Learn to make beautiful bath and body products from scratch. Here you find free tutorials for making cold process soaps, bath bombs, body butters, face masks, serums and a lot more.
I love avocados! As food they’re delicious, satisfying and super healthy, and they’re also great to use in cold process soap giving it a decadent rich creamy lather that is delightful.
Avocado oil, shea butter and fresh avocado are the key players for this soap. Fresh avocado fruit as well as avocado oil contains vitamins A, D and E and nourishing omega 3 fatty acids. Both contribute amazing conditioning properties and creamy luxurious lather to the finished soap.
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Last month I experimented with different ways to use bananas in soap. I wanted to find a visually pleasing outcome for today’s banana and cream soap. The results ranged from light cream color with a little bit of specks to really brown with lots of specks. You can check out the post here and see the side by side comparison.
For this soap I decided to use a fairly ripe banana since I knew from my experiments that I would get this awesome speckled effect which would contrast well with the white piped top. After I was done making the soap I put it in the freezer since I absolutely wanted to avoid gelling.
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Winter time can be rough on your skin. The cold air outside, the dry air inside and the back and forth between the two oftentimes leads to dry, cracked and itchy skin. None of us can escape this completely and we end up reaching for that lotion bottle pretty often. But folks with dry skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis in particular can really suffer this time of year.
My son has mild eczema that practically disappears in the summer, but right now it looks pretty bad. We slather him up with whipped shea butter before bed and have eliminated any irritating ingredients and fragrances from his bath time and even switched our laundry detergent. But it’s tough to keep him from scratching, especially at night.
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I’m a cold process soap maker through and through, but sometimes you just gotta love the convenience and easy handling of melt and pour soap. It’s great for quick and easy projects and I like that I can melt small amounts of material and pour it into tiny molds to create cute details. Melt and pour soap is also great if you want to get your kids involved, like I did last year with my son.
I wanted to surprise my kids with these little soaps. They loved the “Dino Bombs” from a couple of months ago so, I was sure they’d love these dinosaur melt and pour soaps as well.
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I’ve had this idea for a banana soap in my head for quite some time. Something like a banana cream pie soap maybe. But what would the end result look like and would I be happy with it? I started to do some research and saw a variety of banana soaps that ranged from very brown to very speckled to creamy yellow with few specks. Some soap makers reported the specks would disappear after a while. Well, I decided it was time to do my own little research project on using bananas in soap.
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I live in the Garden State. Yes that’s right, New Jersey. The state known for it’s closeness to NYC, it’s stinky highways, industrial areas, and also it’s beaches. What most people don’t know is that we do have plenty of greenery here, as the name suggests. Folks really love to grow their veggies in our neck of the woods and when summer rolls around, we have cucumbers for dayyys….
This post was originally published on May 8th, 2018 and updated on January 23rd, 2019. I’ve added an update an how the colors and scent have fared over time. So, scroll down to the bottom to see what this soap looks like after 9 months.
I’ve been playing around with botanicals and design ideas lately. I kept wanting to throw stuff (clays, dried flowers, etc) into my lye water, just to see what would happen.
Why – you may ask – would I want to put them into the lye solution rather than the more traditional approach to infuse them in oil? Well, cold oil infusion takes 6-8 weeks and even heat oil infusion takes 2-4 hours on the stove – Mama ain’t got time for that. I also thought this could be an easy way for beginners to get a good color result….
Right around this time of year I totally start to sound like a broken record. It goes something like this:”I really don’t like winter. I’m cold. Everything looks so gray. I need some sun. Why do we even live here?”… And on, and on it goes. And every year as my tolerance to the cold and gray seems to diminish so does my skin’s tolerance to dry air and extreme temperature swings – arrgh, the itch is real, you guys.
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I love to add fresh ingredients to my soaps. It’s a fun way to try something new on a whim since most fruits and veggies are easy enough to come by. I also find that they can bring interest and label appeal to your soaps. In this recipe I’m trying something a little more exotic: papaya paired with turmeric. The result is a wonderfully creamy and nourishing turmeric papaya soap.
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We usually don’t send family Christmas cards around to our friends and relatives. The sheer thought of it is paralyzing to me. Maybe it’s because Christmas cards were never a thing where I grew up or maybe it’s because Mister Tinker could care less. And then there’s the logistics of it: Am I supposed to have my mantle decorated in mid November so that I can pose the kids in front of it? Because let’s face it – it will take me at least a month to design, order and mail them. And then there is the photo shoot itself. I don’t have the worst photography skills, but trying to photograph my kids is equivalent to photographing wildlife. You have to be sneaky, you have to be quick, and forget it if they know you’re lurking there with your camera….