Lethargy, Soaps, and Edward Monkton

Good Morning.

I seem to have slipped into a sort of lazy spell lately. I have been getting too much time in front of a tv screen and not enough time being creative. It is probably due to a number of factors, one being that I just finished a crazy semester of school (I took 6 classes!), the other maybe being that I'm still in denial that I have to find a job for the first time since April 2007! And I haven't worked since December 2008. There is probably some other stuff mixed in there too that I am well aware of, but that is just silly to get into.

The one creative thing I have done lately is try again with the melt and pour soaps. The top left picture is all of the new ones together. The top right one is my attempt at embedding things. I made the little squares in an old resin mould I found laying around. I must have had the clear soap too hot though because the white embeds sort of bled into the clear. Oh well!

The middle left one is clear and goat milk soap layered. Both layers have coconut oil added and little pieces of shredding coconut! I'm not sure how exfoliating it will be, but it looks and smells nice. The middle right one is hemp and green tea. The green tea all settled to the bottom, but I think it looks kind of neat. I don't have the suspension base, that's why. I also think I added too much hemp oil because the bar feels greasy to the touch, but it would probably be really nice for your skin.

The bottom left bars are two that I made last time, I just cut them down. The original bars were really huge, like too huge for me to hold comfortably! Plus I love the look of roughly cut soap bars. I used the leftovers from those to make the soap on the bottom right. I just layered the two in a round container. I'm pretty satisfied, but I think that an experienced soaper would probably have made the layers a little cleaner.

Anyways, it has been lots of fun and we have soap to use for a long time now! I have been lurking online checking out all the beautiful cold process soaps out there, but I really don't have the space to do something like that right now. With a toddler in the house, I'd need somewhere to safely keep all of the supplies and stuff far away from him.

Oh, and one last thing. My mom got her mother's day gift in the mail yesterday, so I can share it with you now! It was a little book by Edward Monkton called "The Lady and The Chocolate". This man is obviously a genius to write a book like this one. Check out the book here and his website here. Here's a little something from him. Love it! :)

Have a great day!