Classes at Lancaster County Soapworks

When we had a full time herb shop, we used to give a lot of classes. We still go out to various groups and give talks and sometimes workshops and demonstrations. This year, we decided to offer a series of classes right here at our home base.

Yesterday's class was "Kitchen Cosmetics" and we had a great time making simple, natural skin care products and trying them out.

Here are some of our "students" giving the pore cleansing lotion a try...

We had a great time making a selection of products and everyone got a goodie bag filled with samples to take home..

If you would like to join us, the classes and signup information are all listed on my sister's webpage, The Essential Herbal.

Next week (Feb 11) is "Soapmaking" followed by "Balms and Salves" on the 18th, with a number of other classes/workshops to follow.

I'm not sure if we will be doing this again, so if you would like to join in the fun, do it now!

And we begin again!

Each year, after the holiday rush, I somehow manage to convince myself that we won't have any business for a couple of months! Well, back in the very early days, it was like that since at the time most of our customers were tourist related businesses. But, not any more.

We were well stocked before the holidays and between the shop and late orders coming in in December and early January ...

The shelves are bare!

Luckily, it doesn't take us long to get things looking healthy again around here.



Yesterday, we melted and weighed fats for 16 batches and this morning, I prepared the lye and additives for 8 batches of soap... The lye must cool before we are ready to make the soap.


We'll be making 2 batches of Patchouli, 2 of Lavender, 1 Wise Woman, 1 Double mint, 1 Goats milk and 1 Lilac.

I think some shops are already starting to think ahead to spring because Lilac is one of the spring scents and although it sells all year around, it is starting to pick up for spring already.

While I was at it, I lined the molds - and we are ready to go.

We have some soap to wrap, so we probably won't be making soap until late this afternoon, but it's really nice to have everything ready to go instead of putting in a full day first and then having to get everything ready to make the soap.

Sometimes it seems to be a never-ending job keeping the soap shelves stocked, but luckily they sell out fast and we are kept busy. It just never seems that we reach the end, just always new beginnings!

Fall Harvest

My sister is Tina Sams and she publishes herbal books along with her magazine, The Essential Herbal. We have been attending a number of herbal classes and an herbal conference in North Carolina just the other week. All this herbal learning and remembering (from when we had our herb shop) seems to be inspiring me to get back to working more with herbs again.

Fall is here and the days are getting cooler, threatening frost in the not too distant future, so this afternoon, I decided I had better harvest a couple of things before my chance was over.

This past Saturday, my sister and I attended a class at The Rosemary House in Mechanicsburg, PA. The class was taught by Gail Faith Edwards of Blessed Maine Herb Farm. One of the herbs that Gail spoke of was Witch Hazel or Hamamelis virginiana.  She explained that while the witch hazel that we know in the US is a distillation, in Europe, it is tinctured and the resulting alcohol is used as a muscle rub.

I had some green isopropyl alcohol, which means it has oil of wintergreen added to it. We had learned about green alcohol from Phyllis Light at a class earlier this year and just out of curiosity, I had found some and bought a bottle of it.  By itself, it is supposed to be superior to regular old rubbing alcohol for sore muscles. I figured adding witch hazel would only make it better.

I took the witch hazel up to Tina's and we pulled all the blossoms off the twigs, along with a few leaves and then chopped the smaller twigs into a canning jar.  Finally we poured the alcohol over it and though we hadn't put it on before I took the picture, labeled it with the contents and the date.  This is just for personal use.

I had already harvested one batch of comfrey just before we had our summer deluges and it dried so beautifully that I thought it would be nice to get another batch dried for use in our bath herbs.

Here it is laid out on a sheet in my sister's unused second floor bedroom. Comfrey has such a mucilaginous nature that it never seems to get completely dry.

In a week or so, this should be dry enough to process.  I'll remove the big central ribs and whirl the leaves in a blender to make a lively green dried herb to add to some of our products.  This will only yield a few ounces, but home dried herbs seem to be far superior to even those from some of the best commercial sources.

Holiday Soaps

We've been busy and are happy to present our new line of Holiday Soaps. Some are older soaps, specially dressed up for the holidays and others are brand new.

Our ever popular Bayberry and Doublemint soaps are just extra gorgeous in their new packaging.

Our new additions, Citrus Spruce and Holiday Wine were heartily approved at the wholesale show where we introduced them on Monday and Tuesday.

Check them out on our website shop under seasonal soaps.

We hope to be having special soaps each season of the year from now on.

Making my own Custom Soap Stamp

This morning, I decided to carry through on something I wanted to do for some time. We make a very simple lard and lye soap for some of the historic places that like to carry it. We call it "Granny's Lye Soap."It is wrapped in a cellophane bag with a sticker label and the bag is tied with a piece of twine. I decided it would be nice to put a stamp onto the bar. I had a stamp made years ago of our quilt patch logo and it was working beautifully as you can see above. Then the handle broke off....
Okay, I can still hammer the stamp itself into the soap. Then the stamp broke apart!

I decided it was time to bite the bullet and get a new, real soap stamp. I googled "custom soap stamp" and lo and behold, I found instructions to make your own soap stamp.

The instructions involved using two-part casting epoxy and I have been using some to make jewelry for a while. This seemed to be a little more solid, so I went to our local crafts store to get the type she mentioned.

I reassembled the stamp for one last imprint and made a "mold." Followed the instructions in the box and poured the stamp:
Here's a close up of the stamp still in the mold:
This will be ready to unmold in 24 hours and ready to try out in 72 hours... I'm pretty excited!

I'm sure I'll be posting the results soon.

Life is just a bowl of ...

Rosehips!

Yesterday, we decided it was time to brave the copious thorns of the rose rugosa and gather the abundant rosehips that glow like rubies in the lush greenery of the plant.
We started out with about twice this many hips, since we decided to take pictures halfway through!
We basically peeled the hips to get all the juicy outside while avoiding the seeds and tiny hairs inside.
Finally, we laid the juicy skins on a window screen to let them dry. They may eventually wind up in the dehydrator if they don't dry quickly enough.
I can't wait to see how they dry. I suspect they will be much more vibrant than the rosehips we purchase already dried. That seems to be true of so many herbs.

Along with other wonderful, natural ingredients such as rose water, biodynamic cream, real essential oils and rose clay, we use rosehips in our new Rose Milk soap .

Whenever we can, we like to use herbs that we grow right here on the farm.

For the Outdoors

In the summer, when we are outside and enjoying nature, there are a few little things that can really "bug" us! Over the years, we have worked to perfect a great recipe to discourage those things and have finally come up with what we think is the best all-natural formula we have ever used.
Our Git Stick and Git Spritz are effective and safe to discourage all sorts of buzzing beasties in the outdoors. Both contain catnip essential oil, which has been found in studies by Iowa State University to be 10 times as effective as DEET in repelling mosquitoes. They also contain rose geranium essential oil which is said to repel ticks along with a variety of other all natural oils chosen because of their traditional repellent qualities.

The nice part is that the combination of oils is a rather pleasant scent for the human nose!

The little Git Stick is small enough (.35 oz.) to carry in a pocket or purse and slip out to run around wrists, ankles and neck to discourage "things" trying to slip inside clothes! The base of the lotion bar is a combination of great, moisturizing tropical oils with a bit of beeswax to hold it all together.

The Git Spritz is a nice 4 ounce spray bottle and has a bit of cedarwood oil added to the basic blend. The cedarwood seems to help with those pesky gnats! We like to spray it all over and especially, lightly on our hair. The base of the Spritz is distilled water with a bit of denatured alcohol to act as a preservative and dispersant. A bit of Polysorbate 20 is added to keep the whole thing well mixed.

Just in case, though, something should get through this defense, or you should stumble into a patch of poison ivy (remember: leaves of three, let them be!) we have a wonderful all natural soap to help.
We call it Happy Wanderer and to our basic soap, we add a slurry of fresh Jewelweed and Plantain.

We learned about Jewelweed and mosquitoes many years ago when we camped with the Girl Scouts in a swamp! Jewelweed really helps with the itch and we suggest the suds should be left on the skin to dry out and then washed off, hoping to dry out mosquito bites and to remove all traces of the oils from poison ivy.

Plantain is so soothing, we have watched a baby who had closed its little fist around a bee (ouch!) go from screams of pain to surprise and calm after plopping a fistful of mashed plantain in its little hand.