Taking Honey for Allergies

Honey an antimicrobial, so it's great for treating cuts and burns to prevent scarring. You can keep a jar in your medicine cabinet for years. It’s slightly acidic, so it never goes bad.

Did you know that taking 2-3 spoonfuls of local honey each day for several months prior to pollen season can help with seasonal allergies?  Local honey is produced closest to where you live and so it contains trace amounts of pollen specific to your area. So if you eat the sweet treat that is made by bees in your area, the honey will often act as an immune booster, reducing your allergy symptoms to the local flowering plants.

 

This may work for some people, and may not for others. But if you suffer from seasonal allergies, it's worth a try. If it doesn't help with your sniffling and sneezing, it still makes a delicious alternative to refined sugars AND you're getting vitamins B6, thiamin, niacin, riboflavin, pantothenic acid and minerals like calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, potassium, and zinc. Honey also contains antioxidants and vitamin C.

Mango Iced Tea Soap

I hate iced tea. I really do. That's like speaking blasphemy when living in the south where everyone has this syrupy stuff called "Sweet Tea" running through their veins. Call me wierd, but I just feel that tea should be hot and that's the only way I'll drink it.  However, since I seem to be the only person who feels this way, I've had to master making a great pitcher of iced tea. This is a recipe for iced tea that even I have to admit is pretty tasty (although I still do prefer it hot)

Mango Iced Tea

11/2 quarts Cold Water

6 high quality Black Tea bags

2 cups Mango Nectar

Sugar

1/4 cup fresh Mint Leaves

Thinly sliced Mango

Bring water to a boil.  Add tea bags a steep until tea is dark (about 5 minutes)  Remove bags.  

Add Mango Nectar.  Add sugar to taste.  Stir until sugar is dissolved. 

Place in pitcher and add mint leaves.  Pour over ice and garnish with Mango slices

Mango is definitely one of my all time favorite flavors.  This has inspired me to make a batch of cold process soap using the same concept of this tea recipe.

Mango Iced Tea Soap

Just like the Lime Margarita soap, I used a high quality clear glycerin soap base to make the "ice cubes" and scented them with Peppermint Essential Oil. The peachy/yellow swirls are "mango slices" and I added dried peppermint leaves to garnish.

Goats Milk Soap

 I was  in the store looking for Coconut Milk the other day. After checking all the isles (twice) I still couldn't find any. What I found though was a can of Goats Milk.  I know I kind of live in the country now, but sorry I don't have any goats running around so the canned milk will have to do for now.

Milk tends to heat up and even scorch & curdle when it meets with lye. I found that if  I put it in the freezer and allowd it to turn slushy before adding this can be prevented. I mixed about 1/3 of the liquid portion of my recipe using water. After that cooled (I like to mix at cooler temperatures) I mixed the lye/water with the oils to a medium trace THEN I added the milk. It gets hot and starts to set up pretty quickly so you have to move fast.

This is Toasted Almond & Honey scented. As you can see, it rose up and split like a loaf of bread. I don't know if it helped but I put a fan on it to help cool it down. Eventually the top flattend back out and the split closed back most of the way.  I filled the split with more ground almonds. On the sliced soap you really can't tell.

Note to Self: Do NOT Add Lye to Hot Liquids...

I did something pretty careless the other day. I decided that I wanted to make  Black Tea scented soap using actual Earl Grey Black Tea for the liquid portion of the recipe.  That wasn't the careless part. First I boiled the water and steeped the tea bag until it turned nice and dark.  That's still not the careless part.  I decided that there really was no need to wait for the tea to cool before adding the lye since it's going to heat back up anyway, right? WRONG!! I measured out the correct amount of lye and began to slowly pour it into the tea. Big, Big, BIG mistake. The water started to literally boil in the pitcher and then began to rise up like it was going to boil over!

After shrieking for assistance, my hubby came to the rescue and helped me  quickly dumped all of the ice from the freezer bin into the sink.  We filled  that with water and placed the boiling pitcher in to cool down.  Afterwards I was able to safely add the remaining lye.  To be honest, I'm being very generous with myself by calling my actions careless. It was actually quite stupid.  I should have known better.  I'm so impatient and just wasn't thinking. What can I can I say? I won't make that mistake again though. Fortunately the soap turned out fine. At first it was this really nasty shade of brown. I added a black swirl anyway and by the next morning it had lightened to almost white and now has a pretty cool contrast.

Margarita Treasury on Etsy

This morning I had a message in my inbox to check out this Treasury on Etsy.

Isn't it cool?!  Of course I'm also very proud to have my Lime Margarita soap featured. This is the second Treasury to feature this particular soap.  It was suppose to be a summer soap and now it's completely sold out (YAY!!).  I had no idea that it would do so well.  Now I'm going to have to make some more. 

It's not even summer yet!, lol.

This soap was also featured on this blog: "I Love Etsy".  The author, Nicole, has dedicated her blog to featuring Etsy sellers. If you would like to have your shop featured or would like to nominate a fellow Etsian to be featured, you can submit the shop URL to be reviewed.

Uncut Pearberry Soap

I've been busy. Right now I have about 12 batches of soap sitting on the racks curing.  I'm slowly working my way through photographing them all.

Pearberry

I like the colors in this one. There's a little split in the top. What's that from I wonder? Overheating?  I'm trying to remember if I insulated. I don't think I did. It didn't matter once I sliced the soap though. You can't even see it.

Kiwi Strawberry

Mmm, I really just want to take a bite out of this one. I go and pull it off the rack just to stand there and sniff it.  BTW, those are poppy seeds in the top.

Lime Margarita

This is still cold process soap, I just added some clear glycerin "ice cubes" to the top of it and "salted the rim" with Dead Sea Salts. Amazingly, it really does smell just like the drink!

YAY!! I'm featured in a Treasury

I woke up this morning and logged on to Etsy hoping to see some overnight sales (no such luck) but I found something almost as good. I had a nice little message in my convo box regarding my "ENERGY" soap:

Beautiful soap! It's in a treasury. You can view it at:

Listing: http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=110651

 

I recognize ALL of these soaps and their makers. I've spent time browsing their shops and visiting their blogs and it is really cool that someone thought that my soap was good enough to be included with a group of such talented soapmakers. Thank you ciennamoss!!