The Coconut Oil

 Here's a crazy little video for a crazy little song that has been stuck in my head forty years.  

Nancy's been reading a book on coconuts. I think it was a book group assignment or something. The coconut turns out to be natures best kept secret. Where once there was butter, now there is coconut oil.  And suddenly, we're eating coconut oil in just about everything.

We get to hear all the benefits of coconut while we eat eggs cooked in coconut oil, while we enjoy toast topped with it, and at dinner over a plate of fettuccine covered in coconut Alfredo sauce.

From what I've been told and from the little research and first hand experience I have, I would tend to agree this change in our diets. Weight loss, shiny hair, and smooth skin are some of the benefits. It is also said that people who eat and regularly use coconut oil enjoy better heath, stronger immune systems and heal faster after injuries.

Long before we knew all this stuff, we started using a healthy dose of coconut oil in every batch of Whimsy soap. We heard it made great lather and that was good enough for us. Since then, we have noticed smoother skin and less cracking associated with the dry, winter air. That alone seems reason enough for us to keep making soap with coconut oil in it.

Oh, and by the way, unless maybe you are from the islands, fettuccine with coconut Alfredo is something you probably want to avoid. Let's just say, the exchanging-butter-for-coconut thing can only be taken so far. 

Pine Sap

Several years ago, I owned part of a small rustic furniture manufacturing company.  We built a lot of pine and aspen log beds, as well as night stands and dressers with big, glued up slabs of pine for the tops.  We went through a lot of wood. 

I enjoy working with pine and love how it smells when you cut into it.  The only real problem with pine is that it has a lot of sap.  That sap gums up your tools and sometimes gets on your hands.  Once in a while, you run into a open pocket in the board that holds as much as drop or two or more of the sticky, viscous liquid or gum.  If it gets on your hands, it collects all the dirt and sawdust you touch after that and turns black.  This is super hard to clean off and is avoided at all costs.  

For Christmas last year, we scented a couple batches of soap with a fragrance that immediately brought to mind images of a snowy wood and a fresh cut sapling, tied to a toboggan being pulled home.  The fresh smell of the needles and dripping sap combining into a sensory ecstasy.  (Sorry, I warned you that I love the smell of cut pine.)

The first time I showered with this new, green-tinted, pine-scented soap, still not quite awake, I instantly panicked at the thought that I had just rubbed pine gum all over my arm.  It smells that good. 

During the holidays, all you lumberjacks can purchase this soap under the label, 'Oh, Christmas Tree.'  For the rest of the year, we like to call it, 'Fresh Cut Pine.'

Swiss Family Robinson

Once, for our anniversary, Nancy and I went to a little, local hotel that specializes in themed guest suites.  They have rooms set up like old cabins and fishing shacks, or set in Italy and Egypt.  They even have a couple rooms with a ship’s deck built right into the room, mast, sails, and a big captain’s wheel included. 

We eventually settled on our room, reminiscent of the 1960 Disney classic, Swiss Family Robinson, for three reasons:

1. When I was a youngster, I loved the movie.  
2. We were very poor and this room was the least expensive one in the building. And,
3. The bed was perched high on a platform, way up among the jungle foliage of a big, artificial tree. 

So cool.

The room was in a part of the building where the road going by was on a steep curve, just outside our window.  The constant road noise took some getting used to.  I also had a persistent, troublesome thought of a car sliding off the wintry road and flying through the huge windows of our serene jungle setting. 

But, like a raging, shark-infested surf, crashing on the beach of our small, uncharted, desert isle, the noise and the unnatural fear of a sudden and immediate death soon faded into the background. 

Most memorable for me was the bed in the tree.  I always loved that movie. 

Nancy remembers the soap.  She said it was wonderful. 

Light bulb!

We need to sell our soaps to this place! 

Imagine it –
Sea scented soaps, colored Bahama green, with ground luffa for a bit of texture.
Pine scented soaps for the cabin themes.
Olive oil based soaps for the Italian themes, with goat's milk to increase the creaminess.
And so on . . .  

If we hear back from them, you will be the first to know.

Saponification

Big word.  Big story.

As the legend goes, a gazillion years ago, on a mountain near Rome, the fat of sacrificed animals mixed with the ashes from the sacrificial fires.  Presto!  – they had soap! 

The legend says over the course of years, as these small particles of soap were washed down the hill, they found their way into local streams. 

At the same time, a local woman started up a laundry in the area.  The clothes she laundered were somehow always cleaner and smelled much nicer than any others known to the Romans.  The woman was known far and wide as demi-laundress and was soon being called upon by all the great thinkers of the day. 

In time, a few of these smart guys got together and figured out the cleaning factor was somehow related to some small, squishy balls of off-white stuff, found in the streams and rivulets of the area.  It was only a matter of time before they figured out the rest.  

The name of the mountain was Sapo.  And so these great thinkers, these philosophers and mathematicians and orators, got together and decided to call the stuff, what else, Sapo.  (That’s soap to you and me.) 

The woman was at once exposed as a fraud and banished to the colonies.  There, she ran a successful dry cleaning business until her untimely death from a condition caused, some say, by the harsh chemicals.

Today the process of taking the ingredients of soap (fats or oils, water and lye), and combining them into soap, is called saponification.  A big word for what is most likely not a true story. 

In reality, the entomology of the word sapo, which means ‘fat’ or ‘tallow,’ appears to be around 2200 years old, and comes from Eastern Europe.   Then, when the Romans came in several decades later to redecorate that part of the world, the legend tells us some thinkers and orators also tagged along.

Lye Soap

I recently read an interesting and unusual novel by a popular writer.  It was set in the future, in the deserts of Arizona.  Some people were hiding in a cave and living off the land.  More than once, the book mentioned the cactus soap the people made and used, and how hard it was on their skin.  Everyone dreaded using the soap, and even worse, the job of making the soap, because it burned their hands so badly. 

The very next book I read was a history, set in the late 1800's.  It too mentioned soap and talked about how the mother of the protagonist owned a laundry.  The author speculated on how her hands would have been red and sore from the “harsh lye soap.”

I've thought a lot about this misconception regarding lye soap.  These two small examples, from great authors and careful researchers, are intriguing.  I’m not saying anything negative at all about them.  I just found it interesting that this idea would find its way into two books on such different subjects. 

Can lye burn you?  Oh, yes!  And boy, does it hurt.  But can soap burn you?  Maybe, but only if it's proportions are wildly incorrect.  Besides, all soap uses lye as an ingredient.  But, after the saponification process has occurred (perhaps a subject for a future blog post?), there is no lye remaining in the finished product. 

Okay, maybe, if you had absolutely no idea what you were doing, and you were hiding in a cave in the desert, and you were constantly worried about being invaded by parasite space aliens – maybe then it would be hard to figure out the recipe.  But, a woman living 150 years ago or more, and who owned a laundry service on the frontier – now she would for sure make some pretty dang good soap.

Easter

We have a good friend who is giving soap this Easter to many of the important people in his life.  He's a great guy, a nice guy, an artist, and a good neighbor and friend.  I've thought a lot about him giving soap as as an Easter gift.  On the surface it seems unusual.  Soap for Easter?  And from a guy?  Maybe he's just helping out his friends who own a little soap company.  That's okay with me.

But as I've thought about it, I've come to realize a nice bit of symbolism in the gift.  Soap is refreshing and invigorating, like a clear, warm spring morning.  Soap is colorful and fragrant, almost intoxicating, like walking through a meadow of sweet-smelling spring flowers.  And, like that first Easter Morning, so many years ago, soap makes us clean and new.  

The gift of soap for Easter is an unexpected analogy of the Atonement of Jesus, a beautiful and simple reminder of that moment He took away my sins.  If I will just accept His gift, and if I will simply and daily apply it in my life, I can be free of the dust and the dirt and the grime I have so often and so easily collected.


Sorry if it sounds like I’m just trying to sell soap.  Of course I love to sell soap, but, long before I sold soap, I believed. 

Happy Easter

Texture

We have a bar of Edward Soap in the shower.  Actually we don’t know what to call it yet.  But that name works for now. 

It's got vanilla bean in it for a little robust texture.  Ground up with all the tiny, black vanilla seeds is the whole bean pod; brown flecks of fiber, mixed with the black seed specks.  In the light brown soap, the fibers and seeds offer something to keep things interesting - texturally interesting, both from a visual sense, and in how it feels on your skin.  The brown flecks are woody and fibrous, almost scratchy, but nice.  Just the right amount of invigorating exfoliation, with just the right amount of lather and creaminess.

I’m not sure why yet, but some of our soaps, as they cure, get a kind of crystallized look to them.  It isn’t something you can feel, but something you can see; little pockets of darker colored soap, surrounded by thin lines of lighter colored soap, as if it was cracked.  We first noticed it in the citrus soaps.  This one has it too. 

We aren't sure if its from the essential oils we use to scent the soap, or if it's possibly the colors used.  Everything else in the batch, from the base oils use, to the batching and drying process, is about the same in all the other batches. 

I like how it looks; irregular, and covered in tiny, intersecting lines.  Like a shattered piece of tempered glass, or a road map of Texas; the tiny flecks of fiber, and specks of black seed, marking the towns and cities along the route.  This is a good, down to earth, manly soap.

Spring

The daffodils are here and the tulips will be coming up soon.  Within a couple weeks or so, our front garden, after 10 months of looking fairly blah, will be covered in color. 

I noticed a few years ago that it always snows one last time after the tulips are in full bloom.  Every year, after we're already spending some quality, coat-free time in the yard, it's hard to believe winter isn't over yet.  But every year, without exception, mother nature shows off with yet another surprise storm. 

Other things we can count on each winter, like shoveling snow, and a visit from the jolly old elf himself, are cracked knuckles.  No matter how much lotion we use, the dry, cracked, bloody, sore knuckles happen every year.  But, this year, we had a nice surprise; Anyone who used our handmade soap every day, had no problems with cracked knuckles. 

Just before we started making our own soap, we unwittingly bought two giant bottles of liquid soap.  Some of us quit using it and noticed an immediate difference in how soft our hands were.  But, in an effort to use up the liquid soap, we continued to keep a bottle of it in the bathroom. 

Some of the kids preferred the ease of using liquid soap and, over the course of one, long, dry winter, paid a heavy price for this preference.  In the worst case, our youngest daughter's knuckles looked for a time as if she had been in a fist fight with a beaver.  But, with some good lotion and a whole lot of Whimsy bar soap therapy, she was soon cured of the problem.  We believe she will go on to live a happy and normal life. 

As for the tulips, I’m hoping they'll show up soon.

Whirlwind

The soap manufacturing plant has been idle for a couple weeks.  We seem to do this soap thing in spurts of action and inactivity.  Well, inactivity isn't exactly a fair description, since its the rest of our busy lives that often use more than their fair share of time.

Making soap is normally an enjoyable way to spend an hour or two.  I say 'normally' because sometimes its incredibly stressful.  Like when we're tired, or when we forget a step in the process and we end up with soap that's ready to pour, but it has no color in it, or the molds aren't ready.  Sometimes one or the other of us changes the planned recipe for that evening without letting the other know.  An honest mistake that usually turns into a less than pleasurable experience. 

Then there's the part about finding an hour or two to spend on making, cutting and wrapping soap.  Most of our waking hours, as well as some of our sleeping hours, are filled with kids and family, chickens, work, church, community, and trying to clean up what the kids and the chickens and old man winter have done to our back yard.  Never a dull moment around here.

A few years ago, some friends of the family stopped by with their five children.  Tell me, hypothetically speaking of course, how would you feel after a tornado slammed your front door on its way out, after ripping your roof off, knocking down all the walls, and then churning through the debris for a few minutes?  They didn't actually break anything, but when they left, I was spent! 

At the time, with just one lovely child of our own, we were rookies, still in control of our lives. 

Now we're the ones with five kids. 

Lavender Fields

This week, I drove past a large field of lavender plants, growing along the freeway, about 90 minutes south of here.  Row after even row of carefully managed, winter-dormant plants.  I've only noticed this large field once or twice before, and haven't yet seen the plants dressed in their summer clothes.  I look forward to seeing how the field looks as the seasons grow warmer.

Our oldest daughter has always loved picking flowers.  It took us quite a few years to train her that she could take whatever she wanted out the the back yard, but she needed to leave any flowers in the front yard alone.  I realized one afternoon that the message wasn't quite clear enough, when she came home with a huge bouquet of lavender from the neighbor's yard. 

I hadn't ever noticed the lavender growing along part of an old, ornate, twisted-wire fence across the street.  But, for a long time after that, when I walked past, I would notice it and breathe in the soft fragrance that lingered faintly in the area. 

When we first started making soap, we did a little two-day boutique at a local high school.  I would guess that for every person who stopped and bought a bar or two of what we had, at least one other person would ask if we had lavender.  When we said no, they would simply smile, and without much comment, continue on their way.

Lavender is like that, easy to overlook, but a treasure once you know it's there.

Sitting here at the kitchen desk, I can see, through the window, past the trees and bushes in my yard, and across the narrow street, to the spot where that lavender used to be. 

Affection

There is something intimate about soap.  A familiarity shared between it and human beings, known by only a very few other inanimate objects.  Perhaps warm, clean sheets, crisp and soft on a newly made up bed, have some idea of this intimacy.  Chocolate, creamy, smooth, and delicious, melting, enveloping, satisfying – chocolate might also know of this relationship. 

From the hour you were born, until this very day, perhaps this very hour, you have known soap, and it you.  It has cleaned you, caressed you, soothed your skin, invigorated and refreshed you, both body and mind. 

Soap is so important, so sustaining, so familiar.  And by that familiarity, so overlooked and unappreciated.  

For reasons forgotten a thousand generations ago, people are drawn to soap.  This attraction goes deeper than the need to wash each day.  It goes deeper than a curiosity to smell or use something new or pleasantly fragrant.  It goes even deeper than the lifelong relationships it has known. 

Watch someone, a girl perhaps, or a woman of any age.  Watch her take up a new bar of soap, especially a nice soap, even a brand she has never known before.  Without exception, she will lift it affectionately.  Eyes closed, she will carefully touch it to the underside of her nose or to the soft tip of her upper lip, and fully, deliberately take in the aroma. 

If she likes what she discovers there, she will smile contentedly and again breathe in that scent. 

If a friend is near, she will hold it out for the friend to smell.  If she is alone, and she thinks you have watched her quiet, fragrant dance, she will look at you quickly, timidly, and, catching your eye, glance away again.  

“How much,” she will ask, her eyes averted, holding the bar again to her nose, “How much for this bar of soap?”

The Little Salesman

 
When we first started our little soap company, before we sold anything, we made a lot of soap.  We wanted to have a good selection that was well tested and attractively presented.  We also wanted to give it time to cure before we wrapped it.  And so, after a while, we had quite a collection going. 

We worked every day on making soap and getting the business going.  We found a name, and a website, we worked on a logo, and we developed a marketing plan.  But, before we even had the chance to sell one bar, our five year old son was out showing us how it’s done.  A five year old, not even halfway through kindergarten, was the first person to sell a bar of our soap. 

Nancy’s friend, Nancy was over, picking up her son, who also, by chance, has the same name as our soap selling son.  The Nancys were in the back yard, looking at the chickens, when our little salesman grabbed up an unwrapped bar of Cranberry Breeze and headed out the door to show it off. 

At the time, we were still trying to figure out exactly what to charge for a bar of high end, handmade soap.  We didn’t know for sure what the market would pay, but, we soon found out. 

He showed off the bar to our neighbor and had her smell it.  She liked it, so he closed the deal.  A minute later, he walked in the house with a handful of one dollar bills, the proud salesman of the very first bar of Whimsy Soap.  

Since then, we’ve sold a several hundred bars, and hope to sell thousands and thousands more.  But, no matter how many bars we sell, The Little Salesman award belongs forever to the five year old.

The Collection

This weekend I helped my mom move into a new place.  She insists it's her last move, but we've heard that before.  My mom is a Nomad by nature, a rootless wanderer, a collector of house warming gifts. 

This time I took her soap: Raspberry Bliss and Applejack.  I handed my mom the cellophane bag and she, feeling overwhelmed, thanked me and sat it down on top of a pile on the kitchen counter. 

The afternoon passed while my brothers and I moved stuff in and set it up.  While in the bathroom, hanging a big, heavy piece of decor, something caught my attention.  In a large basket on the back of the toilet was a bar of Whimsy Soap.  Not just any bar, but one of the originals, wrapped in paper the way we only did it for just the first few batches of soap. 

Since the day we gave her that bar, we've given her soap for her birthday, Christmas, the first day of spring, Lincoln's birthday, and Groundhog Day.  Oh, and April Fools Day too. 

There had to have been other gift-giving events, because here, with the bar from that first batch of Cranberry Breeze, was enough soap to start up a small but well-stocked Whimsy Soap store.  In fact, as impossible as this sounds, I think she has more Whimsy Soap in her house than we do in ours. 

When I later asked her if she used our soap, she said she only uses liquid soap. 

“In the shower too?” I asked. 

“Yes, body wash,” she replied.  “But I like looking at your soaps, so I saved them all.”

I guess for Mother's Day, we'll have to come up with something original to give her.  Perhaps we could try Lilac Soap. 

AO vs VO

3.5 US Gallons of Shea Butter

VO (vegetable oil) or AO (animal oil)?  This is the question.  And a complicated one too.

Did you know you can make soap out of raccoon and bear fat?  Not that I ever would, but I've heard it can be done.  And, did you know the qualities of soap made of bear tallow are actually listed on the Soapcalc website?   Who figures this stuff out? 

And where does one get raccoon fat?  Or rabbit fat?  Or ostrich oil?  I must have somehow overlooked the wild animal fat section down at the grocery store. 

We've made soap once that had lard in it.  Great soap, but we just decided after that to only use vegetable based oils in all our soap.  It just seems nicer.

But there are also drawbacks to using vegetable oils.  Take, for example, deforestation of natural hardwood forests in tropical climates to make room for palm groves.  Uncool. 

Why does everything need to be so complicated?  Sometimes, I long for the days when I was just a kid and life was simple for my brothers and me.  We didn't think about deforestation or animal rights issues.  We didn't care about whether our soap was made of VO or AO – or even a bunch of harsh chemicals for that matter.  Heck, we hardly used soap at all, except on Saturday nights when our mom made us come in the house for a bath. 

Then I discovered girls. 

It turns out girls don’t like a boy, who, for six days of the week, stinks like a raccoon.  Once girls came into the picture, I had to start showering every day.  What a pain.

And so on and so forth until now I'm all worried about where my soap oils come from. 

Girls did this.

Orange Blossom

About ten years ago, I came home with a little orange tree in the back seat of the car.  The way pomegranates remind me of my grandma, oranges remind Nancy of hers.  When Nancy was a girl, her grandma spent her winters out of the deep snow of Southern Idaho and in the seemingly endless orange groves of central Arizona.

It's a fairly well known fact that spring comes in Arizona much sooner than it does in other parts of the country.  Taking advantage of this fact, when Nancy's family grew tired of the long winters up north, they would go visit Grandma and her warm weather. 

The orange trees would be in full spring splendor, some with large, ripe oranges and fragile, fragrant blossoms growing side by side on the same tree.  Over time, orange blossoms, reminded Nancy more and more of her grandmother. 

It was a spring day years later, and I was in the doghouse.  So I bought an orange tree.  It was just 3 feet tall and about the diameter of a quarter at the base of the trunk.  And it had three or four, tiny oranges growing on it. 

In our small, light deprived house, we found a spot for our little orange tree, by the window in our bedroom.  Though we lost most of those first little oranges, the tree liked the spot and, by the next spring was completely covered in little, white, sweet-smelling blossoms. 

Over the years we've eaten just eight or ten oranges from that tree.  They aren't common, but the oranges are sweet and delicious. 

But what we love most about the tree are the blossoms, promising of spring to come, and reminding us of a special woman, gone now to that place where orange trees blossom all year.

Start Up

So I came home and told Nancy I didn't have a job anymore.  Not a fun conversation.  Then we told the kids.  These are the same kids that thought the logo of the company I worked for said, “Daddy.”  No, I’m serious.  They really did.  

We then went to work to figure out where we were going to find money for the next unknown amount of time.  We came up with several ideas; One of them was making soap.  Had we ever made soap before in our lives?  Um, no. 

To the library, we dutifully trudged, and checked out 1.62 gazillion books on the subject of soap making.  Then we curled up on the living room couch, an immense pile of books between us, and for several nights stayed up late, reading into the night.  We each picked out books that interested us and constantly interrupted each other with our discoveries of important tidbits of information. 

By the end of the week, we had enough book knowledge between us to write our own instruction manual on the subject.  We were book smart and still knew absolutely nothing about making soap.

In no time we were making soap, starting a little business, and hanging out together – all the time.  A lot of work, and a lot of stress, and a lot of fun.  I couldn't remember having worked so hard in a long time.  Nor could I remember feeling so great about life and about being with my sweetheart and about the direction our new life together was headed.

Humble Beginnings

In early October of last year, I went into the main office at work.  When I started working there, we had just one child, a tiny, two week old, little girl.  On my last day with the company, I walked in the office over 12 years later, now the father of 5 children.

“Times are tough,” my boss explained as we sat down in his humble office.  “We need to let you go.”    My long-time friend, who also happened to be my boss, continued with tears in his eyes.  

While he talked on, I tried to listen.  But the problem solver down deep inside me went to work on the immediate problem at hand:  How am I going to feed and house my little, growing family?

I thought about the people I would call; people I knew who owned companies, and people who I knew that knew other people.  But before all of that, while my boss was still sitting across his desk from me, I thought to myself, “This is not going to happen to me again.”

I left the office in a daze.  12 years - and it was over.

I drove slowly home, working on my plan, trying to figure out what I was going to do next. Then, before getting onto the freeway, while waiting in the left turn lane for a red light, I remembered an article I had read just the day before.  Just a little article about making soap.  About some lady, in a town about an hour south of my house, who makes a batch a day. 

Hmm, I thought.  That could be fun. 

Just then, the light turned green and I got on the freeway, to head home, to tell my wife I didn't have a job anymore.

Edward in a Bottle

We made Edward soap last night.  Yes, The Edward.  If you don't know who Edward is, well, I just don't know what to say to you.  Obviously you don't live in a house where someone has stayed up all night to finish a book about beautiful vampires being chased by wolf people. 

I do live in such a house.  And so, we made Edward.  We got the scent from the same place we get most of our scents and oils.  It's almost two hours away, but worth the drive for the savings – and the Edward. 

So, what, you might be asking, does Edward smell like anyway?  Well, we are told he smells of honey, lilacs and sunshine. The fragrance itself is described as fresh, clean, and sexy with a bit of vanilla, heliotrope, dry wood, and grapefruit. 

To me, the Edward fragrance smells like you are holding a bottle of cologne in your hand while standing in a large, overgrown meadow of wild flowers – the two smells harmonizing perfectly, convincingly.  Also, the color yellow bursts into my mind as I sniff.  Strange.  Interesting.

It really is a refreshingly, and surprisingly convincing scent.  I've never read the books, but have been subjected to enough of the story and movies to have an idea of what the guy – I mean vampire is like.  I was blown away by the smell coming out of the bottle, because it seemed so accurate, so right, so . . . so . . . beautiful and sparkly.

Okay, maybe not sparkly.

So, while Edward cures in the oven, we are planning our scent for today.  Most likely it will be Jacob.  Or possibly Bella.  I think we might also have some Alice in our future. 

Space

Making soap is an endeavor we got into a bit too lightly.  Not that we didn't think long and hard about it before we started.  And I’ll bet nobody read more books on the subject than we did.  But somehow we didn't consider the full cost carefully enough.  And now, I want my house back. 

First of all there are the tools of the trade: spoons and bowls and pots and other containers, a scale, a mixer, and a bunch of huge, clunky molds.  Then, when you've made soap, which it turns out, also takes up a lot of space, you need places to store it and things to store it in. 

And, did you know that before the soap, comes the oil (and the lye and the gallons and gallons and gallons of distilled water)?  Oil, it turns out, takes up an incredible amount of space, like maybe, as an hypothetical example, a whole wall in your kitchen, two buckets high and five buckets wide, plus a whole corner in your dining room.

Oh, and don’t forget the scents and the colors, and the strawberry seeds and the luffa.  No, you can't forget the luffa.  These items don’t individually take up a ton of room, but when gathered together with all their colorful and smelly buddies, take up enough space to fill a couple apple boxes.

We knew soap had to cure before it could be wrapped but, I guess we just didn't do the math on what that meant.  One batch a day and you run into the 600 bar zone in just a month.  Not that we've ever had 600 bars here, but it could happen.  Ugh! 

Good thing we love it - A LOT!