One of the many great things about making soap is you can easily change what you call it and how you market it.
This started out as Lavender Mosh Pit, but when I realized mosh pits are as much a part of the past as answering machines and record stores, I updated it.
I'm not sure this actually reflects what a rave is like. I've never been to one. I'm much too old.
Made with olive oil pomace infused with lavender/alkanet/charcoal, coconut oil, palm kernel oil, cocoa butter, shea butter, lard and castor oil.
Fragrance: lavender, lemongrass, ho wood, may chang, sage and rosemary.
I had this whole punk rock thing in mind when I made this batch.
It's a collage—like the posters we made back in the 80's with letters cut out of magazines and and photos of Ronald Reagan. I used all the bits and pieces of every lavender-based soap I had hanging around my kitchen (including an entire batch of lavender castile soap that was going to become this year's Be My Guest Soap, but I just never got around to doing it).
The fragrance blend (which includes rosemary, may chang, sage, lemongrass and ho wood) is more energizing than relaxing, almost aggressive. It definitely ain't Yardley's.
I cut it, cured it, labeled it using an adorable punk rock font (no more cutting letters out of magazines!), wrapped it in a ripped up black t-shirt fastened with safety pins, spent an entire afternoon trying to get the right photo (it's not a very photogenic soap)—then realized the people buying this soap will most likely not be old punk rockers such as myself. Kids today don't know a mosh pit from a Ramones picture disc. They weren't even born yet when Sid killed Nancy.
I learned a valuable lesson from my Mommie Dearest soap: sometimes you can be too clever and snarky. It results in dismal failure.
So the punk rock theme got trashed. Eighty-sixed. The soap was renamed for this generation, relabeled using a hip and trendy font and rewrapped in black vinyl (a tablecloth from the 99 cent store) and fastened with lavender rubber bands.
And so I present to you and everyone under forty: Lavender Rave
The green embeds started out as a batch onto themselves, but when I cut it, I wasn't thrilled with the fragrance. I used eucalyptus, rosemary and basil essential oil and some spearmint fragrance oil and it was too spearmint-y. I kept thinking of Wrigley's Doublemint Gum. And the plain—although pretty—green (from basil) bars just didn't do anything for me.
I chopped the batch up and embedded them in new titanium-dioxide-whitened batch scented with a good dose of rosemary and a touch of basil.
Perfect. It's refreshing and great for clearing up a stuffy nose or foggy head first thing in the AM.
The name Winter's Kiss came to me on the tour bus as we drove underneath the UNIECF Snowflake on 5th Avenue and 57th Street.
Still no luck on naming my Yet-Untitled-Mystery-Novel—even after an evening of Mai Tais and brainstorming.
I made these guys using two separate tandem batches.
The first with twice-brewed coffee added to the lye (or to be more accurate, the lye added to twice-brewed coffee because you should NEVER ADD LIQUID TO LYE!). I also used coffee-infused olive oil pomace and the last of my precious coffee butter. And coconut oil, palm kernel oil, castor oil, cocoa butter and my old buddy—lard. At trace, I added two tablespoons of sugar (for a little extra lather) and a bit of vanilla fragrance oil. I didn't want to overpower the scent of the coffee.
The second batch was 100% coconut oil (with 20% superfat). At trace, I added powdered milk that I'd dissolved in warm water and my brand new pal—titanium dioxide.
Is titanium dioxide a natural colorant? No. But it is chemically identical to the mineral pigments that are mined from the earth—but doesn't contain harmful heavy metals. And it's used in as a whitening ingredient in both soap and cosmetics.
Here's a tip on using it: Rather than mixing the powder with oil before putting it in your soap batter, stir it into a little distilled water. It dissolves easily and no lumps.
Anyway, once my two tandem batches were at light trace—dark coffee and white milk—I attempted an in-the-pot swirl, but I'd made too much soap for one pot, so I did a little in-the-pot and a little in-the-mold swirling. I got a little overzealous and some of the swirls blended into a light brown—which actually made me very happy.
More swirls using titanium dioxide will be attempted soon. So stay tuned.
I made a batch of salt bars—or Beach Bars as I call them and they came out super crumbly. Salt bars have the tendency to be crumbly anyway—but these were outrageous. Pick one up and chunks of salt and soap avalanche onto the floor. And if there's one thing I hate, it's messy soap. Which is odd because I'm not an anal person.
So I chopped and crumpled the bars up and used them as embeds. The second batch of soap kind of seals in the salt goodness.
The first batch was made 75% coconut oil, so the bar would still lather up with the salt. I did a superfat of 20% so all that coconut oil wouldn't be drying.
The rest of the batch was olive oil pomace that I infused with flowers from Queen Anne's lace. It made a pretty pale yellow—and Queen Anne's lace (or wild carrot) is supposed to be good for dry, chapped skin. There's a ton of it growing in the garden. I was under the impression it was a native plant, but after doing some research found out it's from Europe and considered invasive. In other words, a weed.
I also threw in a bunch of melt and pour scraps to jazz it up.
The second batch is just a standard recipe with some shea butter.The olive oil pomace is infused with the last of the lemon verbena I grew last year. Again, very pale, but pretty.
The whole shebang is scented with lemon verbena, holy basil, may chang, bergamot, grapefruit and ginger essential oils. It's a real WOW! fragrance. Very uplifting and energizing.
One of my New Year's Soap-Making Resolutions was to create the Ultimate Lemon Verbena bar. This might be it, but it's not how I imagined it at all.
Sometimes I have trouble coming up with titles. My Yet Untitled Cozy Mystery is a good example of that. And I have a bunch of brilliant short stories that I can't submit for publication until I know what to call them. Artists and poets have the luxury of just using "Untitled in Red" or "Untitled #23." Novelists and short story writers can't get away with that.
And sometimes, I have trouble for coming up with names for my soap. Like this one. I couldn't just call it "Lavender." It begged for something more. But what? " Lavender Dreams" has been done to death. "Lavender Twilight" has vampire connotations. " Lavender Fields"? Eh. "Manhattan Lavender"? Yawn.
And I didn't want to do something snarky or overly clever.
And then yesterday, while going by Lincoln Center on the tour bus, it hit me: "Lavender Sonata." The swirls have kind of a musical look to them and the fragrance is a lovely melody of lavender, ho wood, orange and tea tree. And the oils I used make a harmoniously cleansing and conditioning. Yada, yada.
So presenting "Lavender Sonata." Appearing in your shower for a limited engagement.
Now, if I can just come up with a title for My Yet Untitled Cozy Mystery.
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.
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.
I love this soap! The fragrance is unbelievably sexy. Warm, rich—just a little sweet. What a man should smell like. And we're talking real man. Not the kind of man that calls other men 'bro' and 'dude.' Or wears flip-flops on a dinner date. Or drinks Red Bull and vodka.
And in the shower (back to the soap, not the man), incredible lather from reduced whiskey and a little sugar. There's a pencil line (hard to see in the photo) of poppy seeds to gently exfoliate. Rhassoul clay (that's how I got that gorgeous brown—reminds me of expensive leather) helps remove impurities, but loads of cocoa and shea butter moisturize and condition.
I will be saving one bar from this batch to give to give to the next real man I meet. There're not a lot of them in NYC these days. They're a dying breed.
It took a while for me to get all ducks lined up on this batch, but it's worth it. I guess. It feels like a culmination of recent failures. And I'm too frazzled at this point to think about 'lessons learned.'
First the soap itself. The polka dots (which I hope look like big raindrops) are a rebatch of an olive oil Christmas soap (fragranced with frankincense and myrrh) that didn't look so festive. Paper mache gray just doesn't get anyone in the holiday mood.
My goal was black—and I know some of you won't think that's a Christmas-y color either. It is if you live in NYC and have a lot of rock-n-roll friends. Anyway, the charcoal infusion I made just wasn't strong enough, hence the gray. The first failure.
When I rebatched, I added a little lavender essential oil to lessen the Christmas-ness of the frankincense and myrrh.
The overpour was a bit more successful on the black front. It's made with charcoal and alkanet. Still not the black of Joey Ramone's jacket, but at least not gray. And I added more lavender essential oil to the batch.
But when I got the batch into the mold, it was shy of being normal sized bars. Size really matters with me. At least with soap. Failure #2. I whipped up another small batch using olive oil infused with mallow to top it off. Really nice green. And I've got more mallow growing in my garden this year—it re-seeds like crazy—so it'll become part of my 'permanent palette.'
Mallow
When I cut the finished bars (and they came out wonky), I was all set to call them Stormy Monday—from the old blues song—but after I thought about it more, I decided to call the batch Rain and include a story booklet with each bar.
For those of you not familiar with my writing, "Rain" is one of the short stories from You Are Here. It's a fairly dark story, but one of the most popular in the book. The fresh, but mysterious, almost melancholy blend of the lavender, frankincense and myrrh in the soap mirrors the mood of the story.
I got my friend Elizabeth Shim to do the booklet cover. She's a very talented graphic designer and as well as a writer—in fact, I met her through Elaine Edelman's writing workshop.Her writing has a very unique Korean/New Yorker perspective, lots of detail and humor as well.
The booklet cover by Elizabeth Y. Shim ( 심예린 )
She did a great job on the cover. I love it. It subtly tells the story of the story.
Laying out the booklets was a plethora of failures. Which is strange because I've done these booklets before without much issue. Then my printer wasn't aligning correctly, then the labels I designed using Elizabeth's artwork didn't fit every bar correctly. Etc…
Today—my only day off for the next million years—the day I swore I'd get the whole shebang packaged and ready to get out of my apartment and into the hands of readers and bathers—it rained.
And the soap absorbed the humidity. And it got sticky.
And I said, "Just do it."
And I did.
The finished product.
It doesn't look like I wanted—except for Elizabeth's fab art—but it's done. And because this batch caused so much heartache, I'm giving it away—to people in my writing workshop. They in turn, will be asked to pass the bar on to somebody that doesn't know me and isn't familiar with my writing, but would enjoy the story and the soap.
There will be another soap/story version of "Rain" in the future. That one will be much different soap-wise and I'll still use Elizabeth's art, but instead of a booklet, it'll include a link to hear the audio edition of the story read by the author and produced by my friend Nate Cimmino at Harrumph Studios.
No more booklets! I'm going digital! You heard it here first!
Well, Mommie Dearest took off like a lead zeppelin. I sold two bars of it.
It might be a generational thing. A few younger people (even gay men!) didn't get that the wire coat hanger refers to the movie Mommie Dearest. Oh well. Even Apple has failures. It's still great soap.
And it's now had a make-over. Same bar, new name, new photo and new product description.
Presenting Bed of Roses:
A surprising mosaic of Arabian rose, lavender and fresh anise. Moroccan red clay and charcoalto remove impurities. Cocoa butter to soften. And gorgeous, fluffy lather thanks to a generous dose of reduced red wine.
Hopefully, this will be more successful.
I'm still keeping a wrapped, coat hanger bar of Mommie Dearest in the soap box. You never know…
The moment I put this into the mold, I knew it was going to be Mother's Day soap—mostly because of the fragrance—which I did in two parts.
The black embeds have Arabian rose fragrance oil. I did a hot process so I wouldn't have to worry about seizing or separating or ricing or whatever. I threw some scraps of soap in after the cook for a little contrast. The white is from the tops of my first Beach Bars and the pink is from an experiment using red Moroccan clay that I'll write about one of these days.
The over-pour has lavender and fresh anise essential oils which toned down the rose a bit—even though they weren't blended together. When it was first cut, I could also really smell the wine and cocoa butter I used. They've all melded together during the cure. It's a gorgeous fragrance. Unusual, yet familiar at the same time.
The final bar doesn't really have a Mother's Day look to it though. It's dark and chaotic. And that's why I'm calling it Mommie Dearest.
It's the perfect gift for anyone with a scary *mom who went ape shit over wire coat hangers or forced them to stay up all night watching old movies or eat raw liver. Or a million other things that wrecked their chances of being a normal adult.
It’s also the perfect gift for moms with a great sense of humor.
And gay men who love Joan Crawford.
Here's my sardonic product description:
Relive those painful memories you spent years in therapy trying to forget. Her cheap perfume covering up the smell of wine and Sambuca. The nights she locked you in the car while she entertained one of her boyfriends. The mornings you went to school nourished with a breakfast of Chips Ahoy cookies because she couldn't be bothered getting out of bed.
Arrives wrapped in crinkled gold tissue paper with a miniature wire coat hanger. $5
If there's any left after Mother's Day, it'll get a new name and a new description. I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, perhaps?
*My mother, by the way, is not a scary mom. She's very cool and I appreciate the terrific job she did raising me—although she did wash my mouth out with Irish Spring for being sassy (you can read about that here). And I think that's why I make soap today.
I have a confession to make. Even though I now own a miter box, I still have issues cutting soap. I blame my silicone loaf mold. The soap is just too wide to fit into the box, so I have to cut the sides off first.
When I was doing this with the Cardamom, Coffee and Oatmeal, the knife hit that fun googie embed and went crazy. I ended up with quite a few bad-looking bars. And with the price of cardamom essential oil, I wasn't going to let those bars go to waste. (You'll find most soap makers hate waste. Not sure if it's a genetic thing or something that happens to you when you start making soap.)
I cut the wonky bars up and used them for this batch. Which I like even better than the first. I love the rich, chocolaty brown of the over-pour. That comes from using a stronger brew of coffee (Café Bustelo). I also used more coffee butter, but other than that the recipe is the same.
I ended up a little short when I poured the new batch over the embeds, so added that light brown strip with a good amount of coffee grounds for extra scrubbiness. I think it looks like foam on a latte.
Last week, I found cardamom coffee in a dollar store up in Harlem. It smells great, but doesn't taste so good. Kinda weak and just off. No matter—it'll make great soap. Can't let anything go to waste. Even dollar coffee.
It's kind of funny, my making soap with booze. I started out with White Star made with Champagne, but didn't get around to making soap with beer until months later. Usually, it's beer you start with since it's so much cheaper than Champagne.
Anyhow, I used Guinness after reading it makes a nice dark brown soap and olive oil pomace infused with the small amount of hops that grew in my garden last year.
A note about hops: It's an herb, a very useful one—and not just for making beer. It's also a sedative—just harvesting hops can make you feel extremely relaxed. Hops is also used to help painful swelling, bruises, rough skin and rashes.
And I love the way it smells. Nothing better than a good hoppy beer.
Unfortunately, hops essential oil is extremely expensive ($100 an ounce). Supposedly, the hops scent in beer does come through the soap making process, but since Guinness isn't a hoppy beer, I used ginger essential oil in this batch.
Next batch—and there will be another batch by the end of the summer—I'll use a super hoppy beer and leave it unscented.
Photo B
Now on to the photographs. The top one (Photo A) was done as part of a photo challenge on Soaper's Retreat run by Joanna Schmidt—who I consider to be the Queen of Soap Porn—not only does she take great soap photos, she blogs about them and inspires other soapmakers to photograph outside the soap box. The challenge was to photograph a plain bar of soap with one of your favorite things in the background. I used an oil painting done by Gertrude Hock, a friend of my parents. I really like the way it turned out. And it kind of gives the feeling of the ginger scent. Which was unintentional. A happy accident.
Photo C
But, of course I wanted to photograph the soap with some Guinness. Makes sense, right? So I took a few bars to Perdition last evening, got myself a pint and took a bunch of shots on a table near the front of the bar that was open to the sidewalk. And I'm not really happy with the results. I don't mind that they're a bit dark. That kind of captures the feel of a quiet pint in a bar, but I think they look clichéd. And as a writer, I hate clichés.
But I could be wrong about this.
And so, I'm asking you gentle reader, what you think. Please vote for your favorite photo with the cute little poll gadget located on the right of this post. I'm keeping the poll open until midnight on April 20th. I'll post the results on the 21st and use the winning photo as a product shot on the here.
Photo D
Feel free to share this post with millions. And thanks in advance for your input.
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