Monday 28 February 2011

Ebb Tide - A Salty Sea Soap


I wanted to make a salty sailor's soap that smelt of the coast and when the seaweed hit the hot soap in the pan, the whole room smelt of the sea and I knew this could be done.

So this soap is kind of tidal,  with a slightly minty green Spirulina base topped with a creamy white layer,  with natural sea salt and speckled with Bladderwrack seaweed.

As for the fragrance, it's a combination of the seaweed and a mix of essential oils, including  Peppermint and Rosemary, which is also known as 'Mist of the Sea'.  Lovely stuff to use when you'd rather be on a yacht than in the shower.

After all this work, we had a distinctive but still anonymous soap. Then late one night moored between East Mersea and Brightlingsea, and after rowing us back to shore against the ebbing tide,  Noel and Belinda came up with the name.

Mermaids like this soap too.







Wednesday 23 February 2011

Grubby Gardener

We developed our Grubby Gardener soap because very dirty hands also need moisturising. We include Shea Butter in this soap, however we also use over a litre of olive oil in our recipe for a soap loaf that cuts into 30 bars. We do our cutting by hand and it's one of the nicest parts of the making process, with the smell of the freshly made soap in the room and the neat rows of bars accumulating one by one on the rack.

GG is a very cleansing bar with finely ground madder root and tea tree oil, known for anti-bacterial and deodorising properties. The scent of this bar is given extra depth with a blend of sweet orange and cedarwood essential oils. These fruity and woody scents are a very good foil for the slightly astringent, but clean-smelling tea tree.

This is one of our best-selling soaps, but don't leave it in the shed to use at the garden tap, as a customer's friend did. The mice clearly liked Grubby Gardener too, as the many tiny teethmarks demonstrated. (I will add here that our soap must not be eaten)

You might also want to try one of the soaps with exfoliating coffee grounds - Devilish Dark and Spice Macchiato.

Monday 21 February 2011

Rosy Soap range

Rose Petal Top

Our Rose Soaps are some of the first soaps that we developed, however they have proved to be a very popular family of soaps, based on Rosy theme.

Geranium Rose is the base fragrancy, however our bars gain much of their appeal and aroma from the rose petals and buds which are incorporated.


Rosy Swirl

The gentle swirls of pink Rose Madder power gives a natural soft rose colour to the white of the natural soap. We roll the freshly made round bars in a bed of rose petals, to enhance the colours and fragrances.





These Rosy Swirls have just been cut and are now ready for decorating.
The round bars are also very popular with our retailers who have made gift sets and hampers included  our Rosy Swirls.

Rose Petal Top
Rose petals are pressed liberally onto the crisp white rose scented soap loaves after they have been removed from the mould, but before cutting into individual bars.

Cutting with the petals, produces random grooves on the surface of the cut as some petals are dragged down through the soap with the blade. This was unforeseen but quite attractive visually, making every bar slightly different. 

Rosebud Layer
Rose Buds are inserted into the top of the layered loaf, making delightful gifts.


Wednesday 16 February 2011

How to make Lavender Soap - Colne Soap Makers

Make your Own Soap at Home

This is something we filmed over nine months ago, when we were developing our soap, it;'s been edited so it condenses "How to make Soap", in less than 10 minutes. For some reason I didn't release it at the time, and didn't even include a recipe, durh!

I just found it again, here it is, I will find a good starter recipe in the next couple of days, so you could make your own soap at home. I hope you find it interesting. It's a typical BBC Blue Peter, "How you could do it home with fruit juice moulds", but I hope you find it interesting. (BTW, We don't quite do it like this any more, and have purpose built moulds, but you'll get the gist).

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Moroccan Moon - with Coffee


Honey and benzoine give this tan specimen a rich nutty caramel fragrance. A sprinkling of dried coffee provides two dark layers and soft exfoliating characteristics to the soap.

It has been poured in three layers and scalloped on the top surface. It also combines a tube of pure Colne Bar, to make a moon affect, set above a Moroccan landscape (with a little bit of imagination and squinting you might see it too).


Probably our most adventurous, when we made it, incorporating several techniques and combinations. I had to work fast during the final stages, as it was prone to set quickly.

Moroccan Moon has evolved into several soaps in their own right. 

Spice Machiato, takes the Coffee theme a little further and combined with a coffee brew, it  makes a masculine bar. The embedded dried ground coffee, provides the base colouring and embedded lightly through out, gives a definite ex-foliating quality to the bar.

Customers have expressed surprised exclamations, and have come back to tell us, "That coffee thing, you know it actually works!"

Well we hoped it would. (I'll let you into a secret, it wasn't all guess work).

Maldon Mudlark, is rich dark brown and combines cinnamon and coffee to make this an extremely fragrant bar to use, good for working hands but being based on Colne Bar is moisturising too.

An invigorating bar to use at the end of your day.



Monday 14 February 2011

Wrapped Soap


Current Stock

You can now see our current stock in the gadget on the top right column. It tracks our batches directly so it is up to date, if you can't make it to one of the Farmers Markets or local outlets, then you can always email your order to orders@colnesoapmakers.co.uk.

Wrapped Soap for Sale

The photograph above shows our soap wrapped ready for sale in one of our soap boxes.

The waxed paper protects the soap after curing, but it still allows the colour to show through slightly.