#4 - Still Going Strong

On the occasion of our 4th anniversary, I commissioned this painting of our beloved Hazel Roy as a gift for Ando! The artist is local and I've always wanted to buy one of her paintings. You can find her website here: Betty Hatchett.

Soapmaking!

John and I are old hats at soap making, to a degree. We used to make homemade soap back when I was in college with success until one night when we made a batch and we stirred it for hours, played games and did what we could to pass the time. We were convinced that the batch never saponified. I guess we must have thrown it out, which is a shame. And its been nearly ten years since we've tried our hand at soap making again. I'm glad we didn't give up. So far this year we made a practice batch of honey oatmeal soap and also a batch of carrot soap. Next up - lavender!

Here we are mixing our lye solution into the fats (which in our case is a combination of olive oil, coconut oil and palm oil).

It doesn't actually take hours to stir the soap - only about 45 minutes or so, but it is constant, so we take turns and keep each other company.

Here's the batch of honey oatmeal poured into its mold.

And here is the carrot. We actually added carrot juice and carrot root oil to give the soap that pretty orange color. We also tried using two different molds to test which was our favorite. By far we preferred the kind with all of the separate soap molds. It worked perfectly.

These honey oatmeal bars we cut by hand.

And here is the carrot soap. Yeah for making soap.