Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
I just stumbled on Steve Pavlina’s blog, Personal Development for Smart People.
His post today is why humans are not as intelligent as we think we are. Here’s a teaser:
Once a pattern of thought and behavior has become conditioned, it can be very difficult to reprogram. This causes bad habits, addictions, and Republicans.
These Macaroon scented candles are being sold at Rose & Radish, the arbirter of all that is cool and good in e-commerce. They are six baby little candles for $15. Given the amount of work that goes into these candles, that’s a very affordable price for these adorably cute pastel candles.
Amber, who does all the newsletters for Bramble Berry, saw my blog post from yesterday.
She initially chortled with a bit of laughter but in a misguided attempt to spare my feelings, tried to pretend that she wasn’t laughing at my miserable bath bomb attempts. The conversation went something like this:
Amber: “Wow, I had forgotten um, how many attempts you did at the bath frosting.”
Anne-Marie: (indignant) “Well, it just goes to show you that greatness isn’t achieved in one try. After all…” Amber doubles over with laughter. Anne-Marie is forced to quit her soap boxing.
Amber: (laughing) “Seven tries! Pathetic. And those horrible green sprinkles. What were you thinking?!?”
Anne-Marie: (indignant) “See! This is what you need to do to reach success! Test, test, test! It took me almost four hours with all the recipe compounding, making the batches, washing the dishes …”
Anne-Marie breaks off again as Amber shrieks with laughter, “And you don’t even have a dishwasher!”
She’s right. No dishwasher and many dirty bowls to clean from the Bathcake Debacle. Ah, the glamorous life of an entrepreneur, reduced to washing dishes by hand!
Bella Lucce, one of my favorite scrub vendors (try their Chianti & Grapeseed Crush) is offering their sampler box for free! Check out the details here.
I just bought the sampler box and a full size of the Chianti Scrub two weeks ago. I am jealous of anyone that takes advantage of the offer and saves the $20. It’s a generous deal at the normal price and an outta-sight bargain at the shipping-only price.
My goal with the frostings was to make something that would melt easily and cleanly away in the tub. I was trying to stay away from the Royal Icing frosting that most Gingerbread houses use as glue. Sometimes reinventing the proverbial wheel is a waste of time, energy and money. This is one of those times.
Frosting One used Meringue Powder, Water, and Arrowroot Powder. It looked too watery. I tossed in some SLS and La Bomb colorant to make Frosting Two.
Frosting Three used 3 times the Meringue Powder of Frosting One, Water and way more Arrowroot Powder. It looked like it would work! There was much happiness in our house for about 30 minutes. After 30 minutes, it was clear that the frosting was not holding. In fact, the “frosting” started dripping down the sides of the molds.
Frosting Four had only Meringue Powder, Water and a dibby dab of Arrowroot. Notice how foamy and airy it is in the photo below.
Figuring I could only improve, I tossed in some SLS to the meringue powder/water mixture.
Notice the strange holes beginning to form in the SLS based meringue frosting. Also, on the right hand of the photo, you’ll see the first of the frosting trials cracking, completely flat and failed.
The photo below is the last batch of the morning frosting attempts. Notice that only the meringue frosting has stayed tall and proud though soft, gooey and completely unsuitable for transport. The SLS frostings completely failed. The arrowroot frostings also failed.
At this point, I was demoralized. I took a break for a few hours to regroup and get my creative energies back. I joined my happy family (that’s my brother and his fiance Cheriss in the photo below) at a
game of Settlers of Catan to try to ge
t my creative mojo back. It worked! My next blog post on the subject will show three more frostings, one of which ends up successful!
Despite my indignant post on Dell‘s customer service (or lack thereof), I am totally enamored with their (coming soon!) Santa Rosa line of laptops. I suspect that the color will have zero impact on my productivity but think how much easier it would to find the laptop, under my pile of papers on my desk?
I made 7 batches of bath cupcakes this week. Count ’em. Seven. It was a long and creative weekend. The photo of the bathcake above is not mine. Mine turned out non-photograph friendly (translation: very pathetic cupcakes).
My batches were:
normal (citric acid/baking soda/witch hazel)
Olive Butter (citric acid/baking soda/olive butter)
SLS (citric acid/baking soda/SLS/witch Hazel)
Kaolin (citric acid/baking soda/Kaolin/Witch Hazel)
SLS/Olive (citric acid/baking soda/SLS/Olive Butter/Witch Hazel)
Olive/Kaolin (citric acid/baking soda/Olive Butter/Kaolin/Witch Hazel)
Potluck! (citric acid/baking soda/SLS/Olive Butter/Witch Hazel/Kaolin)
My recipe was pretty basic. 1/3 Citric Acid, 2/3 Baking Soda with a few extra pinches of whatever additive I was testing thrown into the mix. For more detailed instructions on making bath fizzies, visit Teach Soap.
I attempted to frost all of these with various bath frostings to make a deluxe sassy bath product that melted cleanly away in the tub.
Seven attempts later, I am properly humbled.
The set up (notice the mouth-watering, amazing Salty Carmel Ice Cream fragrance) for making bath fizzy bath cakes.
This is the perfect consistency for making bath fizzies. You want the dry ingredients to stick together just enough to clump but not so much that they are a hard little ball.
SLS is used for foam and bubbles. In its raw state, it is often a soft chunk. You’ll want to break this clump up before adding it to your mixture. I use Sodium Lauryl Sulfate up to about 25% but you could use more or less depending on how much foam you want. Alternately, if you just want fizz, stick with straight citric acid/baking soda and skip the SLS.
First, I lined the cupcake “tin” with a cupcake holders. The cupcake holder helps keep the food grade “tin” reusable again. If there was no liner, the silicone would forever more smell of Salty Carmel Ice Cream fragrance.
The colors I used to achieve the green, orange, yellow and pink were the La Bomb line. The La Bomb Labcolor Colorants are made in a base of food grade glycerin. Because they are in glycerin, the colorant does not start the fizzing reaction in your bath bomb that a water-based colorant would set off.
Then, when the mixture is in that nice pie dough consistency, push it firmly into the cupcake molds. The tighter you pack, the heavier your bomb will be and the longer the fizz will last in the tub. If you pack the bath fizzy loosely, you will get a very short, explosive fizz in the tub. The loosely packed bath fizzy provides a more “Oooh Ahhh” factor than the densely packed fizzy. But, the densely packed fizzy lasts longer. So, how tight you pack the fizzies is a personal preference.
Tomorrow, I’ll blog (with photos) about the various frosting recipes I used and the (6 dismal, 1 partial success) outcomes.
Heather Bailey designed some very appealing fabrics that make me want to actually sew. I can knit and crochet but sewing has thus far eluded me. But, these little goodies would make such perfect aprons that I might just get inspired.
Norman, my COO in the photo below, says that the Soap Queen blog is getting too business based and that I should start blogging more on crafts. I promise, next week will be more crafty. I’m making some cool soap projects this weekend (frosted salty caramel ice cream bath cupcakes) and painting my stairwell pistaschio green and brown. So, next week will be all about both projects, I promise. By the way, that’s me and Norm, at the cockpit of a non-functional Fed Ex plane. He still is trying to look like he’s in charge (notice the hands on the steering wheel).
But in the meantime, ack! Did you see that our own Seattle brand, Jone’s Soda is being dumped by Starbucks, another local fave? The official word is that Jone’s Soda is being pulled because Starbucks needs to make more room for refrigerated food on their shelves.
But, when you dig a little deeper, Starbucks is not dumping Izze, the Jone’s competitor. Why not? After all, getting rid of a few Jones Soda bottles doesn’t make room for much more than one more lunch item But, dig down a little deeper and find that surprise, Izze is owned by Pepsi. And guess who sits on Starbucks board? A former Pepsi exec sits on Starbucks board. Additionally, Starbucks has a distribution agreement with Pepsi to distribute the pre-bottled Frappuccino bottles that you see in stores.
So, what does this mean to Jones Soda? With their much ballyhooed deal with Seahawks, they were riding the high buzz wave. And, Starbucks only makes up 1 to 3% of their total sales. But, Starbucks was a buzz builder, with lots of foot traffic. And what’s the instricic value of associating with a successful, do-gooder brand like Starbucks?
The analysts are wobbling a little with one saying that the major sell off after the Starbuck’s news makes Jone’s a good buy. At a 83 Price to Earnings Ratio, it’s an expensive buy. I’m still interested though. The management team appears strong, the company has been in business for 20 years and they have strong street cred, which has proven instrumental to bringing the tipping point of favorable consumer habits.
I tried out the myjones.com site and personalized Cream Soda and Blue Bubblegum soda. Those goodies should be coming next week. I’m excited to see how the photo and printing quality is.
Forbes.com did a great 3 part series on the CEO of Jones Soda. The term “series” is probably giving it more credit than it’s due. Each part is about 3 minutes, but it’s still a very informative 3 minutes. Check it out here.
I’m rooting for the local guy to make it past this setback. After all, who else has Turkey & Gravy soda flavor?
I blogged about Bag, Borrow or Steal back in February. Their business model confuses me. I personally wouldn’t use their service because it doesn’t make financial sense to me.
At the time, I said:
I’m not totally counting them out though. $8.25 million is a lot of capital to sit it out and wait for the market to come to you.
It turns out that maybe $8.25 million doesn’t go that far in terms of sitting and waiting. Bag, Borrow or Steal has just gotten their third round of venture capital financing, this time for $15 million, partially financed by Kuwait Holding Co.
Now I’m really scratching my head about the business model’s viability. If they’ve truly gone through $8.25 million in about a year, their burn rate is fast, furious and does not appear sustainable.
Sweet Theamakes some yummy looking chocolate specialty cakes. And they’re local from Vancouver, BC.
My love of cupcakes borders on obsession. I like to knit too. Big thanks to Tami of Tami’s Soapworks for emailing me this great project that encompasses both of my hobbies!
Vegan Yum Yumeven has instructions for making these creative little morsels. The good news is that they sound easy to make. When you make them, they are sure to be the hit of the party.
Kudos to the local PR firm I wrote about earlier this week. They happened upon my blog and read my rant about the $150-per-photo-charge. Rather than cringe in their offices or whine about my lack of understanding, they picked up the phone and called me.
That takes guts.
The PR Firm told me their side of the story. They’re not selling the photographs. They contracted out to a third party photographer for the shoot. The photographer is selling the photographs for $150 per photo. He believes his work is worth $150 per photo.
I still disagree with the price tag but that’s okay. I’m still left with a better feeling about the situation because the PR Firm called me to chat about it.
The outcome didn’t change. The photos are still $150 per photo and I’m still not buying any. But, I feel good that the local guys cared enough to call.
Deb at Soapylove has done it again with amazing new designs, creative color pairing and artistry beyond the average. Buy her soap on Etsy or at fine shops around the world.