Luscious Lavender

Luscious Lavender

A view of our curing rack showing Luscious Lavender, which contains lavender essential oil and lavender flowers, to provide a soft ex-foliating soothing bar, based on the original Colne Bar recipe.

Purple Herbal

The swirled, almost indigo hue of Purple Herbal complements the deep, musky, but still sweetly herbaceous scent of the Clary Sage.

The recipe for this soap begins with an inky purple infusion of alkanet root, which takes a few weeks to fully give up its colour to the olive oil in which it is steeped.

Careful measurement and trials help us to make natural plant colours with varying degrees of intensity.

Un - Scented Soap

Dave's Non-Scents Soap

The ultimate in simplicity in our Natural Soap range contains no-scents no colours at all.

In his own words :

Goats Milk Soap - we kid you not

Goatsmilk soap was a challenge. The qualities of the milk that give the extra creamy lather complicate the soap-making. There is a very rapid generation of heat from the fats and proteins in the milk, so you have to work quickly and keep checking the temperature of the lye mixture.

If you get past this stage without incident, the soap mixture can still become unstable during the super-heating process that happens naturally once it has been poured into the wooden mould. If this happens, some of the oils that should remain in the soap are driven off, seeping out through the bottom of the mould and the soap is ruined, with gaping holes left in it. Not very appealing.

So the perfect method took three attempts to evolve and we still make this very special soap only in small batches, just 12 bars at a time, as it is easier to control the heat this way.

The smell of the finished soap is amazing and worth all the effort. The milk gives the soap its nutty caramel colour and sweet, warm scent, slightly reminiscent of toffee and the kitchen after baking.

To complete the fragrancing of Just Kiddin, Sweet Orange essential oil is added, plus a swirl of golden calendula petals within and on the top. One of my favourites, there's a bar of it in the shower at the moment.

Anne

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

History of Soap making

An occasional history of soap making...

'as old as olives'

Christian and I were talking about the olive tree the other night. This was possibly because we were eating olives, with a glass of wine, while Christian was cooking a goat stew.

There's more about goats later, but to get back to the olive tree - it gives us shade; the leaves are said to be medicinal; we can eat the fruit and also press it into my favourite oil for culinary use and natural skincare (including our soap). It is no accident that olive oil is the largest ingredient by weight in our Colne Bar.

As well as all this, the tree gives you a nicely grained hardwood that can be used to make beautiful bowls and furniture.

The olive tree is thought to originate from Syria, which is still a significant producer of olive oil. From Syria, the olive spread fast to Mediterranean countries, most notably Ancient Greece, where the tree was considered holy and you could be punished for cutting one down.

Maybe the olives are a small diversion however, (patience grasshopper) as the first recorded recipes for soap contained different oils. The earliest record of the production of soap-like material dates back to around 2800 BC in Ancient Babylon. This was a formula for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil, written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 BC. However, I quite liked the recipe (550 BC) for soap containing ashes, cypress oil and sesame seed oil, "for washing the stones for the servant girls". It must have made the lives of those hardworking young women a lot easier.

The ashes provided the alkali necessary to saponify the oils to make soap. Wood-ash was, and still is the alkali most readily available for the production of handmade soap – hand made of necessity, by homesteaders in the wild west and elsewhere, and still today, in countries with lower levels of material well-being. Tallow or other animal fats were used by homesteaders, however in places where vegetable oils can be economically extracted, these might be used too. I've recently read about some new soap-recycling schemes aimed at the less economically developed parts of the world. This is one of them: http://www.cleantheworld.org/– but perhaps there are other interventions that could be effective in helping control disease and wouldn't involve energy expended in mechanically re-processing and transporting used bits of soap thousands of miles. Making soap by hand involves very little energy and is something people have done for millennia. I note however that there are significant tax benefits for the US hotels participating in this scheme.

So, oil and alkali and the beginnings of soap in Ancient Babylon.

There is a soap museum in Sidon, in Lebanon- part of the Ancient Babylonion empire. http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist/RTV/2010/03/15/RTV649210/?v=1&a=0

Searching around all the sources on this, I found the 'old as olives' quote, which I like very much. Here it is in full:

'Soap industry on the Lebanese coast is as old as olives. The age of olives extending in the area from Palestine towards the Lebanese coast goes back to thousands of years BC'

I'd guess that the soap in the Lebanese museum could still produce a lather, but might have lost a lot of its water content over all those years. I've always wanted to go to Lebanon...

http://www.discoverlebanon.com/introduction_movie_presentation.php

Aah the goats, oops nearly forgot about them. A clue- goatsmilk lovely stuff. As good in soap as olive oil. (not to be confused with Olive Oyl)

Photo of Sidon Soap Musem: - copyright of the photo pertains as follows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License