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Makeovers (2: Wake Up!)

Wake Up! was the first soap that I ever made using a blend of essential oils, way back in early 2010. Up until then I’d used fragrance oils in soap but, despite having an interest in aromatherapy, I’d never tried blending oils myself. Oh how things change! It’s a simple but refreshing mix of Peppermint and Rosemary essential oils – perfect for waking up the senses in the morning shower. While the fragrance blend has stayed the same since that time, it was a couple of years before it got its true name. Up until some point in 2012 it went by the predictable, if uninspiring, ‘Peppermint & Rosemary’.

This is the very first :

1st Incarnation of Peppermint & Rosemary - now known as Wake Up!
1st incarnation of Peppermint & Rosemary – now known as Wake Up!

I quite like the sprig of mint used there as a prop, but the least said about the background the better!

It wasn’t long after the above photo above was taken that I acquired my very first loaf mould (from The Moulds Shop – highly recommended btw), and my soaps became a more uniform shape and size.  For a while I was obsessed with the Tiger Swirl, and Wake Up! looked like this:

2nd incarnation of Wake Up!
2nd incarnation of Wake Up!

Interestingly, it’s only now that I realise that I hadn’t started bevelling the edges at this point – something I always do these days.

These days Wake Up! looks something like this:

Wake Up! from The Soap Mine
3rd incarnation of Wake Up!

Currently all my essential oil soaps are made using the Drop Swirl technique, as I wrote about here. Sometimes they have textured tops, sometimes mica swirls, but they are always (for now!) Drop Swirls.

I’m really enjoying looking back over old designs, so please bear with me in the short term while I indulge myself with these makeover posts – I will try to intersperse them with some other stuff as well 😀  Thanks for popping by!

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I’m back…

…definitely, absolutely, for good this time!!

I’m so sorry – the last two months have had so much going that I’ve struggled to find time to get on here to post, and then, over the last couple of days, I realised that I’ve  been putting it off as I didn’t know where to start. This is just a quick post to ‘break the spell’ as it were – I have loads more posts in the pipeline.

We finally moved! We’ve been in our new home for about 6 weeks now. It’s a ‘doer-upper’ and there really is so much to do, but it’s ours, it’s warm, it’s dry and we love it! Our eldest (4y) started full time school last month and has settled really well, and our youngest (18m) becomes more of a little monkey every day. Literally – she will climb, or attempt to climb, ANYTHING!

The soap business continues to grow, though with the little one demanding so much of my time I’m wary of committing to too much too soon.  My soap is now in 5 retail outlets, and I’m in discussions about another project. I did my first custom order of party favours recently, and the last craft fair I did was really successful. I’ve also put together my first ‘multi-item’ gift sets, experimented with piping, and invested in a new piece of hardware for the business – an amazing soap cutter imported from the US.  All good stuff and I’ll fill in the gaps in future posts.

And finally (because I refuse to post a photo-free update), I created my first exfoliating soap:

Super Scrubby Peppermint Soap
            Super Scrubby Peppermint

Oatmeal and ground apricot stones make this soap wonderfully scrubby – great for gardeners’ or mechanics’ hands. It’s fragranced with nothing more than pure peppermint essential oil, and simply coloured with a green mica. They’re not the prettiest bars I’ve ever created, but oh they do feel good on tired feet 😀