I was supposed to go to bed much earlier this evening, but couldn’t resist skimming through my emails.

Tonight I’m really blown away at the thoughtfulness of so many of my customers.

The ones who know of friends and family members who were suffering from eczema or acne or a rash, and bought our soap to give to them to see if it could help improve their skin condition.

The ones who tried the soap, found them beneficial, and spread the word to their colleagues etc.

Thank you all for reaching out to your own circles of influence to offer them possible relief for their skin. You put your kindness into action and so many people are now the better for it.

Give yourselves a pat on the back!

I’d like you to know that for all new batches of Skin Treats moiturizing oils, I will be using more costly dropper bulbs made of natural instead of synthetic rubber. I was told that they are much better at resisting chemical reactions when exposed to essential oils compared to synthetic rubber, even at 100% concentration.

And in case your wondering—no, I’m not about to raise prices on account of my packaging cost going up.

On a side note, I’m a bit amused that while Malaysia is a rubber producer, these bulbs were made in Taiwan. Maybe I’m not looking in the right places, but I would have liked to have found a local manufacturer and supplier of these types of high quality bottles and droppers.

Here’s the schematic for Saturday’s booth layout:

A couple of things for you to take note of for this Saturday’s Markets event:

1. If you have any recyclable items at home you wish to discard (eg. aluminum cans, old newspapers, etc) please bring them to the Markets as the organisers will be having their first Recycle Drive in front of Palm Square (next to OCBC Bank) as well.
2. The Market’s registration counter for the public will be located opposite Duck King and Guo Ren Guan. Remember to get your goodie bags here okay?

And here’s the full list of vendors there on the day, and their booth numbers—satisfy your curiosity and really take the time to explore the market! I’m sure it’ll make for a terrific afternoon outing for the family.

See you on Saturday!

OUTDOORS :
1 House of Allure
2 HULLABALLU
3 Thr5t
4 OMG It’s Us
5 Peep Boutique
6 Twizs
7 Vintage Biri-Biri
8 Xisters
9 Oh&h
10 ZIKKOS
11 Kiiss
12 FURUI Clothing
13 EMO.EGO
14 EmiKaz
15 The Bubble Lab
16 CHACHIMEWE
17 Luscious Delight
18 Arts Cream Gallery
19 Myglasscubicle
20 Owhsome
21 Guiirin
22 Sunny Sideup Closet
23 Un-Masqued
24 The Petticoats Lingerie
25 Like iGloo
26 Trendy Confessions
27 Winkstick
28 I Heart Badges
29 Love and Craft
30 Blurry Boutique
31 Notbook-notbuk
32 Calaqisya/Cala Man
33 Swit Martini
34 Helmelia Hisham
35 Karen Wong
36 MOOKS/Ripcurl
37 Miracle Watts
38 .::[ALLkinds OF Everything]::.
39 Mimpi Murni
40 Phat Culture
41 KALLA
42 Sewfabby
43 JUS Black Box
44 Pretty Little Freaks
45 ARARED
46 Chasseur de Rêve
47 Sharonsen
48 Nick Chong
49 Luvpercent
50 Soak Republic
51 PitterPatterPlace
52 Emcee Couture
53 Project Swissify
54 6Tea’s Boutique
55 6Tea’s Boutique
56 HisPebbles
57 Keyna Boutique
58 The Hanging Thread
59 Lana Laang
60 My DIY Little World
61 Roadblock Fashion
62 Jainabee
63 Kee’s Creampuff
64 House of Dollface
65 Delirious Accessories
66 Eggbash Cothing
67 DisturbiaDistro
68 Baked Cookies
69 Kindersoaps
70 PurpleDotz
71 Lush Serendipity
72 NaisWear
73 Tanks for 5
74 MICCAZ
75 Daphne Clothing
76 Pastiche
77 Mibead
78 Ninu Handmade
79 All In Online Store
80 Sugar Dressing
81 Jewels Paradis
82 CuppaTea

INDOORS :
1 WWF Malaysia
2 Lovely Candy Shop
3 Novels for Nepal
4 BreadnButter
5 Adrien Ritzal
6 Whenever Store
7 Jesslyn Tandela
8 Glossy Additction
9 Bisou Rose
10 Makeover Now
11 Maz Mynrose
12 Nakalicious
13 Dusky Wings
14 Sara Ong
15 Kiss & Tell

I don’t think it’s just the effect of essential oils though. All I have on the curing rack at the moment are Friday’s batch of Goats Milk and Patchouli, and some bars of Songbird. This feeling of well-being is ALWAYS present when I’m here.

I look at my hard floor work area in the back. It is lined with vinyl squares. It finally dawned on me that THIS was the scent that gets me going each and every time I step into this place.

Why?

I spent my university years studying at the University of Warwick in Coventry, UK. The university housing, as well as the terrace house that I eventually shared with my flatmates used a lot of vinyl flooring, especially in the kitchen areas. And those years were chock-full of heady experiences, emotional highs and lows, a sense of invulnerability, curiosity and an inexhaustible supply of optimism.

It was a happy time, and the vinyl flooring here evokes those memories and emotions.

And that is what is being channeled into all the stuff that I make here, for you. How cool is that?

Have a terrific week ahead everyone!

I hope you’ll find the interview informative. Comments are most welcome!

Apart from producing endless streams of photographs of our offspring, I have also used it to film some short videos of me at work. Here’s the most recent one:

I hope you found it interesting! It’s actually kinda nice to be able to show you around my office and give you a glimpse of what’s involved in making soap around here. In any case I’ll have to work harder to write more on this blog. :”> In the meantime, you can always hop over to our Facebook page where I am much more active with updates at the moment.

Additional tip: enlist the help of your kids to clean your home this way.

Please bear with me as I restock my soap. I already have Dark Chocolate, Clarity and Songbird on the curing racks, but realistically speaking I’ll only be ready to sell stuff at the end of January 2012.

If however, you’re after Skin Treats, Gentle Body Polishes or the Double Duty Balms, you’re in luck! As always, shipping is on the house if you’re in West Malaysia.

Here are some photos that I managed to take while in the process of making Christmas Warmth this year.

 After adding the lye water to the oils and working the mixture with the stick blender briefly, I separated a portion of the raw soap so that I could have two different colours for the design. Here I added a little bit of titanium dioxide (I made sure that they were not micronized, or also called “nanoparticles” over which there has been much concern on its ill effects on health) to get the mixture to be more white. My recipes tend to yield slightly yellow soap because of the natural golden hues of the oils I use for superfatting - jojoba and macadamia nut, for example. This ‘batter’ that you see in the mixing bowl is what the soap looks like after I’ve left it to stand for about 10 minutes after using the stick blender to mix the raw soap to a light-medium trace. It already contains the superfatting oils and essential oils.

For the bottom layer I used french red clay for its colour, and I left it to set for about 15 minutes before I added the white layer on top. The remaining red portion of the soap was glopped onto the white in patches (because I didn’t want to waste any soap, as far as I can possibly manage). Then I used my rubber spatula to tease the surface of the soap into these peaks that you see here. I’ve seen much prettier textures from other soapmakers (a prime example is Inner Earth Soaps), so I’ve got a loooong way to go in learning how to master this! Still, I was quite happy with the results. This photo was taken about 30 minutes after the soap was poured/coaxed into the mold.

 Here’s one of the logs after being pushed through the first slicer. In the bottom left hand corner of the photo, you might notice what looks like condensation on the surface of the soap. I usually do a pH check on the exposed (outer) and cut (inner) surfaces of all my soap, and the condensation registered a very definite pH level of 14 (highest possible). The inner surface had a pH reading of 10, which is the normal pH level for most cold process soap. A week later I checked the readings for the same slice of soap again and this time both the exposed and cut surfaces had pH levels of somewhere between 9 and 10. All my soap batches demonstrate this behaviour but I really don’t know why there should be an initial difference in pH levels between the exposed and cut surfaces. Any ideas?

After being sliced into individual bars, the soap went onto the curing rack. I loved walking into my office even more for those few weeks because the lingering scents from the soap was just delicious. Cinnamon, clove leaf, ginger, nutmeg, peppermint and sweet orange, ahh… I found myself taking sniffs at the trays every so often while taking my mini-breaks from work, and often walked away feeling a tad more sprightly.

I’m looking to take more photos of Christmas Warmth as individual bars soon. If you can’t wait to see them though, they’re now available as part of sampler packs or in bars.