I’ve been busily restocking soaps the past few weeks and made a total of 8 batches. I made mint and eucalyptus with charcoal soap for my guys, coffee and lemongrass kitchen soap, garden soap (mint with apricot kernel for extra scrubby power), wasabi ginger, shampoo bars (my first ever), unscented with jojoba beads, Feliz Navidad with rhassoul clay and lavender with jojoba beads.

The pumpkin lasagna only used half the pumpkin so what to do with the leftovers? How about moist and delicious pumpkin cake. I replace 3T of oil with butter, added pecans and baked mine in a round pan rather than a bundt pan.

and to finish off the week of skin care experimentation I made a batch of mint soap and another attempt at massage bars. These bars are much closer to what I want, just a wee bit too firm so next time I’ll  replace some of the cocoa butter with shea butter which has a lower melting point. I can now reclaim my kitchen table until after Thanksgiving.

There is a lot of conflicting information out there on soap making both in books and on the web. I’ve been gradually finding out what works for my base recipe and I think I have finally found the bottom and top of the temperature range for my ingredients before I mix them. Yesterday’s batch of Sandalwood soap turned out very nicely. I’ll still have to be cautious each time I try a new essential/fragrance oil but I suspect most will behave nicely if I stick to the center of my range. A temperature too low means the beeswax will come out of solution, a temperature too high means my soap will go to trace too quickly causing lumpiness and sometimes scorching/discoloration.

My second attempt at making bath bombs was a resounding success. The tip to add witch hazel from a spray bottle gave me the control I needed. I had only the tiniest bit of foaminess and my bath bombs turned out firm and well shaped, they popped very easily out of their molds. I was using up little bits of essential oils so these are scented with amber and geranium.

Jason was planning a beef stew over the weekend but wasn’t feeling up to it on the day so he made a salad and left the thawed CSA stew beef for me to cook Monday night. I also had some white wine left over from the weekend so made this delicious stew.

Way back when I first bought my soap molds, I noted the soap cutter and thought I’d like to eventually get one. It’s quite easy to cut the soap by hand with a butterknife but the bars vary between 3 and 5 ounces. The more we talk about selling the soap the more I think I need a smaller variation between bars. I finally broke down and bought the soap cutter. It’s slower to cut the bars this way but now my bars vary from 4.25 ounces to 4.5 ounces, a much more reasonable variation.

I’ve been meaning to sew some reusable shopping bags for quite some time now. I’d heard a report on the news about how they need to be periodically cleaned but the store-bought ones I have don’t lend themselves very well to cleaning. I found a few different patterns on Etsy and settled on this one. Maybe she just happened to be online when I bought mine but it was delivered to my inbox immediately so I was able to get to work right away. The pattern is very clearly written and the bag seems quite sturdy if a little shallow. It’s going to be very easy to adjust so I plan to try making a deeper one and then hopefully make several. The store-bought ones seem to be all starting to fall apart now so I’ll have to toss those. The nice thing about these is that they’ll be easy to repair so I think they should last much longer.