We went to a Brambleberrian Alumni’s wedding tonight. A girl after my own heart (go Michelle!), she had cupcakes at the wedding. I ate two.
Happy Easter Soaps!
Tutorial for making these happy soaps is here.
Easter Soap Project
Tomorrow is the earliest Easter in 95 years. You can buy the scrapbook page on the left from CiaDesigns here. If you are casting about for some soap ideas to hide for the kiddies, or have on display to amaze and delight your guests, Soap Queen has just the thing for you.
This project will take about 30 minutes of total soaping time, broken up into two sessions.
First, gather your supplies. For this project, I used:
White Melt and Pour
Non-Bleeding (Pink & Blue) Colorant
Clear Soap
Lilac Fragrance
Labcolor Aqua
Milky Way Square mold
You’ll need the following equipment:
Spoon
Pyrex or heat safe melting glass
Cheese Grater
Plastic Dropper
Step One: Make the Shreds
Melt 4 ounces of white melt and pour in the microwave. Carefully drop in 1 to 3 drops of non bleeding color. I used Non-Bleeding Pink but you can use any color, so long as it is non-bleeding. Scent this 4 ounces of shred base heavily with fragrance. A “heavy” dose of fragrance is .2 ounces in 4 ounces of soap.
Step Two: Wait & Shred
Once the Shred Soap has set up fully, using the small end of the cheese grater, grate the soap into small, little shreds.
Step Three: Anchor the happy chick or plastic egg or Easter Themed item
World Market carries the little chick I used. They have a World Market in almost every state so you can rush out and buy some little cheep cheeps for your soap project. If you don’t have a cute little furry animal, it’s okay. A nicely decorated plastic egg would look equally fetching in your mound of soapy shreds.
Melt clear soap in the microwave, scent it and color it. I used Labcolor Aqua in the back soap and Non-Bleeding Blue in the front soap. Pour the mold half full. Anchor your item in the melted soap.
Step Four: Shower Object with Soap Shreds
Carefully sprinkle shredded soap around your object. The curls will soften and sink. Continue piling the soapy curls until you’re happy with the height of curls.
If you get too carried away building the mound of curls, take a dropperfull of clear, melted soap and make trails of clear soap into and on top of your curls. This will help glue the curls down into the soap.
One small obvious safety note, when you are showering with your Easter soap, consider pulling the plastic, sharp-edged objects out of your soap. The little feet in the bird will scratch you and your loved ones in a rather unattractive manner.
This entire project is very simple and could easily be done with children above the age of 4 with adult supervision.
Join me, Live, at the MSSB Summitt
On Monday, I’ll be speaking (and making soap) at the Microsoft Small Business Summit in Redmond, Washington.
You can watch the entire thing live here.
I’ll be on at 12 noon PST, making soap with the host and chatting about Bramble Berry, blogging, soapmaking and what it’s like to run a small business.
I’m finalizing the soaps we’ll be making on air, right now. I’m hoping to use our water soluble paperto embed a Microsoft logo and maybe even a photo of Bill Gates.
How to Felt Soap
Thank you to Two Tadpoles, Teresa, One Bubble, Amber’s Ambry, and Soapaholics Anonymous for the blog shout outs this week.
Heidi, your heat transfer method soap pictured above looks amazing. The texture really adds interest to the bar.
Teresa, the soap (pictured on right) that your boys made is adorable! I love that you are creating positive memories with your boys, utilizing this fun art form.
Thank you to the Soap Queen reader that alerted me to this YouTube video on how to felt soap.
Feedblitz subscribers, you have to go to the blog to see the video. If you make CP soap and every have ugly CP soap that you want to salvage, the video is worth watching.
Otion Commercial is Posted
We Love Our Community – from Bakima
This is a guest post by our fabulous marketing intern, Bakima. She’s been hard at work on our MySpace Page and worked on the Commenters Love post for this week.
Hey Soapers!
I want to take the time to congratulate everyone on your efforts and evident passion towards this amazingly creative and useful art form. Your involvement in the Bramble Berry community (as well as multiple others) is inspiring through your constant support, encouragement, and constructive criticism of one another, which is nothing like the cut-throat competitiveness other interests can bare. Although soaping isn’t a personal passion of mine, being exposed to it through the past few months has really opened my eyes to the vast possibilities available to people to pursue their passions- whether it be professionally or merely used as a fun hobby. I hope you all continue to pursue other passions in your lives as persistently and optimistically as you do your soaping. That being said, here’s a big CONGRATULATIONS going out to Teresa (was ShadesOfGrey), comment number 35/48, who is our winner for this round of the blog giveaways.
Teresa, look out for a nice package rounded up from the Portland Soapers Unite event including:
Jojoba Beads
Shimmer Mica
Non-Bleeding liquid colorant
New bulk Melt and Pour bases from Bramble Berry
Soap Rope & 3D mold
3 Cavity mold by Milky Way
3 of our latest fragrances from your very own Bramble Berry
Congratulations again Teresa, can’t wait to see what you create with your prize!
Alaska Treats My Mom Right
My Mother recently had a great experience with Alaska Airlines. My parents run a psoriasis skin care company. She went to the mid-year meeting of The American Osteopathic College of Dermatology (that’s her, on the right with Lorelei, the manager of Ontos) to promote their products.
On their way home, in San Jose, the plane broke down on the tarmac (whoops). Alaska promptly sent an engineer out to fix the prop that was broken. Unfortunately, the mechanic was called away to another issue before fixing the problem. After 2 hours on the runway, all the passengers were offloaded. Rather than forcing all the passengers to remain overnight in San Jose, Alaska Air went the extra mile and scheduled multiple shuttles to another airport, San Francisco, so that my Mom and others could make it on a flight back to Seattle that night. My Mom especially liked stewardess Deb (who makes her home base out of Portland) and thought the pilot was hilarious. Apparently, he was cracking jokes the entire time they were stuck on the runway. Kudos to Alaska for not only treating my Mom right but for making a great customer experience turnaround out of an otherwise dismal situation.
Somehow, I doubt that United would have done the same.
Remember my little United fiasco? They gave me $225 in credit to use on a future flight and an apology letter that thanked me for my “candid remarks regarding their staff.” Of course, this was after “Nathan” in Customer Care told me that, “they don’t compensate for bad behavior.”
After the way Alaska treated my Mom, I’m going to try to fly more with them.
Uh, Can I Put You on Hold Again?
Just a reminder – if you’d like to be entered to win all of the tools I used in the Springtime Cutout project, sign up for the FeedBlitz emails on the right hand side of this page. I’ll be doing a random drawing this week for a winner. The value is a full $75, including the colorants needed, the fabulous jelly roll baking pan, melt & pour and fragrances.
And, if you’ve written Bramble Berry in the last 24 hours and we haven’t written back, please write again. We just got a fabulous new phone system to handle or increased call volumes. The phone system went “live” yesterday around 4:30 p.m.
When we came to work this morning, the phones worked great! But, there were no emails from the entire night. Amber called and argued with Qwest for over two hours about our missing emails. They kept saying, ‘Well, maybe you didn’t get any emails last night” despite Amber’s assertions to the contrary. After two hours on the phone with them, and multiple hold times, the Qwest Technician came back and broke the sorry news that all of the emails were gone, never to be recovered.
So, if you wrote Bramble Berry last night or this morning, please write again. Or better yet, you can call and check out our cool new phone system. It’s 1-87-SOAP-STUFF.
Jojoba Display at Otion
Here is Otion‘s latest Springtime Inspiration display.
The theme is Jojoba Beads and spring. Jess, the director for the project, said this about her vision: “Since we’re a small store, we’re limited in floor space and therefore display space. I used the small mini molds so they wouldn’t crowd with the full bottles of jojoba beads. I especially liked suspending the jojoba beads in the suspending liquid soap base. It’s like a magic that they stay up there!”
One of the things that Jess was most surprised about was how cool in temperature the melt and pour soap needed to be. Since the jojoba beads are a wax, the hot melt and pour soap can easily turn them into liquid. Jess waited until the soap was getting ready to set up before she added the jojoba beads. In the top photo, the green leaf soap on the right, shows what happens when the jojoba beads melt. The soap turned a luscious green but has no in-tact jojoba beads for scrubbing. While it’s a nice color, you could achieve the same color with our Shamrock Green mica for less money.
HGTV Label Templates
HGTV has some very cute, temporary label templates that you can print out and handwrite your labels with. Click here to view them.
Emus, Teacup Dogs & Cupcakes
I loved the season-appropriate cupcakes made by SweetiePie in Napa Valley. I managed to resist this amazing temptation so can’t vouch for the quality but if they’re anything like the fabulous cakes we tasted, they wouldn’t have disapointed any St. Patrick Day revelers.
This is “Baby,” the teacup chiwawa that we shared our bed with for two days. Baby belonged to our gracious Napa Valley hosts. She did not fail to enchant with her penchant for appearing absolutely adorable for no reason.
On our way to the pre-wedding florist appointment, we ran across this unique Emu in the middle of Napa Valley ranch country. The Emu seemed enamored and curious with us, making a low throaty sound to apparently show his appreciation for our attention. I suspect that he also was trying to convince me to remain a vegetarian with no appetite for emu oil based soaps but I could be making that part up.
I have more photos to share from the final day of our Wine Country Wedding Tour. I’m playing with more mineral make up tonight so hopefully, I’ll come up with some fun colors and recipes to share.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Blocks made by IceHouse Crafts.Buy your own set for $9.99
Choco Oatmeal Soap Recipe
Learn the recipe for this soap over at the TeachSoap Forum here. Kudos to Barbara at Soaps & Potionsfor designing the recipe and graciously sharing it.