Peacock or Bouquet Marbled Orange Patchouli Soap ~ Magellan’s Gift Micro Soap Company

Happy New Years!

Thanks so much for a great 2012.  Saturday, December 22, a new record for sales was achieved at the Harrisonburg Farmers Market!

I’m busy replacing my stock and will start vending January 5.

The Winter Markets hours are from 9 AM to 12 PM every Saturday

Lori Curry ~ Magellan’s Gift™

We did some early Christmas unwrapping today, allowing the kids to paw through the little items that were from their parents, as opposed to the more mysterious gifts that will come from St. Nick tomorrow. I made the kids these canvas art smocks/aprons to wear during their own crafty pursuits. Dorothy had a tiny little painting smock when she was a toddler but it long ago lost its straps and fell by the wayside. My method of keeping the kids clean during art projects has been to send them upstairs to change into old t-shirts when I think about it, but that’s rather inconvenient when one has been hit by inspiration. These sturdy canvas smocks should allow them to act on their inspirations without the burden of climbing two flights of stairs and locating an acceptable shirt. I used fabric paint and freezer paper stencils to paint their initials onto each apron.

Of course unwrapping the smocks caused inspiration to hit immediately, so we had to pull out paints and brushes and canvas boards to try them out.

I made these “favorite newspaper” cufflinks for Rob. He likes novelty cufflinks to lighten up his stuffy lawyer garb and we’ve had fun in the past gluing Legos and bottle caps onto cufflink hardware. This year I used a 1-inch round craft punch and epoxy dots to make cufflinks from his own used newspapers. I punched clear plastic (like from the packaging of new toys) for the backing.

And this is a brand new batch of cold-process (lye) soap. I make unscented “man” soap for my brother whenever he starts to run low. He likes a soap without weird chemicals or fragrances and I like the opportunity to make something handmade for a brother who doesn’t need much. This soap will come out of my extremely expensive and fancy (ha!) dishpan mold later today and I’ll cut it into slabs before I give it to him tomorrow. It will still need to cure for 4-6 weeks, but if I give it to him straight from the mold then he will be able to cut it into just the right size bars himself.

I went ahead and made a second batch using goat milk and a light honey and green tea fragrance. I did make a batch of these earlier and talked about them here, but needed a few more to fill out some baskets.

Gingerbread Holiday Soaps

For the final touch, I added some sparkly ribbon to dress up the gingerbread men!

I think these soaps will add the perfect accent to my holiday soap baskets.

Enjoy!
~Jennifer~

For this first batch, I used 2 different colors to swirl the tops. I used an ultramarine oxide for the purple color and some clay for the red color. I think the swirls are very pretty!

Plumeria Soap

For the fragrance, I decided to go with one of my mom’s favorite ones – plumeria! It has a light, sweet scent that is not too overpowering and reminds you of gentle Hawaiian breezes.

Each batch of soap takes an hour or so to “cook” but then requires about 1 month to cure. The curing process really hardens the soap so that it will last much longer in the shower or bath.

Stay tuned for the second soap batch!

Happy soaping!
~Jennifer~

Finally, the soap was firm enough, though just barely, to be cut.  It still looks rough from the initial cutting, but it will be tidied up in about a week when it’s had a little more time to cure and dry.  It smells, to me anyway, more like lily of the valley, and there is that note in it, but there’s also white lilac and  greenery.  It’ a clean, green, white and wet scent.  It can just imagine how refreshing & light this one will be while showering with it in the summertime after a hot, sweaty day weeding outside in 90° + North Carolina summertime heat.  I might need to set one aside for that!

It has the usual three skin loving oils, colloidal oatmeal, coconut milk & 2 other milk powders, Vitamin A & E, silk amino acids, and the fragrance oil from Nature’s Garden called Drifting Away.  I love the soft clean scent of this soap!  Can’t wait to try it out!    This one also had my first try at a hanger swirl.  I had the hanger a bit too wide so it wasn’t that easy to move it back and forth through the soap in the mold, but it still did the swirls that are typical of hanger swirls.  Very nice!  Love the Peacock Blue Mica from Conservatorie in anything!  This is the second time I’ve used it because I love that colour!   It’s like a Caribbean sea!

Little sugar pearls sprinkled over the top around the clam shells embeds of yogurt M&P from NG and lightly scented with Drifting away again and a touch of Mica Pearl White from Conservatorie to give a soft pearly glimmer finished off the tops.

My next project will have a new addition to it after today’s shipment arrived safe and sound.  Tussah silk is here!  Yay!  I can  hardly wait to try it out in something.  It needs to be something lush though.  Maybe a Rose?  or…..Bamboo Hemp?  or …..    Indian Summer? or….. Dragon’s Blood?  ……..

Magellan’s Gift hires Chad Lewis to illustrate soap!

Illustrator ~ Chad Lewis
Click on picture for Face Book
E-mail: chadlewisillustration@gmail.com

For my next project, I’ve tasked Rich Bartko, (soap mold maker to the stars) and Chad to work on imprint mats for my custom slab divider molds.  I’ve loved using the Wilton fondant mat with the ivy pattern (scroll down and look for spearmint soap). I much prefer custom images on my soap.  The images actually will be on the bottom of the soap, which means no  more worry about the magical ash that sometimes occurs on the top of the soap.

Another one of my crazy ideas is making a real sail with a logo.  Our farmers market is under a  large open pavilion.  I can set up the sail off one of the supports.  It would make a cool background, not to mention that it will help provide shade and even block some of the blowing rain!

Also for the near future:  custom stamped cloth bags and custom boxes with Chad’s images!

Life is really busy with near record Christmas sales, but I’m so excited about the future of Magellan’s Gift™  that sleep will just have to wait.

As always, fine handcrafted  soap for exceptional people!

Magellan’s Gift™  Lori Curry ~ Adventure and Discovery in Fine Soap.

They have a beer called Fortunate Pilgrim that comes out this time of year. It is cranberryish and delicious, and the little menu card on the table says something about how the Fortunate Pilgrim is the brewmaster’s response to the pumpkin beer craze, about which he seems less than enthusiastic.

So we made a pumpkin soap.

It looks like this:

and we called it Unfortunate Pilgrim in homage to Bullfrog.

And I would’ve sworn on my mother’s grave that I indicated the homage in the little display card I made.

But I didn’t.

Here’s the card:

Woe is Me.

I did, however, mention the tribute on the Adipocere Facebook Page, which is likely how I became confused.

Still, Considering our fondness for the Bullfrog, and my personal feeling that we small business people should help and support and love each other as much as possible, there is no excuse.

When one of the fair owners of the Bullfrog strolled up to our table, I was excited for him to see our tribute soap. And then he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and I told Leviathan that the card made mention of the reference, and then Leviathan said, “But it doesn’t.”

I said, “What?!”

Leviathan showed me the card.

I turned red and got that fluttering sense of shame and guilt and self-dissapointment, and I felt paralyzed by embarrassment.

So, Bullfrog Brewery here is my heartfelt apology and the hope that you will find some forgiveness and perhaps even fondness for Adipocere Soap’s apparently sloppy rookie graphic designer/entrepreneur/soaping maven.

And the Stuff We Learned

1. Never go to a craft fair without business cards

2. Clever soap names and creepy anachronistic sensibilities are no substitute for a large, clear sign with your business name on it.

3. Other soapers rule.

4. People who shop at craft fairs are patient with wonky, low-tech POS systems.

5. Clever Marketing is important.

6. People buy more the more wine they drink.

7. People always grab the soap that is to their left-hand side with their right hand, and that is the position in which one should rest one’s best-smelling soap.

8. There is a huge amount of enthusiasm for soap that smells like black licorice jelly beans.

9. Square Register is amazingly easy and fast to set up.

We’ve redesigned our soap labels, what do you think?  We’ve also added new scents to our soap shop, including oatmeal lavender, calendula citrus, mint, and lavender mint to our existing inventory of rosemary mint, lavender and oatmeal honey.  Our artisan soaps are made in the old fashioned cold process way in small batches.  Hand-milked, hand-made, hand-cut, hand-packaged by my daughter and I.

Check out the ingredients: sweet almond oil, coconut oil, castor oil, olive oil, kaolin clay, silk powder, coconut milk – yum!

Any of you ever done a craft fair before? How did it go for you, and what kinds of items did you sell?

What is cold process soap?    -Cold Process is the type of processing that is used to make soap. Cold Process soap generally uses vegetable oils that are combined with lye and other ingredients.

To sum it up, the best soap for your skin and our planet is a handmade, organic, all natural cold process soap bar. Once you’ve tried one of these lathery treasures, you’ll never again be satisfied with ‘store-bought’ bars. So do yourself and your world a big favor and start using REAL soap.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/026110_soap_natural_clay.html#ixzz2BfkKBK1y

Here’s what we put together this year:

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We had a lot of fun & there were some VERY fun booths that I am going to tell you about later (but I have to wait until after I give my purchases away for Christmas).

What do you think? Did you like this year’s booth or last year’s booth better?