New website awesomeness!

First, some pretties. :-)

Why, yes, I do remember my blog! Don't you hate it when you find a blog that you really enjoy and then *poof* the blogger disappears? ME TOO! And I totally did that to you guys - I am so very sorry! What have I been doing with the oodles of time I've had off from not blogging? Well, we had a fantabulous holiday sales season, which kept me constantly on my toes with packing, shipping, thank you card writing, and holding a couple of sales to boot! I've also managed to tweak my website during our off time (Dec. 15th-Jan 1st). I'm by no means an expert at web development, but I've managed to impress even myself with how it all turned out!

When ordering reopens on 1/1/14, I will be introducing e-Gift Certificates! These are completely electronic and you're able to email the recipient (or even yourself!) with the code that will enable them to receive store credit on their next purchase! These will not expire and they will not reduce in value if you wait to use them. So long as OHTC is in business, they're valid! Of course, being an e-certificate, they are only useful on the website and not in any retail locations.

Lavender Herbs as a scrub and body whip!

I've also managed to introduce two new products in the past month: emulsified sugar scrubs and whipped shea butter! Expect some more in-depth posting about these in the future.

For now, I'm just glad to be back at the blogging! Can you tell it's going to be a New Year's resolution for me and my company? Let's hope I keep at it!

Thank you for being awesome fans and I hope the New Year is amazing for all of us!

A lovely Saturday at the 2013 Hunters Moon Festival!

This was my first craft fair event – ever – for OHTC, and it was a great experience for us! We greatly enjoyed meeting and visiting with so many locals and friends. Here are some booth photos!

We kept it simple, but festive for the season!

Soaps all lined up!

Candles were there! German Roasted Nuts was a clear winner - we sold out!

I got this stand just earlier this week - 

it worked perfectly to hold tarts high where they were easy to see!

Everyone uses soap of some sort - what's so great about ours?
Here's a few reasons why OHTC soap is different!

The best five year old sales girl ever! 

I had some amazing helpers – my husband, my eldest daughter (who asked everyone to smell the soap!) and even my younger daughter waved hi to folks as they passed by.

We really enjoyed Hunters Moon – an annual fall festival over in Land Between the Lakes here in Kentucky – and especially appreciated the volunteers and locals who worked hard to make it happen. Events like these can’t happen without them! The weather was great, the people who passed by were pleasant, and the girls generally had a good time.

Being a relative unknown in the area, since I've been 100% online until now, I was happy with how well the festival went for us. The learning experience was invaluable, and we made enough to begin preparations for a physical location in one of Murray's flea markets!

A note about Harvest Homecoming in New Albany, IN: This year, I did apply to have a booth setup at Harvest Homecoming. I am from that area, and still have many friends and family there (NAHS class of ’99 represent!). I was gently cautioned by one of the organizers that competition would be stiff this year with about 5 other soap and candle makers there. We crafters always appreciate being warned about this possibility as it helps us to better plan where to put our efforts and resources in the future. We are definitely considering the possibility of having a booth there next year, especially if our local schools (where our eldest daughter will be a Kindergartener in 2014) are on Fall Break the same week. I appreciate so much hearing how missed we were at this year’s festival, and it is definitely a major consideration for next year’s event! Thank you for thinking of us!

Gluten Free Breadmaker Recipe

I've done this many times and varied it in many ways. Here's how it basically goes:

In a breadmaker, you'll have to go with the instructions that comes with your maker, but mine calls for wet ingredients before dry ones and to make a little hollow in the dry ingredients to put the yeast into (not a big deal if you're baking right away, but might be if you're putting it on a delay). I like to whisk together the wet ingredients, though you probably don't have to. The instructions call for baking on the "sweet dough" cycle if you have one.
  

3 eggs

1 TBSP apple cider vinegar

1/4 cup olive oil

1/4 cup honey

1.5 cup buttermilk

1 tsp salt

1 TBSP xantham gum

1/3 cup corn starch

1/2 cup potato starch

1/2 cup soy flour

2.5 cups rice flour

1 TBSP active dry yeast 

You can find xantham gum, starches, and flours generally under the Bob's Red Mill brand in the crunchy section of stores. I've had luck with Kroger, Big Lots and Walmart. I managed to find all of this in my small town!

VARIATIONS

I've subbed out for the flours quite a bit. I have interchanged the soy flour for quinoa flour instead when I was trying to be soy-free. I've put in Teff flour, white rice, brown rice, a bit of golden flax meal, hemp powder, all sorts. My picky family prefers the white/brown rice flour on its own. I still sneak in some golden flax meal - shhhh, don't tell 'em!

It appears that subbing out canned coconut milk for buttermilk is a good sub for me so far.

Highly recommend measuring out all your dry stuff into multiple ziploc bags (minus the yeast) so it's easy to just dump and go in the future. I've priced this out and for me, it's much cheaper than buying a loaf of GF bread at the store! Tastier too. It also freezes nicely, and I tend to freeze what I haven't eaten that first day for later. My husband and both girls all prefer this bread over even the glutened store stuff! :-)

You use LYE?!

My first ever exposure to lye was seeing Edward Norton's character's skin bubble and burn in Fight Club after Brad Pitt's character threw powdered lye onto it. I never could have predicted then that I would someday be working with that substance myself on a regular basis and even  - of all things - writing a blog post on how this stuff is actually A-OK to create an out-of-this-world bar of soap!

There's a number of folks out there who struggle with the idea of a soap made with lye (listed as sodium hydroxide on our labels). Some can even recall the days when a grandparent stirred a pot of hot, raw soap themselves; this was generally a combination of leftover fats and oils from cooking and meat processing that met with lye (the super traditionalists would even create their own lye from wood ashes). Soap has been made this way for a very long time - even the ruins of Pompeii revealed a soapmaking factory along with finished bars of soap used to prepare textiles for weaving! Soap created in this manner was usually, as you can imagine, a very inaccurate process - particularly if you were creating your own lye solution. Many ended up with very lye-heavy, soft, greasy soaps that were very harsh to the skin, sometimes it would even burn to the touch!

How is handmade soap today different? Very simply, we know more about the chemistry behind soapmaking, we have pure grade lye, and we formulate to be on the side of moisturizing with a lot more accuracy than ever before. Now bear in mind that I am not a chemistry major, and I'm going to try to present how soap is made as simply and accessibly as possible. Ready to find out what happens with all those ingredients on the label? Good!

First, it is important to keep in mind that without lye, there cannot be soap. It is simply impossible. There are some soapmakers who shy away from discussing lye (or they'll mislead about it altogether - yikes!), but I feel it is up to us in this craft to educate our customers about lye and to make it a little less scary for you. I must also mention that there is a type of soap called "melt and pour" soap, which is a block of premade soap base that crafters can (as the name implies) melt, modify, and pour to create an array of designs. Does this soap base require lye? If it is true soap, then the answer is always yes. The difference is that the process of turning fats and lye into soap has already occurred and these crafters don't need to handle lye themselves (which is very appealing for those who don't want to handle caustic chemicals or want to involve their children in this as a crafty project). Here at OHTC, we create our own soap using fats and a lye solution instead of using a premade melt and pour base. There are also cleansing bars out there comprised of a mix of SLS detergents and other chemicals to create a product that looks like soap. For the purposes of this discussion, it is not soap in its true form, which is an alkali salt of fatty acids. (What the what? Read on!)

Ready for some chemistry? Very simply put, true soap is created when you mix together acids (fats, oils) with an alkali (sodium or potassium hydroxide - depending on whether you make liquid or solid soap) that has been dissolved in a liquid (water, milk, tea, coffee, etc) to create a solution. When these fats are combined with the lye solution, a chemical reaction occurs between the lye and the fats that produces heat, glycerin, and what chemistry recognizes as a salt (we call it soap!). Creating these recipes require a lot of math and double-checking to make sure that you have enough fat to react with the lye solution - in fact, most soapmakers include what we call a "superfat" into our equation. We purposefully put more fats in than the lye can possibly react with, which ensures that our finished soap is moisturizing, mild and not at all lye-heavy. This is all measured as accurately as possible, which means measuring by weight (never volume!) and using a digital scale. 

We also cure our soaps for a period of time to ensure mildness and to allow our bars to become firm and long-lasting in the tub! Here at OHTC, all of our soaps are cured a minimum of 4-6 weeks (most of the time, it is a full 6 weeks of curing!). This allows the liquid that was in the lye solution to evaporate out of the bar (making the soap much firmer) and the soap actually continues to react and saponify further during that time (ensuring a mild final product).

OHTC's Lavender Jasmine ingredients label

But - why is sodium hydroxide on the label? FDA labeling requirements for soapmakers can go one of two ways: we either list what goes into our soap pot or what comes out. To ensure accuracy, we list what goes into our soap pot instead of the finished result, which is why you find sodium hydroxide (lye) listed on our labels. We must list our ingredients in order of prominence and without the appropriate lab testing required to determine the exact amounts of glycerin, leftover unsaponified butters and oils, we cannot determine the order that these ingredients should be in with any degree of accuracy. So in order to stay FDA compliant and to be as accurate as possible, we list our ingredients as "what went into the pot" to create our finished soap. The exact butters, oils and fats used and in what amounts they are used in is what makes each recipe (and each soapmaker) a unique one!

A word for soapmakers and soapmakers-to-be: these soap recipes are often created over a long period of time and with a lot of investment in order to find a final master formulation. The formula I use at OHTC was over 4 years in the making in order to have a finished soap that is long-lasting, bubbly, moisturizing, and still leaves you clean as a whistle! I haven't even told my own husband my entire formula! Most of the soapmakers I know are incredibly protective of their trade secrets. If you're considering going down this path, please don't let that discourage you. There are many basic soap formulas available on the internet (always double-check these with a lye calculator!). Once you've become comfortable with the process of soapmaking, experimenting and developing a formula for yourself is an incredibly valuable process that teaches so much! 

Another valuable game-changing aspect to modern soapmaking is that we also now have pure, food-grade lye that our forebears did not have; yet another way to be very accurate with our lye-to-fats ratio. Did you catch that I said "food-grade" too? This doesn't mean that you can eat lye directly (yikes no!) but it does mean that the lye is pure enough to use in cooking. Just like with soapmaking, even though lye isn't present in the final product, it is used in cooking to help create an innocuous final product. Soft pretzels, olives, hominy, canned mandarin oranges, Japanese ramen noodles - all of this is made using food-grade lye! Lye is also used to modify the pH of other products due to its extremely alkaline nature. Other examples of products which contain lye are: toothpaste, hair dyes, facial moisturizers, eye liners, aftershave, baby wipes, lipsticks, breath fresheners, baby lotion, and even eye drops! (source: Good Guide)

Now a word of caution. I don't want anyone to come away from this post thinking that lye in its pure form is completely safe. It isn't. It is a highly caustic substance - so much so that it is often used to clear drains and clean ovens. Those products contain a never-ending list of warnings and caution symbols for a good reason! Unless otherwise stated, products which contain lye for these purposes are not pure, 100% lye that can be used for soapmaking and they are definitely not the products that we use to create our soaps! Even when using our 100% pure food-grade lye, responsible soapmakers must wear a lot of safety equipment in order to be well-protected from our lye solutions while we are creating our soaps.

I hope that I have helped explain that lye, when used responsibly, can be used to create a fabulous and mild end product, like hand crafted soap, and it shouldn't be the thing keeping you from trying a bar!

OHTC's Lavender Jasmine with Silk

Ingredients Listing - aka, what am I trying to read here??

A few thoughts about ingredients listing, especially now that I've gone down the rabbit hole that is FDA regulation and proper labeling. A couple things to keep in mind: very few products actually follow FDA regulations to the letter (even the big-name companies!) and soap can wear different hats in the eyes of the FDA. I know, this is SO exciting right? I hope that this post will clear up a lot of questions folks usually have about the soaps I offer and why they're presented the way that they are.

Soap that is primarily comprised of an alkali salt of a fatty acid ("lye" soap - not primarily made of detergents) can be considered a consumer commodity with few regulations (manufacturer name, size, and place of manufacture is all that's required on that label!). Candles and tarts also fall under this category. Ingredients are not required, so depending on how the soap is presented to the public (in this case, as "just soap") then there can be some liberties taken with the label.

Soap that is intended to moisturize, exfoliate, cleanse, smooth, and is meant to enhance your appearance falls under another category - cosmetics! Here at Orchard Hill Trading Company, we consider our soaps to be cosmetics as far as the FDA is concerned. There is a very strict set of requirements for these labels - font size, placement, and especially proper ingredients listing are all requirements.

With cosmetic labeling, current FDA guidelines require that we list everything in descending order of prominence with INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients) names. These names are intended to be recognized internationally and among different cultures. Manufacturers can include the common names of these ingredients in parentheses since many do not readily recognize certain names (example: butyrospermum parkii - what in the world IS that? Sounds dangerous right? It's shea butter!). I often hear that if someone doesn't recognize what's on the label, they won't bother using it. With these FDA regulations in place, it's up to us to educate and inform as to why labels read the way they do.

There is a third category that soap can be classified as: drugs. Soaps that are intended to treat a condition (eczema, acne, psoriasis, dermatitis, etc) are considered drugs as far as the FDA is concerned. Sunscreen also falls under this category. These products must conform to a rigid set of guidelines including clinical testing, submission and approval of a New Drug Application, compliance to a set of active ingredient usage guidelines set by the FDA (called monographs), prohibitively stricter production settings, and if I were to change my formulas in any way, then I would have to start all over with the process. This all amounts to a lot more money and, frankly, a level of responsibility that I don't want to have on my plate since I am not at all formally trained in these areas. If you want advice about your condition, the best advice I can give is that you should visit your doctor and discuss your options with them.

The key here is how the public is intended to perceive your soap. Is it presented as an eczema cure? Just pure soap? An exfoliating scrub? Even if it's not on the label, if a customer is led by the manufacturer to believe it has a certain function, that's what counts with the FDA.

Whew! That was a lot of info. Not terribly fascinating information either, but it might answer a few questions regarding soaps and why I market and present them in the way that I do. Doing things the right way isn't always the easiest, especially when customers ask me why X soapmaker has an eczema soap and I don't. Maybe that soapmaker has undergone the rigorous standards of the FDA. I know I haven't, so I don't make those claims and I can only speak for myself. I hope that this has been helpful!

Bugs away!

My family and I live in the country - on about 12 acres of land, about an acre of which is a pond. It's a pretty wide-open stretch of land and a lot of fun to chase my girls around on! I grew up in the suburbs, very near a city, and never thought I'd ever live on acreage or like it so much! Part of living out here has been dealing with a deluge of bugs, especially mosquitoes from a nearby swampy area and wasps that like to nest around our house since it's the only structure in a couple hundred feet in every direction. I happen to be allergic to stings and mosquitoes tend to be extra-attracted to me. So what do I do? Even though this isn't *strictly* a soap or wax-related post, I'm happy to share how I make a bug spray that I've found to be pretty effective.

Before I get to the spray part, you want to make your home as inhospitable these types of bugs as possible. Some of this information is probably a repeat for most folks, but it's important all the same. For mosquitoes, try to drain or treat any standing water. My daughters have a wading pool that we treat with bleach to keep it sanitary. For as semi-crunchy as I try to be, I have yet to find a better method for small wading pools that actually work. Our pond gets these mosquito dunks (Summit is the brand name) that are rated as organic for gardening and even safe for watering troughs for animals. The active ingredient is BTI - a bacterium that is toxic to mosquito larvae only. We don't treat 100% of our pond surface area because the fish do a decent job at getting the rest of the larvae and we don't want to deprive them of a food source. For wasps and yellow jackets, they love to have access to an open trash can or rubbish in general. Try to make sure your trash cans have a tight-fitting lid. I also like to do an extra good job spraying the cans (and the area around them) with the spray that I'm going to tell you about further down.

Second, I looked around for any evidence-based articles about wasp deterrents. I found the following link. For those who'd rather I just paste the important part from this link, here it is: "Two essential oil mixtures - 3EO-mix (clove, geranium and lemongrass) and 4EO-mix (clove, geranium, lemongrass and rosemary) - totally blocked the attraction of vespid workers."

There are a lot of home remedies that include cloves for wasp deterrents, and this link appears to back that up. I didn't want to use my precious geranium essential oil, but clove, lemongrass and rosemary were definitely ones I had on hand and were willing to spray with!

For mosquitoes, I chose to include lemon eucalyptus ('Corymbia citriodora') essential oil. The CDC has rated a synthesized version of this (known as PMD, which is also present in the pure essential oil form) as being as effective as DEET in repelling mosquitoes (source). I included the Latin names of these essential oils so you can be sure that you're getting the right type of oil. There is a misconception that lemon eucalyptus essential oil is a mixture of lemon ('Citrus limonum') and eucalyptus ('Eucalyptus radiata') essential oils. Seeing the Latin names, it is obvious that they are not the same. Lemon eucalyptus contains about 80% citronellal, so despite its name it does have a very strong citronella-like scent. I added Lime as an option because to my nose, it really helps calm down the citronella scent and adds a nice summery feel to the blend. You can also play with using other citrusy essential oils.

Essential Oil Method:
*Clove Bud Essential Oil ('Syzygium aromaticum')
*Lemongrass Essential Oil ('Cymbopogon Citratus')
*Lemon Eucalyptus Essential Oil ('Corymbia citriodora')
*Rosemary Essential Oil ('Rosmarinus officinalis')
*Liquid Soap (dish soap or bath soap is fine - or you can grate down bar soap and melt into hot water)
*Pump Sprayer (most garden centers and big box retailers will have this)
*Water

Optional
*Lime Essential Oil ('Citrus aurantifolia')

Directions: I'm going to give essential oil percentages so that you can adapt this to fit whatever you plan to use to disperse it. If you're doing a small area, you could just reuse an empty spray bottle. I like to make a big batch and put it in a 2-gallon pressure pump continuous sprayer since I like to spray anything that stands still! I have a lot of plants on my patio and front porch, and this mixture won't hurt them. I like to have about a 5% concentration of essential oils (equal amounts of each), a generous squeeze of liquid soap (I do about another 2-5% of soap) and the rest is water. Shake, shake, shake. Spray away, occasionally shaking again to reincorporate the oils. Pay special attention to areas where wasps like to nest - crevices, under eaves, and around doorways and windows. Spray down your garbage cans and the area around them. I have a lot of brick and I spray all of it since it's a nice porous surface that will hold onto that spray longer than smoother surfaces will. I also spray down all my window screens and find that flies don't like to land on them anymore. It will be awhile before I can report if it really keeps flies at bay, and I may not be an accurate judge of that since I have a 4 year old who doesn't do the best job at keeping doors shut. I spray my patio furniture, around my daughters' plastic pool, everywhere we like to frequent! After spraying so much, I still had the majority of my 2 gallons left over and plan to reapply the spray as I see an increase in bugs or we get a big wash down of rain.

Don't want to chase down essential oils or intimidated by them? I don't blame you! It takes time to become better acquainted with EOs and to not stare at those displays of little blue and brown vials without being overwhelmed. And this method may be a cheaper, easier-to-find way for most folks. It uses steeped herbs to create a concentrated "tea" that will also help deter bugs. Cloves and Catnip are the two most important components here. Regarding the Catnip/Catmint ('Nepeta' Walker's Low is what I use): unless you are sure that it's a 100% dried version of this herb, I would suggest going with a fresh version over buying something from the pet section of a store. It's a hardy perennial herb that has pretty purple flowers throughout the summer and makes a nice potted plant to keep by the door and repel mosquitoes! Studies have begun to confirm the efficacy of using this herb as a mosquito repellent (source).

Non-Essential Oil Method
*Whole Cloves - spice section of grocery stores
*Fresh (or dried) Catnip sprigs
*Fresh (or dried) Lemongrass - produce section of your grocery store may have some fresh lemongrass
*Fresh (or dried) Rosemary - you may find fresh next to the Lemongrass, or you can use clippings from your own herb garden.
*Liquid Soap (dish soap or bath soap is fine - or you can grate down bar soap and melt into hot water)
*Pump Sprayer (most garden centers and big box retailers will have this)
*Water

Optional
*Fresh (or dried) citrus peels of your choice - Grapefruit, Lime, Lemon, Orange, go nuts!

Directions: I like to dump an entire spice jar of whole cloves and several large sprigs of each of the herbs listed into a stock pot, cover with a few inches of water and bring to a boil. If you want to add some citrusy scented fun, add citrus peels at your own discretion - just be sure that everything stays covered with water (add extra water if needed). I turn down the heat and let it simmer for about an hour then turn off and let cool. Generally this is best to do the night before (mostly because I'm impatient and maybe that extra overnight steeping time makes it extra potent?). I strain the cloves, herbs and citrus peels out of the tea and pour into my spray pump, add a generous squirt of liquid soap and fill with water until my 2 gallon container is full. Shake, shake, shake to incorporate everything and spray away! Just as with the EO mixture, try to hit the areas where people tend to congregate, or bugs are likely to enjoy as a habitat. This mixture is safe for any plants you have outside as well!

I know I'm not using direct measurements here, but it's really not an exact science. I've seen a dramatic decrease in wasps using these sprays. I went from seeing a wasp or hornet every time I looked outside to seeing zero! The mosquitoes have been trickier and we use other deterrents in addition to this one (potted herbs on the patio, burning lemon eucalyptus candles). As the bug season wears on, I'll be sure to update this post with how well these sprays continue to work for us!

Welcome!

Just a post to say welcome to my blog, and to introduce myself. My name is Jennifer Robinson, and I am the owner/artisan behind Orchard Hill Trading Company. I'm a mom to two little girls (Audrey, 4 years old and Daphne, 1 year old). My husband works for a local hospital as a family practice physician and we've been married for nearly 7 years. I've been making soap for my family and friends for 4 years, and started making soy candles and tarts with the launch of OHTC in October 2012. Besides soaping and wax pouring, I also really love to garden and spend time outside.

I struggle some with being a work-at-home-mom and achieving that work/life balance. Sometimes I don't get to actually be as ambitious as my plans are, and I'm sure it'll be the same with this blog. Here's hoping I'm able to keep up and we're able to make this a regular thing!