handmade soap

Coming Soon -Logo’s & Labels

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Coming Soon

So the month of May has been very busy here in the House of Wobbly Pins with some lots of discussions about logo’s & labels . We have been thinking about redesigning our labels for a while as the business has evolved and covers a myriad of crafts.

Classic or Quirky

A few cups of tea and maybe just a few gin & tonics have been consumed whilst doodling and exploring a new label design for our soap and candle range. Should we write a classic or should we be quirky or floral or moody?.

 

So many choices  are available when trying to decide on a design that reflects your ethos and will not become outdated in this fast moving world but also catch your customers eye when you are faced with so much choice.

We have considered spots, stripes, flowers, geometrics, squares, swirls, font style (important as we get older-I have difficulty reading a lot of labels), shades of purple, & yellow……..you get the picture.

The Logo & Label winner is?

So in the end we choose a classic theme, with a classic colour combination , with a font style that you can read without recruiting an interpreter. We have retained our hand doodled birds combined with a new brand to reflect our handmade soap made in small batches and our candle range.

When you are out and about watch out for our new brand labelling arriving in late June,  wrapped around our handmade soap and candles.

We hope you like it as much as we do.

 

 

Milky Tales – Goat Style

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Goats Milk Soap

The benefits of drinking goats milk are very widely publicised but have you tried it in soap? As I mentioned in my January post I wanted to experiment with some new products this year and an opportunity arose to try Goats milk soap again.

A lot of people love goats milk soaps and have had success when using it to relieve symptoms of problematic and sensitive skin.

Goats milk is a beautiful creamy shade of white – sounds like something on a paint chart!

What shall we make?

So the next part of the journey was to decide which base oils to use, everybody has favourites and preferences when it comes to the choice of hard and soft oils. Should I go Palm oil free?. Should I include extra butter to give the soap a creamy moisturizing finish? So after a lot of deliberation the base recipe would be made up of Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Sunflower Oil, and Shea butter.

Which scents to choose – fragrance or essential oils?

Not a difficult choice here – I went for essential oils, the difficult part was the selection and combinations. Weeks later and I came up with my choice, my husband has never smelt so good as he had all the oils on his socks!

A few favourites, Lavender, Lime and Patchouli but also a few different touches with Vanilla, Vettiver and Fennel. I also tried some different combinations of additives settling on turmeric for it healing properties and activated charcoal for its cleansing power.

Into the Workshop

So once I had settled on my new recipes I sent these off to be checked by a chartered chemist and get the legal cosmetic safety assessment which is required to sell soap in the EU.

So with certificate in hand it was down to the workshop and a week later I had produced the first batch of each soap.

The soaps are now having their obligatory 6 week cure so watch this space for a picture when they wake up.

 

 

 

The Clean Ending

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The Last Batch

I have just made my last batch of handmade luxury soap so I have a clean ending to 2017. Good old fashioned water(tap, bottled, stream etc.) and a little resist in the form of a flannel, loofah, or a leaf will  get you clean but we are a nation of people that like to add a little luxury & fragrance to our daily rituals with the use of soap.

Over the years we have not always been so keen on washing and liked to wallow in our natural odour.  Elizabeth 1 had a bath once a year “whether she needed to or no” and I am sure there are still folk today who agree with that sentiment.

Over the festive period many people will have received numerous hygiene related products, soaps, bath bombs, massage bars, bubble baths, shower gels etc., in a variety of fragrances and textures but not always natural.

“Hygiene” derives from the Greek goddess of health – Hygeia. The Greeks  understood hygiene as a form of  “longevity knowledge” which we can all incorporate in to our everyday lives and add to the process with some handmade soap.

Beautifully Fragrant

So tonight I  shall be seeing in the new year with an evening of luxury and I shall have a bath especially for the occasion. The only stressful part will be deciding which bar of beautifully fragrant soap to have as my companion.

All of the essential oils used in our soap range have therapeutic benefits but the winner this evening will be ….Neroli & Orange. The fragrance of this exotic sweet smelling, uplifting citrus delight will produce a rich white lather and leave the skin feeling soft and clean heading to the new year.