What are you looking for?

Most people have an idea of what they are looking for when they are shopping for soap, and they ask me to help them find what they are wanting. Since I can't hand you the soaps that you might be interested in, I'll group them for you here and maybe it will be easier for you! I'll just base these categories off of what I get asked about most commonly.

Exfoliating: Oatmeal, Milk and Honey

Serenity

Facial: (Normal to oily) Sandalwood Vanilla Spa Sticks

(Normal to dry/sensitive) 1616

Lavender based: Serenity

Sweet Dreams

Soothe

1616

Dupe fragrances: Aphrodite ('Lovespell' by VS)

Cold Hard Steel ('Cool Water')

Soothe ('Moonlight Path' by BBW)

M-81 Woodland ('Green Irish Tweed')

Goat Milk: 1616

Soothe

Sandalwood Vanilla Spa Sticks

Oatmeal Milk and Honey

Sweet Dreams

1847

Cold Hard Steel

M-81 Woodland

Tea Tree

Vegan: Serenity

Aphrodite

Cucumber Melon

So, I hope this list helps you find what you're looking for. :) Also, I've have a few requests to bring back a couple fragrances I discontinued...if there's something you miss, let me know and I will see about maybe making a few bars of those long lost soaps.... :)

Keeping it useable

So, all the soap users might not care too much about this post, but any soap maker might be interested in reading on. Maybe I'm just slow, but it took me quite a while to figure this out. :)

The first mistake I made was not writing anything down in a permanent spot. I would just jot down recipes and formulations, values and percentages on whatever scrap I had nearby and then it would get confused as trash and be gone forever. This was detrimental to my early formulas, because I had no idea what I had used, and in what percentage in each batch I had made. So, if it was good, I didn't know what made it good, and if it was bad, I wasn't sure what about it made it so. I soon got a notebook and began writing stuff down where I could keep track of it.

That notebook worked for a while....and then it began to look like my cookbooks; spills all over it! Problem was, unlike the glossy pages of my cookbook, I couldn't just wipe off the oil drips from my notebook paper. The splashes make the ink bleed and run and spread and it wasn't long before I couldn't read what I had written and so carefully kept track of.

Finally, I figured out the secret! I got a 3 ring binder and collected all the 'good' formulas. I re-wrote the ones that were hard to read, gathered all my fragrance and color notes, and put them in plastic sheet protectors. Now, if something splashes or drips, it is easy to wipe right off! Best part is, I can still read my results and recipes (although I don't always remember what all my abbreviations mean; what could I have meant by 'Lilw/mas'?!).

I took the sheet protector idea to the next level, and now use a gallon size ziplock bag on my scale, to guard against drips that stick in the buttons and compromise it's accuracy.

Hope this saves you some trouble!

Summer time

This is going to be a great Summer! Aside from the awful heat (already 100+ here) and yardwork, I'm looking forward to all I've got going on.

There's books to read, rodeos to watch, camping trips to take, letters to write and packages to send, a cabin in the mountains to visit, peaches to pick and products to make.

I'll be trying out lots of new fragrances, to see what I want to add to my Signiature Line, so be watching for those new fragrances to make an appearance on my site....and the bonus of me trying new fragrances and colors is there will be some that don't make it as permanant additions and so there will be awesome products for you at a discount. ;)

We might show up at a market or two, and of course I'll be re-stocking all the favorite soaps and lotions in the tvala shop.

.....Oh, yeah, and I'll be riding my horse. :)

What does this Summer hold in store for you?