Today we sliced the castille soaps (and tried to work out why the olive oil one is stripy?) and started looking at Christmas recipes. I'm not feeling Christmasy in June.

I need to work on the tops of my soaps being a bit more smooth. Castilleish and pure castille soap, fingers crossed these are the final recipes and I can take them to market soon!

Last night it looked like ointment, I was a little concerned it might not be going to work but I think it's OK this morning. Although I would have liked it to have gelled right the way out to the corners so it's all the same colour.

I have no olive oil right now as the bank has decided our card doesn't need to work, so today I experimented with moisturiser!

Normal service will resume soon. Probably.

Last few tweaks to the coffee recipe before being sent off for approval! I’m having another experiment with things I can put on top of soap, this is instant coffee sprinkled across the top, and I’ve made some soap coffee beans to go on top once they’re cured!

Basically I’m nowhere near ready.

6 weeks from now I will (hopefully) have a sell-able product!

It's less uranium green than I thought it was going to come out. Very very soft though, we'll just have to wait til the 2nd Feb to see if it's a successful experiment.

I have spent the last two hours editing my recipe sheets because everything has to be in grams, I’m not allowed to have teaspoons. I might scream. I’m so close but there is so. much. paperwork.

How the giant hole came to be, I have literally no idea, there’s no other bubbles anywhere, just that one!

The somewhat disasterous pumpkin soap that attempted to volcano on me a few weeks back actually functions as soap! It's not to prettiest thing in the world, and it seems to be leaking oil still but it works and the following batch is looking much better. Boyfriend said the previous incarnation where everything was mixed together in one colour was a really nice soap so I think this one is finished! Just need to wait for the next batch to cure and then it's just paperwork and a trip to the council for a license and I'll have my first saleable product! I'm hoping by the end of November my castilleish one will be ready too and I think my coffee one is almost there as well, just making a few tweaks to the form in which I put the coffee in and whether I use or omit the coffee butter. All in all, I'm pretty excited and now off to wash the excess oil and soap off myself and edit some paperwork!

Current soap cupboard photo! From the left; castilleish with spirulina I'm just taking out, the coffee soap I made the other day, batch 2 of the two-tone pumpkin spice, batch 1 next to it, and finally castilleish in sections of plain, powdered nettles, and nettles & spirulina.

Today we're coffee soap! This time I soaked the ground coffee so it's more coffee coloured. Also added coffee butter and some powdered caffeine to this batch so hoping for a lovely exfoliating, soothing and tingly bar :3

Second attempt at pumpkin spice, much better result! Still some cracking on top so I think it might need freezing for an hour or so but it still came out so much better!

Following last week's disaster, here is pumpkin spice soap mkII, take 2. Now with water discount and significantly cooled lye water.