Hits and Misses

I'm still foraging and preserving as befits the time of year. It sometimes seems that there is not enough time in the day to do the things I want to get done but for now,  it's time to unwrap some of the soap I made a month ago.

Here we have an old favourite - Cinnamon Cake

 Deliciously fragrant and spicy and very popular from this time of year onwards Actually, what started as a festive yuletide seasonal bar became such a winner I make it all the time now. I have lost count of the number of times people have said
 "That looks and smells good enough to eat!"
Well, I know I use all natural ingredients including  ground almonds for exfoliation, Cinnamon essential oil and bark, nutmeg and honey but I wouldn't recommend  you take a bite.
It is a great soap for showering and hand washing alike though and often takes pride of place in downstairs bath and cloakrooms where the scent provides a warm welcoming note.

Speaking of ingredients, one of the very first soaps I  made was a simple bar, scented with Bergamot essential oil that I named Earl Grey after the strong pot of fragrant tea I used as the liquid part of the recipe.
I recently found some of my old style labels for this soap during a clear out and I thought it was high time for a revival.
A quick canvas of friends and customers alike indicated a lot of enthusiasm for this oldie and so I set to work.
I did have a slight niggle about the quality of the essential oil I was using. Not from my usual supplier I hasten to add but I was keen to make a start and so into the pot it went.
Four weeks down the line I open the box  and unwrap a bar to  do the usual tests. 
While it is a good creamy bar of soap the scent is way too far in the background for a newly made batch. It could be bergamot but it's too faint to really tell. Not what I wanted from this bar at all.
So back to the drawing board which is annoying for a few reasons, not least my impatience to get it done. An unsatisfactory batch of soap for whatever reason can be an expensive and time consuming mistake. Not to mention having to dissapoint the people who wanted to try a bar.
So in summary - I have a large batch of faintly scented bars of soap that I don't want to sell.
I have Bergamot oil on order from www.essentiallyoils.com  and a determination to get it right so when the postman delivers the next parcel of fab smelling bottles I'll  brew some more tea and get out the soap pot to start again and to anyone who wanted a bar I ask for patience but it will be worth the wait.

On an unrelated note I leave you with a picture of a gift my Mother gave me recently. It currently hangs above my desk and if you know me you will know it to be very appropriate.

 

A Happy Harvest

A long overdue forage all of 400yards from my house has made me feel very blessed indeed.
I went with my partner with the intention of finding a few elderberries with which to make delicious cold -busting syrup (more of which anon) - maybe a few stray blackberries if we were lucky and this is what we gathered, leaving plenty for the birds and other wildlife who make the place home.

Some Rose hips - I'll show you what they became and how later

An abundance of Elderberries

Hawthorn Berries

 Beautiful Blackberries

and right at the end of our walk we found the most wonderful secret stash of lovely sloes ready for picking


They went straight into the freezer - all the better to yield their juices when payday comes and I can buy the necessary bottle of gin.
A generous harvest I'm sure you'll agree. So what did I do with all this stuff?

The Blackberries were easy - I filled a jar with the squashier ones, topped it up with cider vinegar, covered with a vinegar proof lid and labelled. In six weeks time I will have the most beautiful tasting vinegar which will be fabulous in a salad dressing or equally good  spooned into a cupful of hot water and drunk to fend off colds. The rest were instantly combined with some windfall apples given by my neighbour and made into a delicious crumble which is always a joy.

The Elderberries were painstakingly de- stalked  - I use a fork to do this.
There was enough to make a good few bottles of syrup - invaluable for sore throats and colds too. Either taken by the delicious spoonful or combined with just boiled water and sipped as a drink that beats those powdered over sweet cold & flu sachets by a mile.
John Gallagher from http://www.learningherbs.com/ and Mountain Rose Herbs showed me how http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOYzWyFGkqM
The kitchen smelled divine by now.
As for the Hawthorns I tinctured some of them in high proof Vodka to make a wonderful heart tonic and a quick search for Hugh Fearnely -Whittingstall's Haw-Sin sauce recipe which, when my sister said, when she popped in to say hello, "Makes the kitchen smell like posh ketchup!"  The quantity in the recipe didn't yield much but what I did get bottled was very tasty indeed.

The rose hips became rose hip syrup with the aid of another useful and entertaining video  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJr-mgLELrE

Good old rose hip syrup. Packed with Vitamin C and, as certain generations of British school children will tell you, the only thing that made school Rice and  Semolina puddings edible. Incidentally the darker bottles seen in this picture are filled with Elderberry syrup. If you've never made it I would say give it a go. it works as well with dried berries if you can't find fresh.
    



      

I think I fixed it!

After an enthusiastic start to blogging my best laid plans were derailed by a series of trying events and an error on my page that I just couldn't fix. So I stopped blogging and was about to give the whole thing up as not being for me.
Today after way too long I am able to post again.
This certainly is cause for celebration and maybe even a relaunch.
So here's a few pictures of things I have made since I last wrote.

Here are my Bliss Bath Fizzers

They are made with Rose, Jasmine & Ylang Ylang essential oils and real flower petals, each has a whole rosebud inside.



And here are my Blossom Fizzers

See those beautiful orange Calendula flowers? I grew them and dried them myself and combined them with Neroli, Orange flower water, Ylang Ylang and Frankincense, which I always think of as "Dragonsense" ever since a colleague of mine told me that this was what he little boy insisted he was giving as a gift when he played a Wise Man in the school nativity. I bet that was a cool gift.


These are my Mmmassage Melts

I've been making these a while. I mould them in a silicon cupcake tray and the idea is that instead of a bottle of massage oil you use these little darlings, packed with shea & cocoa butters which respond to the warmth of the room & your body and melt on contact with your skin. Great for sharing.
However, happy customers have told me that they also work as an all over body moisturizer applied to damp skin straight after a bath or shower and recently I was thanked by a lady who has discovered that they work very well on the dry skin on her feet. I'm delighted to have this feedback and also to pass it on.

Likewise with the vegan friendly lip balm in Lime & Grapefruit or Mandarin flavour.

I now know - because you tell me, that as well as being a good all round lip balm it is good on those sore patches you get on your nose when you have a cold and... and...  believe it or not, it works as a cuticle cream too!
Now, I'm not going to ask what it is that compels Old Pit fans to be so innovative and clever as to make these discoveries but I'm delighted that you do - so keep them coming. Enquiring minds want to know...
There is more but it's late and besides, I'm excited to find out if this post is going to work so I'll leave it for another time, hopefully it won't be quite so long...

Busy week

This time of year is always busy for me. As the festive season approaches I'm lucky enough that Old Pit Potions are in demand for gifts, fairs and other winter delights. I've got used to making more stock as the cold weather approaches, it helps me get over some of the sadness that summer is over and the dark nights are upon us. A days work that produces such a fragrant atmosphere is a welcome bonus. Yesterday I made some batches of soap that I've put away to cure.

Among them was Sylvan pictured here still in the moulds.
Fragrantly woody with cedarwood, pine needle, rosewood & patchouli in a base that includes coconut & extra virgin olive oil, this soap is a popular choice with men although a lot of women like it too. It also is special to me because it's my husbands favourite, so the scent of it always makes me think of him. In fact it was his desire to have an aftershave or cologne that smelled like the soap that led me to develop a range of perfumes and spritzers. I'm told that his work colleagues like hanging out in his office because it always smells so nice. That's a great endorsement.

I also have been making some Mint Smoothies

   
This bar was one of the first of my own soap recipes that I ever made. It has extra glycerine to moisturize and a refreshing blend of spearmint and Tea Tree essential oils which makes it an ideal morning shower bar and is also really popular as a shaving soap. I just love making this one because the whole place smells of zingy mint as I pour it. I've had the idea of making this one in larger round bars suitable for use with an old fashioned shaving brush. So I'm off to  dig out some suitable circular moulds. I have some large sillicon muffin trays that look like just the thing.

Catching up

I've been quiet for a few days and unable to post. This was because I was involved in making something different from soaps and potions for a change. I was making a wedding cake.
It was for a beautiful young woman who is part of my extended family and her lovely guy. My gorgeous niece was fulfilling a long held ambition to be a bridesmaid, a role she carried out to perfection.
The wedding party were dressed in 1920's style clothing all in ivory and black. The bridesmaids wore black fringed "flapper" dresses with ostrich feather fascinators in their hair. The bride asked for a suitably themed cake. The picture shows the finished article.

It was a rich chocolate cake with a vanilla lemon upper tier. It had to be freshly made as near to the wedding day as possible so I really only had one shot to get it right. Luckily it went very well and the thanks, smiles & big hugs from the bride, groom & families was worth more than gold.
It was an interesting project for me and an honour to be asked. I started making celebration cakes back when my sons were small. I did their birthday cakes suitably themed to each child and made & iced fruitcakes for the family as presents. Then the people who brought their kids to the birthday parties started asking if I could do them a cake, word spread and I found myself very busy. I made my sisters wedding cake and pretty soon I was making them for all occasions.
 I once made a leaving party cake for two very dear friends and a few days later received a call from the local poetry society. The man on the phone sounded desperate. The poetry society was having a party to celebrate their 15th anniversary. They  wanted a cake that would feed at least 150 people. This represented the number of poets who'd read for them over the years. What they were looking for was a big cake with space for all 150 names to be written on the top. I had a couple of weeks to make the cake, they knew it was short notcie and they didn't have much money but the local bakery had turned down the job and a mutual friend had suggested I might be able to help?
The upshot was I made a huge fruitcake shaped and iced to look like an old leatherbound open book. I hand painted all 150 surnames onto the "pages" of the cake and I really wish I had a scan-able picture of it because I swore I'd never do another like it. It turned out really well and the poetry society loved it but I had nightmares, when I could sleep, for the entire week leading up to the event. This included a dream where I mis- spelled all the names on the cake & another where I dropped the cake in the river ( the party was held on a boat)  It also made me realise I couldn't possibly do this for a living because the stress was too much at the time.
These days I'm happy to make cakes for special occasions, and  I find the whole thing much more enjoyable, soap is still my first love and Old Pit Potions is taking a lot of my time but there's always room for a cake or two if I'm feeling inspired.

Finding my way

This could just as easily refer to my new experience of learning to blog as much as making soaps and potions. Big big thanks to my lovely, talented friend Pixie Sue/ Poppie at  http://the-creative-spirit.blogspot.com/ for suggesting that I start this blog and for being so encouraging too. Not to mention for being a willing tester for my experiments with whipped shea butter face creams.
I'm sure that the more I blog the more I'll learn.
When I started making soaps I quickly became hooked on finding and sourcing ingredients and moulds. For me it is still as fascinating as the making. When you're fussy about what goes into the stuff you're going to put on your face and body it is vital to know the origin of the ingredients.
The decison not to use anything artificial was easy, realising that a standard 10ml bottle of Lavender essential oil was not going to stretch very far when it came to perfuming my soaps was less so. It was also expensive.
I knew  very early on that I'd hit on something that I loved doing. I knew that I wanted to make more than just the odd batch of soap so with the help of a friend I found a supplier who could do beautiful Lavender oil in 100ml bottles. Buying this was was cheaper too so I was off to a good start. Their catalogue was like a treasure trove of exotic smelling oils.
I was still working in the wholefood store which was a great resource, when I needed a decent quantity of beeswax The man who sold us his local honey came through with a sweet smelling block weighing about a kilo at an excellent price. I discovered that Asian grocery stores were the perfect places to buy all sorts of base oils, not to mention having an excellent range of  Rose & Orange flower waters, more herbs and spices than I could dream of and lots of other fab things I saw as potential ingredients. They were cheaper than a lot of cosmetic supplies companies too.
Another challenge was finding the moulds to shape the soap. No piece of tupperware, plastic packaging or juice box was safe. Again the Wholefood store came up trumps as their weekly yoghurt deliveries arrived in plastic trays that could turn out six beautifully hexagonal soaps. They didn't last long but I felt happier reusing something that would have otherwise had to be thrown out. When things took off I invested in some purpose made moulds but I still use pringle tubes to mould my circular soaps, as you can see in the picture. People pass on the empties for me to clean and use.
The first bath fizzers I made used a small pot of bicarbonate of soda and a packet of citric acid from the pharmacist. These days my bicarb comes in 12 kilo sacks, which greatly amused my neighbour when she came to borrow a spoonful. The garden has herbs and flowers that become ingredients. A friend has taken up beekeeping and brings me the most wonderful beeswax. The essential oil bottles multiplied as did the bottles, jars and boxes. Where was I going to put them all?   Well that's another story...

How it all began and the question that everyone asks

Welcome to my Blog.

My name is Lorraine and I'm the creator of Old Pit Potions. A range of handmade, all natural bath & beauty products. I started out making soaps & bath goodies at the beginning of this century. makes me sound stately and venerable doesn't it?

A friend had bought me a book on soap making as a present and I was too busy working in a job that was not good for me to do anything other than look through the pages but I dreamed of making some of the beautiful bars pictured there.

Two years down the line I was happily working in a wholefood store filled with the sort of wonderful goodies that looked to me like they'd be just the thing to turn into soap. So I loaded a a basket with things like raw honey, organic oatmeal, goats milk & Lavender essential oil. I bought Coconut, Almond & Extra Virgin Olive Oils and turned my kitchen into a soap factory for the day.

Some weeks later I had what looked, smelled and lathered like very good soap indeed. Guess what everyone got for Christmas that year?

It didn't stop there. I just wanted to make more and more so that's what I did and that's where things got interesting, but that's a story for another time.

Right now I'm a few years down the line and I'm surrounded by bath fizzers & salts, massage melts & oil blends. Body and face creams, perfume spritzers and bars and bars of soap. Not to mention the wonderful materials I need to create these goodies.

Oh and the question that everyone always asks is "Why Old Pit Potions?"

The name raises a few quizzical eyebrows and a few chuckles, especially from some American friends who think that it's all about the underarms.

The truth is that the labels started as a really nice joke. I did a swap with my lovely neighbours, who wanted to give my soap as gifts alongside their delicious Sloe Gin. They came up with the label Old Pit because we live close to the site of an old coalmine. As a Miners daughter I loved the name and the picture and so the label stuck.