I enjoy reading blogs … I love to peer into other people’s lives and to live vicariously through them, to be encouraged by them, to be entranced by them, to have my heart lightened by them … these are just a couple that I enjoy.  I hope you do too.

Kathy Neudorf – photographer with wonderous vision

I can has cheezburger – cat funnies

Patti Flynn – the daily life of eco friendly soapmaker

Gardengurl – the musings of a extraordinary gardener

So I soaped the other week … its been a little while.  Now that I don’t sell my wares it takes time for us to go through my batches.  I still make sort of ish large batches so I can split them down at trace to make baby batches in different scents.  I like variety

From bottom to top, they are:

•  vanilla, sweet orange and cinnamon
• lime and cucumber
• pearberry and stargazer lily
• african geranium and patchouli
• lavender and lemon myrtle

Here they are in their little moulds:

So one of the things I very much like to do, is make soap. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to take the raw ingredients and turn it into something that is useful and good to use.

I first took a class in soapmaking back in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1995 … so that was my first introduction to it. And I was hooked.

Initially I took the class because I was taking all sorts of adult ed classes to meet people as I was new to the area. But over the years my body has developed intolerances to a lot of different things, including chemicals, and so handmade soap went from being something that was enjoyable to something that was necessary.

I’ll never go back to commercial soap now.

I will be sharing recipes and instructions for various bits and bobs in this blog so stay tuned for that too.