I wanted to show off the packaging for Shaken and Stirred. Well, not the actual packaging which is just a cello bag cut in half and some incredibly expensive yarn given to me by my friend, Poppy to try my hand at felting soap (a dismal failure). It's the label that I'm so pleased with.
I love art deco fonts. I love art deco anything. Who doesn't?
Originally, I was going to name this soap '9th Avenue' because it has all the ingredients for Thai food (coconut milk and oil, basil, lemongrass, lime, ginger) and there are a ton of Thai restaurants on 9th in Hell's Kitchen—too many really—on some blocks there're four of them. But in light of this soap's appearance, I've nixed the snarkiness and am being straightforward. It's a rebatch of soap I'd made using some of that beeswax I'd rendered last year. I made balls with some of the overly rustic honey/beeswax soap then rolled them in powdered lime basil before embedding them. The effect just didn't work. Hideous, actually. The embeds had a regulated look to them—although the embeds I made with the same soap looked great in Plan Bee. Go figure. So everything got shredded and melted down in some coconut milk. It's still not a pretty soap, but the coconut milk makes for a creamy lather. And it smells great. And makes your skin feel fab. To make up for the soap's humble appearance, I package it using fabric samples that a decorating store on the Upper Eastside was tossing out. My mother was a decorator when I was growing up and she had tons of swatch books that would get tossed when the fabric was discontinued. She gave a lot of them to a neighbor who pieced the swatches into quilts and cushions. My Barbie doll house also had its fair share of brocade draperies.
The look is a little clunky (so were my Barbie's drapes), but no glue or sewing was involved and it's kind of sustainable.
Photo taken on top of our bathtub of goldfish in the Oasis Community Garden
I stumbled on the legend of the four thieves in a book about growing herbs and decided to create a soap based on their recipe.
The Four Thieves lived in Europe during the Bubonic Plague. Everybody was dying. Bodies were everywhere.But the Four Thieves—who were daring enough to even rob graves—didn't become ill. When they were finally caught, they escaped punishment by reveling the secret to how they avoided the Black Death.
It was a simple herbal vinegar. Being a legend, the recipe varies from one source to another, but the list of ingredients almost always includes mint, rosemary, sage and thyme. Lavender, clove and wormwood come up a lot as well.
All of those herbs do have antibacterial properties, so it makes sense. Of course, they had never heard of bacteria in the 1300's, otherwise everyone would've been walking around with one of those little dangly things of anti-bacterial lotion.
My soap version of the Four Thieves recipe includes olive oil infused with thyme, rosemary, lavender and mint—and also activated charcoal and alkanet. The pencil line is powdered mint. And there's some cocoa butter, shea butter and oatmeal involved as well.
The fragrance is a blend of lavender, thyme, rosemary, sage and mint essential oils. It smelled a little too herbal to me so I added neroli to lighten it up.
I don't know if using this soap will prevent the Black Death (which is still around), but I'm sure it will help ward off the flu and colds. And I love showering with it after working in the garden.
I'm not by the way, the only person who's saponified the Four Thieves legend, there're dozens of bars out there. And Cathy from Soaping 101 (which I'm totally addicted to watching) has even created a video on how to make it.
I had this soap in my imagination a long time before it finally came to be—and it's not quite the way I pictured it, but I've gotten over that.
It's a soap version of a martini in the shape of an olive. I'm a purist when it comes to martinis, by the way. They should only come in two flavors: gin or vodka. If it tastes like chocolate or peaches, it's not a martini. It is acceptable (and wonderful) however to infuse you vodka with rosemary or mint or any other herb.
Anyway, back to the soap. The 'olive' part made with a lye infusion of reduced dry vermouth (recently found in my cupboard and leftover from an old, old boyfriend who made the best dirty martinis I ever had) and juniper berries (from my garden). The concoction smelled pretty…powerful when I mixed it, but I'm beginning to actually like the smell of lye and booze. I hope that's not an indication of some strange neuroses.
My lye mixture
I knew the vermouth was going to darken the soap and my olive oil infused with lemongrass and lime basil might end up muddy, so I added some French green clay. Essential oils of juniper, lime and may chang. This was all poured into a mold I made from a mailing tube with a paper towel roll inside to create a cavity for the 'pimento' part.
My mold
It's sort of a reverse embed. The pimento was made of melt and pour soap with Moroccan red clay (that's what my (Not Seeing) Red experiment was all about). I figured an embed of melt and pour would probably lose its shape when cold process soap was poured over it.
And the olive part came out fine—a perfect shade of green. I took it out of the mold after a day and then turned it into a mold (or so I thought) by rubber banding a Ziploc bag on the bottom.
But alas! When I poured the melt and pour into the cavity it began leaking out the bottom. Which is odd since the cold process didn't leak out...
I panicked. This was not a cheap recipe. The red clay, melt and pour base and essential oils cost the same as a night drinking real martinis in the Meat Packing District. I was not going to let this go to waste.
So I started scooping the leaked-out soap back into the cavity while adding shredded soap scraps I had hanging around. Eventually, the melt and pour started to cool at the bottom and created a seal so it stopped leaking out. I ended up with a not-so-solid reddish, pinkish center.
But months later, it's cured and fabulous. Really lush, stiff lather. I love it for shaving my legs and the fragrance is intoxicating, of course.
I might give a bar to that old, old boyfriend who made the great dirty martinis. I haven't spoken to him ages. Maybe he's been deported.
It's been too hot and muggy to make soap. And I've been working too much to even think about writing about it. Or working on my Yet Untitled Cozy Mystery.
I get up, go to work, deal with really stupid ("Why is called 'Chinatown'?") tourists, come home, shower with Downstairs Seating Only, then crash out. On my one day off a week, I get out the Schmutz Sticks and make my work shirts spotless. And perhaps pull some weeds in my garden.
What a life, huh?
This will all change soon though. Autumn is coming.
I wanted red for an upcoming soap project. Red is not an easy color to deal with. Ever. And I've now learned it's especially difficult in soap. Particularly if you're using natural colorants.
My first attempt was using tomato paste in hot process soap. I figured using hot process would be kinder on the color. I knew I wouldn't get red/red from tomato paste, but the red I was looking for was supposed to represent a pimento so a tomato-y red would be OK. But, as you can see, it produced something peachy/pink.
I then scoured the internet hoping to find something. There are micas and liquid colors available, but I really wanted to stick with something natural and/or something I didn't have to order. I live in New York City, damn it. The center of the universe. I should be able to find something to turn my soap red.
At one point, I wondered about buying a few bars of red soap and melting them down. Red soap though is also hard to find. Wonder why.
Finally, while in Westerly—after (unsuccessfully) looking at their vast collection of soap for something red, I spied some insanely expensive Moroccan red clay. I had seen red clays on the internet, but the finished soap looked more orange than what I wanted.
Still, I kinda wanted to get on with my life and perhaps find something new to obsess with. So I bought it.
This is red clay in cold process. I dissolved the clay in some olive oil before adding it.
I wasn't too happy with the results. (You'll see scraps from this experiment in Mommie Dearest aka Bed of Roses. When it finally cured it was definitly pink.)
So tried using the same clay-in-olive-oil in some clear melt and pour.
Not bad. Definitely useable. And now I have nearly 6 ounces of expensive Moroccan red clay for other projects.
The name of this soap—Downstairs Seating Only—does not refer to the area of your body it's supposed to be used on. In fact, I don't recommend using this soap on your downstairs area at all.
Downstairs Seating Only is a phrase Gray Line Tour Guides will say thousands of times between now and Labor Day. Summer is our busiest season. It's the cheapest (and worst) time of year to come to NYC—and everybody wants to ride on the top of the double decker bus (the best way to see the city). It fills up quickly.
When new passengers board, we have to tell them, "Downstairs seating only." Sometimes they're understanding and patient and are fine with waiting until somebody gets off from the top. Sometimes they don't believe us and go up anyway (with their three kids, grandmother and bulky stroller) only to come down disappointed. Sometimes they get very angry. One year, I had a guy kick the glass out of the bus's door.
Meanwhile, when we're actually giving the tour— upstairs —it's 95 degrees and insanely muggy and their doing construction all over the city and it's like riding through a dust storm. And the sunscreen that doesn't really work is dripping in your eyes. And there's a little kid screaming, "I have to poop." And nobody is listening to us say that the last boat cruise went out at 3:30. And we know half of them won't tip and we're lucky if we get $8.26 by the end of the tour that we have to split with the driver who's been on the phone the whole time fighting with his girlfriend.
And we're thinking about going home to our apartments that we just spent the day trying to pay for, turning on the A/C and taking a shower with a bar of soap that will truly wash away the disgustingness of the day.
And Downstairs Seating Only will do just that. Lots of scrubbing action from my favorite exfoliate, cornmeal. French green clay to help draw out the construction dust that mixes with the sunscreen. A generous dose of moisturizing shea. And the fragrance! A refreshing combo of mints, rosemary, basil, eucalyptus and orange.
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