Soap of the Day

On twitter today I found out that my Tea Tree & Clay Soap made Day #145 Soap of the Day by @soaplogI  just started taking new pictures and it’s on of my favorite ones.    That was terribly nice of SoapLog – Twitter can be so full of surprises!!

You can find this soap either on Etsy or at the shop.

Patchouli Citrus Soap updated

The new Patchouli Citrus Soy Milk soap is now available.  We cut it the other day and it looks great!  With the earlier cold weather, the soy milk base is a nice creamy white and it really contrasts great with the red clay chunks.  The colored chunks are heavily scented with patchouli and citrus essential oils.

Originally, the soy milk line was solid color soaps, but I wanted to do something to make the stand out.  The chunking just gives it a more artistic look than just the solid bar – I hope everyone likes the change.

Soap for BEADS

I recevied the best phone call today from Debby Rooney, who is the founder of Beads For Education.  She is over in Kenya finishing up with the 2007 Break the Chains of Illiteracy 100 mile Walkathon.  I planned to leave myself this year to go, but family and work took over…..I’m scheduled to go over to Kenya next year.  BEADS is one of the non-profit organizations that I support – actually a percentage of all of Botanical Earth’s sales goes towards charity works.  You might have seen the hand beaded baskets that are made by the women of the Dupoto Womens Group that Botanical Earth offers.  The baskets are beautiful and new colors for spring should be arriving shortly!  If you go to the BEADS site, they offer all sorts of hand beaded items for sale.

For this trip over, we sent over some 50 pounds of our soap for the girls and mothers to enjoy.  Ms. Rooney sent me the picture of the ladies in their beautiful native dresses and then some of the girls.  Later in the month, I will post my letter from Farja, who is the young girl (age 9) that Botanical Earth helps sponsors through school.  It’s a long term commitment, but one that I don’t ever question.

I have to thank our customer, Alice Eberhard for getting us involved.  She has done the walk for the last 2 years – go Alice!  When she mentioned she worked with BEADS would take any donations of soap, I was more than willing to help.  As a child I grew up in the Middle East and on holiday we would go to Kenya.  It is the only place that I would cry when I had to leave – I love the Amboseli area in particular.  So to know that I could do something as a business too regarding helping girls in Kenya was an honor.  I had friends from Kenya in grade school and college, but all but one has died from the civil unrest throughout the years.

So for now, Botanical Earth sponsors Farja through school close to her home, and will assist her through college if she chooses.  Hopefully, as the business grows, we can sponsor more girls, and the girls in turn will educate their own people on environmental issues, humanitarian rights and AIDS education. If you want to read more on all the happenings at BEADs and to see some great pictures, including Alice’s – go to http://www.beadsforeducation.org/

Cold weather and slow shipping

So I thought it wouldn’t be any worse, and figured what’s the best thing to do when you can’t go out and have orders?  Make soy milk soap! By making soap and letting it stay very cold during set up, it becomes very creamy white – so I made soy soaps all day.  I figure I would go out on the 14th.

But when the 14th came, I had to dig out to GET to the shop the next morning!  Beautiful day, picture perfect but it’s now ZERO degrees….can I whine any more about it being cold?  Ok, I know it’s not snow in New York, but I didn’t think it would be so cold.  That soy soap is going to be white for sure.  For those that have asked, here’s a picture of my shop, it’s not my house - the building is devoted totally to the wonderful world of body care and soapmaking. I can never complain about where I work because the woods are always so pretty all season.

So the 15th, orders will resume again now that I can finally get the tractor out to plow.  There’s plenty of soy milk soap in the molds that’s for certain!

Patchouli Hemp back

I will be the first to admit it has taken FOREVER for me to make up our Pure Patchouli Hemp Soap but it’s finally ready to offer.  After 4 weeks of curing, it’s listed now on the site for sale.

And for those of you that have asked about the picture of the Patchouli Citrus labels having a mint leaf on bottle – it’s not a mint leaf but a patchouli leaf!  Patchouli essential oils is distilled from leaves.  Because of the questions, I am going to add a section on each essential oils we use too.