A Surprisingly Productive Week in Soap: 4th June, ’17

It’s June!  Flippin’ heck I love the summer.  Mind you, while we basked in some wonderful weather during May, June seems to have other ideas and has been a little wet so far, to say the least!

Anyway, I wasn’t expecting the last week to be particularly productive as far as soapiness goes.  Dean (my other, some would say ‘better’, half) was working away most of the week and it just happened to be half-term so both kids were off school and I wasn’t able to get into the office for any decent period of time.

On Monday night I made the most of Dean’s last night at home to make some soap. This is one I’ve not made since last year, and is one of my summer specials.  Traeth Craig Du (Black Rock Sands) is an homage to our local(est) beach. Just 20 minutes from home, we spend long days there in the summer, building sand castles and playing in the waves.  The base of the soap has ground apricot stones in it, for a mildly exfoliating, sandy texture, and the fragrance is a refreshing marine scent. Think seaweed, rock pools and a coastal breeze – summer in a soap.  Last year I made 15 bars, this year I’m making 60, so I hope it sells! I’ve only got in the mould photos at this stage – which aren’t very exciting, but I’ll post some cut pics very soon.

Traeth Craig Du in the mould

By Tuesday I had sent off all the parcels in this year’s International Soap Swap, and a couple of recipients have already received theirs.  In order to avoid spoilers we’ve agreed not to share any photographs until everyone has received their parcel, but as soon as I can, I will…

Dean arrived home on Friday night, to a hero’s welcome from the kids (I let them stay up a bit later especially).  I was pretty pleased too, not least because it meant I got to spend the whole day in the office on Saturday, catching up on wrapping and labelling.  Not the most exciting of days, but I needed to make up for lost time.

Last night brought more restocks – Clarity & Lemon Verbena Confetti:

Clarity & Lemon Verbena Confetti in the mould

In other news, and this IS exciting, we spent some time in the ‘soon-to-be-recogniseable-as-a’ garden today. We have some scaffolding boards arriving tomorrow to build three raised beds, and today we levelled some ground ready for Dean to build the beds this week. Because of the incline there a fair bit of levelling to be done, so we’ll probably have to create a tier or two.  But this feels like real progress, and I may even have sowed or planted something in there by this time next week – woop!!

Garden progress

It doesn’t look like much here, but it took us hours of digging and carting soil to get just this patch of ground nice and level.  Those retaining bricks are only temporary by the way!

A different angle…

Thanks for reading, back soon!

Getting back on the horse

I’ve done a lot of soapy things over the last couple of weeks, but they didn’t include writing a blog post. I’ve thought about it, aware of the passing days and the realisation that my plan to post at least once a week wasn’t panning out. But you know what? It’s only been 16 days.  I’m improving 😀

During the last couple of weeks I’ve given a soaping demonstration to a local ladies craft group, given two soaping presentations, had a stall at a (late) summer craft fair and, of course, made loads of of soap.

The soaping demonstration was for a local ladies crafting group. There were some 16 ladies there, and I made a batch of Luscious Lavender soap from scratch. They were fascinated by the process, and asked a lot of questions as we went along. Luckily I had taken plenty of fully cured and wrapped soap with me, as once the demo was over they were keen to treat themselves and their loved ones to a bar or two of handmade soap.  The whole demonstration was done through the medium of Welsh, and I’ve made a note to look up some of the more technical words and phrases before my next one (oops!)

The soaping presentations were in a local guest house, Craflwyn Hall, where visitors come to stay and walk the mountains that surround us here. I go every Thursday evening during the holiday season (usually April through October) and I absolutely love having a captive audience to talk to about my soaping obsession. I’ll write a more detailed post about it another time.

Craflwyn Hall, Beddgelert

 

The summer fair I attended last Saturday wasn’t particularly well attended, but I was lucky in that almost everyone who visited my stall bought something. It was a beautiful day – just look at the views from my stall!

View from my stall

I’ve also been making a lot of soap but you know what? I’m going to save that for the next post, which will come all the sooner if I already know what it’s going to be about. Oh I’m definitely getting back into blogging mode 😀