Handmade Soap: April Showers

April Showers soap is scented with a fragrance oil from Simbi Fine Fragrances called Bright Sunshine. It has a lovely, bright, citrusy scent that is cheerful and sweet and a little bit exotic. This bar weighs at least 5.5 oz (156g). All soap is priced per bar (though several bars may be shown in the product photos).

To take care of your bar of cold-processed soap, try to avoid letting it sit in a soap dish filled with water. For the longest lasting bar, it's best to let it completely dry out between uses.

Ingredients: Olive oil, distilled water, coconut oil, shea butter, sodium hydroxide (lye), castor oil, fragrance, sodium lactate, titanium dioxide, mica. 

Our soap story:

When I started dyeing yarn a few years ago, my hands started to get really dry from all of the washing and rinsing of yarn I needed to do. I got interested in making my own lotion bars with my own customized essential oil blends.

That led to Andy and I experimenting with making our own cold-process soap. Making cold-process soap is ancient magic; it involves mixing fats and oils with sodium hydroxide  — lye — and then mixing rapidly but patiently as the solution saponifies, and turns into a glorious loaf of soap.

We use skin-loving ingredients in our soaps, including high-quality oils and butters, as well as natural colorants made from botanical materials and clays, micas and fragrances (both essential oils and synthetic fragrances) from only reputable suppliers, and additives that promote bar hardness (sodium lactate).

Our soaps are large! We're still figuring out what the perfect-sized bars are for us, but currently our bars range from 5 oz. to 7 oz. (though we list the bigger ones conservatively at 5.5 oz.) We cut each bar by hand and wrap and label each one, making them the perfect little gifts for giving.