Soap, Moving and Pneumonia
Hello MoSoap customers and well wishers! It’s Debra and my family has finally allowed me close to a computer after kidnapping me and taking me to a doctor. Seems painting the outside of our “new” old building at 12′oo at night in 40 degrees weather can make one ill, I have found out and now I have pneumonia. I thought we could have plumbing and a kitchen within a month of moving in, but learned I was overly optimistic with working on a 106 year old building and dealing with contractors. Every week I was told, “sure we will be there…” and no one showed. No drain, no running water…that makes it a difficult process in cleaning soap pots, molds and lye buckets. So needless to say, I have given up on trying to fill orders, make new soap or paint any longer. My husband and aunt do not want the store open until I am completely healthy again….I guess I can’t complain about them for caring.
So my aunt Virginia has been kind enough to contact everyone and will be answering the phones for a while if you do call. I don’t know what I would do without her and am grateful she lives close by to our new house. Again I will try to post more on the move and stocking up soap. Everyone has been so kind with well wishes on our move and what to see the progress I have made with the building. If you want to keep up with the drama of my new” house” and trying to set up the soapshop, you can find it on Facebook at Commercial Hotel of Ironton .
Again my apologizes to everyone who waited since February for me to ship in April and now canceling the orders but I just can’t make enough new soap fast enough.
Debra
Chat with me
It’s been a funny week about talking about myself and MoSoap. A wonderful customer, Christian Ford who writes for a food / drink blog on preservation of small-scale arts HogSalt.com , he really likes my pine tar soap and wrote a great article about MoSoap and that caused other people to contact me regarding what I do. It’s just strange talking about what and how I do things….seems trendy and silly but as my niece said “important” to some. I love my family!!
If you have ever tried to call the shop, there’s always something wrong with our phone lines. I like the think my guardian Angel keeps me from sales calls but ….well, either I am repainting the shop and haven’t put the phone cords back in, the friend, neighbor or family member covering for me while I am gone can’t stand to answer the phone all day, our neighbor plows the road and cuts the phone line or I just don’t hear it while my Milwaukee Drill mixer is grinding away…..did I mention I love my Milwaukee Drill ?? It beats a wissy stick blender any day and is still made in the USA! Anyway, not to ramble on but I decided to add a new feature to the online store, http://store.mosoap.com and it’s online chat. I feel so modern and trendy….
When you come to the site now, on the upper left hand corner just above the listing of categories, you’ll see a button with a generic face smiling that says whether I am “online” or not. Now as Mr, Ford’s article will tell you, I am particular to night soap making so you will probably see it “online” in the wee hours of the night. But I figure if I can answer one question for someone while I am working, that’s one less person having to write out an email and wait for me to reply. I hope it helps, and please feel free to stop by just to say “Hey” as sometimes when I am waiting for the lye to cool there’s not much else to do but surf the web….well there’s always plenty to do but I would prefer to chat with someone interesting like you!
Island Joy
Our soap reminds a lot of people of their childhood as they write or call me with stories of their mother’s lye soap on the farm or a friend suggesting it. For me it’s about scent, that’s what makes me remember my childhood. My memory is sunshine, fruit trees and flowers having grown up in St. Petersburg, Florida in the 60′s. I loved picking the orange blossoms off the trees at the correct time and gently warming them with in a beeswax blend along with doing the same for jasmine blossoms that grew wild outside my bedroom window. After a couple of months I would filter out the blossoms and warm again with some amber resin to create my own perfume.
MoSoap’s Island Joy scent is close to what I use to make from scratch for myself. One cold snowy afternoon I was in the shop making soap when I looked out the window and missed home. There’s nothing like 12 inches of snow all around you to make one think that warm beaches might be pleasant. And that’s how Island Joy came about – It’s a blend of essential oil along with fragrance oils that I hand mix and allow to sit for a while to mellow into tropical like fragrance. You’ll smell hints of oranges, coconut and floral in this fragrance.
The weather has started to change herein Missouri and well, my father just called from Florida to tell me how lovely and warm the day is to be down there. I do miss Florida but Missouri is home now and I wouldn’t change that fact. So in order to honor a pretty day, Island Joy Lye Soap is on sale for the rest of October 2011. Have a look to at our other monthly specials on deals on our Specials Page.
Shampoo Bars and Lye Soap
I thought I would answer some email questions here on the blog. If one person asks, I’m sure there’s others.
What’s the different between a shampoo bar and regular lye soap?
MoSoap considers a bar soap a shampoo bar when it contains a high percentage of castor oil. This thick, almost syrup-like bean oil gives soap a rich lather and is very conditioning to hair. While you can use any soap as a shampoo bar really, ones with extra castor oil will give you a feel of dense lather that most people associate with shampoo. Our Pure Olive Oil Castile soap works perfectly well as a bar soap for cleansing hair but you’ll have close to no lather and that makes many people feel it’s not cleaning their hair or skin. Again, I design the shampoo bars to have really dense lather, plus with extra castor oil the soaps tend to liquefy in water better incase you want to make a liquid soap.
I’ve read that lye soap is too harsh on hair and can make it tangled and leave a residue. Is this true? Yes and no so here’s your two-part answer;
Harshness is based upon the amount of lye used. The higher the lye (sodium hydroxide) percentage, the less amount of moisturizing oil left in the soap. You need to look for a soap that will be gentle on your scalp along with your hair, and for that we suggest our Traditional over our Basic strong Lye soap. I have had customers wash their hair with the Basic Strong lye soap for things like head lice for a period of a few days, but it’s not the soap I would suggest for daily use unless you have extremely oily hair.
Handmade soap contains glycerin from the soap making process. Glycerin which your skin loves, attracts humidity which will leave hair gummy feeling. There’s a TV ad where they show a mirror and “ icky soap scum” from using simple soap. What the left behind ”icky scum” happens to be is wonderful glycerin which skin loves and is highly valued as a natural ingredient – it’s just marketing what you want people to think. Now if you have thin, dry hair shampoo bars or any handmade soap it might be for you without a rinse as it will give body and a feel of thickness to your hair. If you have thicker hair like I do, then you will find your hair feeling weighed down from the glycerin if you don’t use a vinegar rinse.
Are you supposed to use a vinegar rinse after wards? Yes, you need something to cut the glycerin if you dislike the feel in your hair. While it
sounds like a pain to do, simple white (the least expensive vinegar) is the best for this as it cuts the glycerin. It’s a trial and error issue to find what works for you. Just put one part white vinegar to one part water in a plastic squeeze bottle in your shower for after shampooing and your hair won’t reak of vinegar either if it’s diluted but add a drop or two of your favorite fragrance if you think it might bother you. If you want to go really creative, make a tea of chamomile or rosemary and add the vinegar. Now you have a fancy herbal rinse for pennies! Many women use to brew black tea and add vinegar for a rinse as it slightly darkening to their gray and the caffeine from the tea was a scalp stimulitant…no promisae on what the color will truly be but that’s country hair coloring at best!
Also, is the scented lye soap the gentle lye or the strong lye? They are similar to the Traditional Gentle soaps but with better
lather because of the addition of castor oil. You can use them to wash your hair without a problem if you are not sensitive to fragrance.
For more information, check out our other article on How to use Shampoo Bars on MoSoap.com
Moving the blog
As some of you know our site is hosted on the YahooStore system for easy ordering. I’ve been with them for over 8 years now and am happy with the shopping cart on most days as it’s really secure for shopping, but the blog is on a different part of their configuration. I decided to move the blog over to wordpress.com as it seems the Yahoo system is not running the backend needed to upgrade – here’s the error message I receive for all my techie peeps out there;
“You cannot update because WordPress 3.2.1 requires PHP version 5.2.4 or higher and MySQL version 5.0 or higher. You are running PHP version 4.3.11 and MySQL version 4.1.14.”
And Yahoo tells me they aren’t upgrading the PHP version or MySQL on the domain server I am on…..so I’m moving over to WordPress.com since it just seems easier. I realize not everyone understands this post, and trust me there’s a whole bunch I don’t but I do take internet security seriously so if I can’t upgrade to the latest, greatest and most secure - I’ll just go somewhere I can.
Our new blog address will be http://lyesoap.wordpress.com I figure what in the world do I make a lot of? LYE SOAP! So if you are a member of wordpress.com you’ll be able to subscribe easily and follow. I’m not a big talker, even hate talking on the phone but I am trying to be better about blogging as I write for several. I’ll be deleting the content from the old blog since it’s copied over here already so you can still check the Archives for past information.
If you think I just sit around all day staring at your order and not shipping it out quite as fast as you think I should, there’s usually a few reasons like internet security, death, dealing with printers sticking, GS-1 barcode issues and a few other “what did I get myself into” business things. One would think selling bars of soap wouldn’t require a study in such technology but since I don’t go to craft shows, I deal with the internet.
Happy Monday to everyone, thanks for your patience as always!
debra
