Soap Balls

Soap balls

Do you make cold process or hot process soap?  Have you ever tried making soap balls instead of bars of soap?  What do you do with your little bits of soap leftover from making your batch of homemade soap?

These soap balls are small ones that fit nicely in your hands and are about the size of guest soaps.  If you make cold process or hot process soap yourself, this is a nice way to use the last bits left in your soap pot.  You must use the same safety precautions that you use with making soap bars, including, but not limited to goggles, gloves, and covering for your clothes.  After you have put your soap bars into your soap mold, you are sometimes left with a small amount of raw soap in your soap pot.  Just carefully scoop out the raw soap and hand roll the balls in your gloved hands.  Then cure them for the amount of time that you cure your soap bars.  I made these for my Etsy shop and cured them for the same amount of weeks that I cured the bars before offering them for sale.  Due to the small size of the soap balls, I offered them in sets.   I think I will try to make more next time I do another batch of soap.  At some point, I may do a whole batch as soap balls instead of as bars, because they are just so cute. 

 Have you ever used soap balls for bathing or washing your hands?  Do you prefer them to soap bars? 

Inspiring colors

Over a short period of time, I kept coming across the color combination orange, brown, and white.  First, a friend was wearing a great dress with those colors.  Then I received as a gift a box of candy brought back from Japan.  Finally, I was at a friend's house and that interior designer friend had created a pillow with fabric with colors similar to the ones that I kept seeing.

The last two photos show the washcloths or dishcloths that I crocheted out of 100% cotton yarn that combine white, brown, cream, and a deep salmon. While not exactly the colors from the items that inspired me and with the colors being more muted, the color combination that I kept seeing drew me to this yarn when I was selecting one to buy for making these handmade cloths.  The color combination will be appearing in other creations that I make such as jewelry, hats, and soap.  In the last picture is one of my soaps that I make that picked up the brown in the washcloth. 

So it will not always be the case that what inspires you gets literally translated into your creations, but it may spark an interest in a new color, texture, material, technique, or something else related to your creative process.  Have you ever found similar inspiration from seeing similar color combinations over and over and thinking that you have to do something in those colors? 

As part of creating to share with others by selling to them, we need places for others to view, enjoy, and (hopefullly) buy what we have created.  Some of us show in our own stores.  I do have a tiny B and M (brick and mortar) store, but with a full time job I am only able to be open on Saturday.  Do you have a B and M store?  Have you ever wanted to have one or did you have one in the past?  What was your experience like, especially if you did not have one full-time?  Please share your helpful hints here or anything else would like about this topic.  This is the first in a series of posts about where we as creative people display and sell what we create. The photo is one taken in my store (JDNatlady's Creations, LLC) when I first opened.