every day... keeping my fingers crossed.

This tree in our old neighborhood had a little problem.



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Edited to add:

In my addle-brained state I didn't explain things well I suppose!

I make handmade soap. The soap in question is the soap I'm wrapping for the upcoming craft show. I didn't want to leave it in the workshop, because without electricity it gets very hot & humid in there. Unlike most soap, handmade soap contains a lot of glycerin. When it's very humid, the glycerin attracts moisture and the soap looks like it's sweating! Not good.

So I edited the above to say "Move 600 pounds of soap to another location". ("Move all the soap" didn't sound enough like the colossal pain in the patootie that it was. And of course now I've got to move it all back!)

I still had a small amount of $2.15 gasoline in my tank when I grumbled about having to refill with $2.54 gas. Then yesterday I still had some of the $2.54 gas in the tank when I refilled at $2.80 a gallon. And felt lucky to get that, as it went up to $3.00 later in the day. Then last night I noticed one station that had already changed their sign to read $3.10 a gallon.

Several stations in Birmingham are out of gasoline altogether. Someone told me they'd seen the owner of an SUV filling up several gas cans stowed in their cargo area. The radio said there was a rumor of a gas shortage, but I think it's more likely that people are just trying to beat the daily gas inflation.

Also: it's not our tree. It belongs to someone in our old neighborhood.

Handmade Soap

Life's on hold while I make soap!

Soapmaking by the cold process method involves patience. After the liquid soap is poured into the molds, it is insulated and left to harden for 24 hours. Then the soap is unmolded and air-hardened for one or two days before being cut into bars. After another few days the bars are trimmed. Then the bars "cure" for at least a month, to allow time for the excess water to evaporate.

Handmade soaps are perishable goods; they don't last forever. Soapmaking is a delicate balance of trying to meet demand with the freshest product possible. Make too little and customers have to wait. Make too much and you'll end up throwing it away.

I hate throwing soap away.

I also hate not having a particular soap in stock when someone wants it.



With my current equipment, I can make almost 400 bars of soap a day. But I prefer using only my newer molds (and saving my back), so normally I make about half that.

Our next craft show is Yellow Daisy, in September at Stone Mountain, Georgia. It's the best traditional craft show in the country. About 250,000 people will pass through the festival over the course of four days.

Soaperrific

I run a small handmade soap business. Once a year, Alabama soapmakers convene for education, shopping, gabbing, and eating too much. This is known as the "big meeting". There are regional lunch meetings throughout the year, as well as a large social gathering in January. It's a friendly bunch. We started out many years ago as a group of strangers on the internet, and have now become so much more than just colleagues.


We are fragrance junkies.


There's always lots of stuff to spend money on.


We teach each other how to make things.


Vendors provide samples, catalogs, and door prizes.

The unofficial uniform includes overalls, pearls, and a tiara...


Not your run of the mill overalls.

The pearls and tiara are optional for men. We have had a few male members in the past, but somehow we've managed to run them all off.