River County Soapworks produces high quality soap and toiletries that are both pleasing to the senses and terrific for your skin. I invite you to try our products.
I must confess that I got distracted. Yes, I did! We have a small handmade soap company and I really want to offer liquid soap as well as handmade bar soap. I’m so close to launching a liquid soap line but got distracted when I ran across a different method of making liquid soap on a handmade soap making forum that I belong to. While I found this different method interesting I was hesitant to try it. Instead of adding potassium hydroxide which is the alkali used for liquid soap making to the water phase, you replace the water with vegetable glycerin and add the potassium hydroxide to the glycerin. It’s a quick and painless method. Usually, it takes me several hours to get to the point that I have a workable soap paste. When using glycerin in place of water the chemical reaction happens so much faster and I’ve got a nice solid translucent paste within an hour or so. It’s that quick! Also, taking a 2% discount, there is no need to neutralize and I still end up with a clear liquid soap after dilution. Has there been a learning curve? Yep! Sure has and I’ve got a couple gallons of dish soap to prove it! Some of the essential oils I added turned the diluted liquid soap to a nice thick gel after sitting for a while so I learned to work through this adding a bit more glycerin and letting it sit. The glycerin dissolved the gel and made it fluid again. It is normal for a true liquid soap to be pretty thin. Thin enough that you can squirt it out of a bottle. I happen to like a thicker soap and so have been tinkering with how to get it. I tried different vegetable gums, adding borax and reducing the amount of water used to dilute the soap paste. Using the normal method of making liquid soap, I could reduce the water quite a bit but with the glycerin method I found I needed a bit more water in dilution to keep the soap from reverting back to paste. Borax works but I really wanted to avoid using it. What I ended up doing is making a 20% sodium chloride (table salt) solution and adding a dropper full at a time to the diluted soap stock. Using too heavy of a hand will turn the soap cloudy so there is a fine line on how thick you can take it and not get cloudy soap. I was able to use the salt solution with a coconut oil percentage of 20% in my formula. I have never used a salt solution before but have read that it won’t work on a liquid soap formula with a high percentage of coconut oil. In my case, it seemed to work great so I don’t know how high is high. I really like using the glycerin liquid soap making method. It’s a time saver and has produced some beautiful soap for me. Took a lot of testing but I think I’ve got the process down now. Patience is not one of my virtues but I have been forced to go slow and test, test and test some more.
Here I’ve got warmed oils and the potassium hydroxide added to the vegetable glycerin.
The lye solution has been stick blended into the warmed oils.
Tracing…
We have bubbles..which means done!
To get to the bubble stage only took about 5 minutes. The soap is done and after I put the lid on and came back in about an hour I had paste and it tested neutral with the phenolphthalein. I had whipped air into the soap which accounts for the cream color but underneath was all clear paste. So much for 24 oz test batches. Not the easiest to work with but better than wasting a lot of material.
And here is the final test batch of paste diluted, thickened and scented with Eucalyptus, Spearmint and Sweet Orange essential oils. Perfect!
Our handmade soap company is a family affair around here. Our little soapmaker in training spent the week end, and was just fascinated with Nona’s soap shop and the large block of Lemongrass soap that we cut. When I took out the pot tipper to take over to my brother’s so he could weld another one, well…that was just TOO interesting. Pot tippers are great when pouring heavy buckets of oils or handmade soap. Makes life much easier!
Our family owned and operated handmade soap company is growing and I need to ramp up production of our popular handmade soaps. Yeah! We make our own silicone soap molds or should I say my handy other half makes our molds for me. Before investing in the silicone, however, I need to test out the process of making a larger batch so went ahead and ordered a block soap mold from Upland Soap Factory. Silicone is not cheap and I need to make sure this type of handmade soap mold is what I want before we make the investment. Our handmade soap bars are not the standard size so unfortunately, I have to make due, and I can with one of the standard size soap molds available until I’ve got the process down and then we will design a mother mold for my particular bar soap size and Rick will pour several silicone soap molds for me like he did with my slab molds. This new mold will hold 35lbs of handmade soap. Yep, you got it! 35lbs. I’m so excited! You could not pay me enough to go back to lining wood molds! Silicone is the only way to go.
Lately, I have been really busy making many batches of handmade soap in the shop. Those of you who buy handmade soap from me know that I like to use color quite a bit. Otherwise, I’d be bored with making lots and lots of plain handmade soap bars! I just like color! It’s a fun part of the whole process for me. You would think as a handmade soap company I would have come up with a simple solution to mixing pigments up some time ago but I have to confess that the light bulb just went off about a month ago while I was busy mixing up some soap batches. A few years back, I purchased a mini mixer to mix up small test batches of lotions and it has been sitting staring out at me on the shelf every time I go into the shop to mix up some more batches of handmade soaps. This little mixer is the perfect solution to avoiding clumps in your color solution. I just add a bit of oil to the colorant and mix away. No more clumps of pigments! Perfect, clean color in the final handmade soap bars. Don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.
The past couple of week ends I’ve had the new handmade soap displays set up at the outdoor market I attend most weekends. This market is the Portland Saturday Market which is gigantic and keeps me pretty busy. I get to meet and talk with retail customers but also potential wholesale soap customers too. Handmade soap is very, very heavy and so it was really important to try to come up with a display system that would allow me to fill it in the shop and just set up at the market. Reduction of tubs of inventory was the main motivator in order to save my back every week end. Every outdoor market, fair or special event that I’ve attended to market my handmade soap company at has always had 10 x 10 booth spaces. Trying to condense things into a 8 x 8 space is no easy task. We are almost there but not quite. I love how the handmade soap bars are displayed in their new do but the booth is still too stark. We will need to jazz things up a bit. How? Well…now, guess I’m going to have to figure that out.
Yes, River County Soapworks is a handmade soap company which should have been on Facebook a long time ago. Unfortunately, the soap maker who makes all the handmade soap around here is not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to all this social networking stuff. Yes, I’m really, really good at making handmade soaps but really lacking when it comes to computer stuff. I mean, REALLY lacking. You wanna see a blank face. Just say blog, facebook and twitter. Not to mention, upload, download and photoshop! Please join me in my new adventure.
One of the fun things about being a handmade soap company is blending essential oils together to use in handmade soap. Sometimes you hit on what you think will be a great blend out of the bottle so to speak but once it hits the soap pot it quickly morphs into something that grows out of a swamp. No kidding! On the other hand, you can mix up a blend and it doesn’t strike your fancy out of the bottle but is just beautiful in handmade soap. Today I poured a test blend of what I think I’ll call Summer Solstice. I know, I should have made this soap a few months ago, but hey, better late than never. It is a essential oil blend of Lavender, Litsea Cubea or May Chang and Patchouli. Nothing fancy but I am pretty confident that these handmade soap bars once cut will smell awesome! Here it is just poured in the slab. If this soap goes over like I think it will at the Portland Saturday Market then I’ll add it to the website and as a wholesale soap selection. That’s the best part of doing markets, I can see how a new handmade soap is received before making the decision to add it to the line. Nothing like doing a little market research!
Well…yesterday, I opened up my laptop and could not get the darned thing to start up properly. Nothing, nada, zip! As I’m sitting there with the laptop on my lap trying to get the screen to come on, I’m thinking of about all the essential oil recipes for my handmade soaps, documents for my wholesale soap accounts, photos for the website, saponification tables for my workshop and just about all the pertinent information I need to function while making handmade soap! While this is all rapidly going through my mind, I remember the slip drives I purchased to back up all my information but those were still sitting on my desk. By now, I’m starting to sweat with anxiety! Yes, dripping! I get dressed and take a drive down to the computer shop I use to fix all my screw ups. I walk in and the nice young man asks me what the problem is. I proceed to tell him in a panic that the laptop won’t start up and I need it because I’ve got a lot of important information on it regarding my handmade soap company!!! He opens it, presses the start button and voila, the laptop miraculously turns on. I’m standing there dumbfounded. Apparently, the dork that I am did not press the start button hard enough. So today, I am backing up all my files and vowing to do this on a weekly basis. Yes I am!
Over the winter I loss my beautiful mare Sasha in a tragic accident. It was heartbreaking for me and my husband in his infinite wisdom brought home a alpine goat named Emily to keep our little shetland pony Snuffy company not to mention give me something else to focus on. Now all my customers who know me first hand and have always looked at the goat milk soaps in my handmade soap collection and asked the question “Do you have your own goats?”, know that I never wanted goats. No way, no how! Absolutely not! Yes, I do make quite a bit of goat milk soap in addition to my shea butter handmade soap bars but goats are mischievous and gregarious creatures and I didn’t want the hassle. Boy has time changed my tune! Little Miss Emily dropped a baby one evening and my husband knew that anything that has fur on it and especially a baby fur animal just warms my heart. I wondered why he kept saying “You know, Emily sure is getting round.” He knew that goat was pregnant when he brought her home! I am now officially and happily attached to my little goat herd. They are so much fun and a delight to interact with. Snuffy is the big boss now and baby loves to jump on him and run circles around him. He has a lot of patience with her and everyone has settled right in. No, I still don’t have any intention of milking goats to make handmade bar soap with. I will still buy my goat milk in bulk. There isn’t enough hours in the day. After all, we are a “artisan” handmade soap company which basically means I do everything. LOL!
Emily & Baby
Our Baby a bit bigger. She grows really, really fast!
And..this is one of my favorites. Before I took this photo the baby was jumping on Snuffy. She got tired and layed down near him for a snooze!
I’ve always admired the “artsy” handmade soaps I’ve seen and finally decided to have some fun with crafting a bar when testing out another essential oil blend. To be honest, I did not start the the soap making process with this design in mind. I had poured layers again but when taking the handmade soap out of the small mold it! stuck and I had quite a mess. So what to do? I cut the soap up into small pieces and rolled handmade soap balls. After making another batch of soap, I split the handmade soap stock up into two batches and colored them white and a light green. I poured some white into the mold and sank the soap balls into the soap stock and then poured some green and layered white onto of the green. Voila! The next day I was able to cut these bars. I absolutely love the way these handmade soap bars turned out. However, this method is labor intensive and I’m not so sure a good method for bulk soap making. Maybe limited editions? It was lots of fun! Here again, these bars will also end up in the grab bag offered on the website when cured. By the way, they are scented with Patchouli and Spearmint. Mmmm!
Here I’ve got warmed oils and the potassium hydroxide added to the vegetable glycerin.
The lye solution has been stick blended into the warmed oils.
Tracing…
We have bubbles..which means done!
