Well, it's been live for about a month or so now *hangs head in shame*, I just hadn't got round to announcing it on my blog!
Gah, I'll never get rich with such a lax attitude!!
Now, I am going to assume that you just might want the web address :D
www.simplyangelic.bigcartel.com
So far, my customers have been very happy with the melts, which is fantastic, and something I am very proud of.
Here are images of some of the melts currently on offer.
Frosted Berry is a wonderfully sweet scent based upon peppermint, vetiver and patchouli.
Brandysnap is a sumptuous Christmas scent of cinnamon, sweet orange and tangerine essential oils.
Bring Me Sunshine is perfect for burning at this time of year as it lifts the spirits on dark, damp, autumnal days.
At £3.75 per pack of 6, these are wonderful for either treating yourself, or as a gift. Bear us in mind when picking out your stocking fillers this Christmas.
Wow, is it really been this long since I last blogged!?! Talk about neglect :s
Anyway, this bar was inspired by the avocado and honey hair mask I use about once a month. My hair loves the mask so I decided to try it in a 'poo bar. Scented with eucalyptus, lemongrass and may chang essential oils to clarify and cleanse the hair, it contains pureed avocado and, yes, you guessed it, honey!!
I'll let you know how I go on with it.....think I'll have to lower the superfat as the avocado is quite oily, which, in my excitement at actually soaping for the first time in months, I forgot to take into account. Nevermind, it smells divine.....hopefully it'll be good to use too.
From here on in I'll be doing a feature entitled Deviant Friday, where the beautiful works of chosen artists will be displayed here. Each week the theme of the feature will change, highlighting artists using various media and subject matter.
As my main artistic interests lie with traditional media, this week will feature artists who work within this category, concentrating on paintings.
Feel free to go and browse the galleries of these artists and be inspired by their unique interpretations of their chosen subject matter.
I've neglected both of my blogs of late so as I'm browsing the web using Stumbleupon I thought I'd share some of the links and pages I find along the way.
First up is a cute little project for reusing the various jars that we all end up having! Book Page jars
Having been looking at alternative ways to display plants/flowers in my postage stamp sized garden, this next project struck a chord. Tyre planter
Along a similar theme are these ideas for creating colour in your garden if, like me, you have limited space. Spacially challenged
A plethora of crafty projects can be found at this lovely site. A Little Hut
And lastly(because I'm off to bed in a sec!) a lovely way to transfer nature directly onto your art projects Leaf and flower prints
I'd had an absolutely rubbish night's sleep the previous evening, and made up an aromatherapy blend for myself consisting of vetivert, lemongrass and clary sage. It was a very 'heavy' blend, but it did the job beautifully!
I woke up the next morning feeling inspired, and this...
...is what I came up with.
Using Redbush tea as my liquid, with added coconut cream(my most favourite ingredient....for now anyway!), and tussah silk, and charcoal plus cocoa powders for the swirls, I am in LOVE!
For the purposes of soaping, I added a touch of benzoin to the blend, and upped the lemongrass a little as, as most soapers know, citrus oils tend to fade really quickly, and I wanted to hang onto it for as long as possible.
I very nearly repeated my previous mistake of forgetting to add my essential oils, but just before I split the batter to add colour I remembered, and into the mix they went. All I can say at this point is that I then had to move very quickly. I'm not sure which of the essential oils was the offender, but one of them will have a smacked bottom next time I use it...I just need to work out the guilty party.
Despite having to move like greased lightening, I got the batter into the mould, and styled as I wanted, so all in all it was a successful batch.
Aside from making soap, and occasionally picking up a pain brush, one of my other loves in life is music. It will always be a regret that haunts me that I never had the balls to follow my dream and take up singing as a career. I'm not saying I'd have been any good at it, but there's so much you can say with a song, so much emotion you can convey with a piano and a pure, unadulterated voice.
For me, this song here, by Adele, is everything a song should be. It's beautiful, it's pure, and it's not bolstered by any fancy tricks. It doesn't need any bolstering. It simply is.
I'd been meaning to make this particular soap for a while now, and had settled on a new look for it. So, I get all my ingredients weighed out, put together my essential oil blend of lavender, cedarwood, black pepper and clary sage, and set about putting it all together. Some tussah silk went into my lye water, coconut cream went into my oils and things were looking good.
The soap batter came to trace quite quickly(probably due to the cocoa butter I had included this time) and so I set aside a small portion of the batter to colour(I used a tiny amount of cocoa powder and some alkanet infused olive oil), added some soap chunks I'd cut up from another batch to the main portion, and proceeded to mix them in.
I then placed half of the main portion into the mould( a cute little Really Useful Box I'd bought in town over the weekend), poured a smidge of the coloured portion ontop of that, than added the rest of the batter, followed by a swirled layer of the remaining coloured soap.
As well as the chunks I'd cut up previously, I'd also made up some soap curls using a potato peeler.
So they were placed at specific intervals on the top of the soap. It looked great.
BUT, what I'd forgotten to do, and swore profusely at myself for, was add the dam essential oils!!
One was most definitely NOT amused.
At all.
I didn't want to ruin my visual masterpiece(pfft), so had no other option but to leave it scent-sually nekkid.
Damn. Blast. Buggeration.
*and breath*
I wrapped my nekkid soap up and popped it into the airing cupboard to encourage it to gel. The very last thing I wanted was a partial gel as that would have had me inconsolable.
Anyway, this is what my nekkid Fools Gold soap looks like.
Time for me to go sit alone, in the corner, sporting a very big dunce cap.......
I made the pillow box myself out of 280gsm Kraft card, and I'm really happy with it. Maybe needs a little tweaking here and there, but overall I feel it's a good place to start.
Visually strong, yet very sensitive(much like the perfect man!), Smoke and Mirrors is the latest artisan creation from Simply Angelic. Made with 100% olive oil, with added coconut cream to boost the lather and further enhance the moisturising qualities of this soap, Smoke and Mirrors boasts an impressive array of natural ingredients including oatmeal, cocoa, cinnamon and charcoal powders respectively.
In the mould
The aroma of this very masculine soap comes from a carefully selected blend of pure essential oils including cedarwood atlas, patchouli, clary sage, sweet marjoram, and lavender(yes boys, there is a smidge of lavender in there, but don't worry, there's nothing girly about this scent at all.)
Having just washed my hands with a small sliver I took from the end of the loaf, I keep getting a faint waft of the fragrance as I type, and I have to say it is very lovely indeed.
It's really inspiring, with many great ideas for all kinds of excellent arty projects.
Another fantastic find is here at Arctida . Her handmade jewellery is stunning, the photography inspired, and quality of the overall blog content means that you're sure to keep returning time and time again.
For those of you with Etsy stores, Craftcult offers many Etsy related applications and widgets to increase exposure for your handmade goodies. I haven't had a proper chance to look around the site yet, but it looks very interesting indeed.
Happy wanderings my friends, feel free to comment and add your favourite places on the web.
You've been there yourself, right? You suddenly become inspired;an idea takes hold and you have no idea where it's taking you, or indeed what the outcome will be, but you just HAVE to find out.
Well, that happened to me today. My clary sage essential oil that I'd ordered arrived *hoorah* and I set about trying to create a smokey, masculine blend for the men in our lives.
I picked out some other oils that I believed would be suitable(namely lavender, sweet marjoram, cedarwood atlas, and patchouli) and added a drop here, a smidge there, until I was happy with the blend. As I do with every experimental blend I create, I mixed the oils into a tablespoon of vegetable oil and put it to one side to enable the scents to marry together.
Later on I began running myself a bath, and as I hadn't used a face mask for a few weeks, decided to conjure one up using a very simple base of bentonite clay, and cornflour.
I use bentonite as my skin has a tendency to be a little temperamental, and bentonite absorbs the excess oil without being too harsh, and the addition of the cornflour means that when the mask is mixed into a paste it is ultra smooth and easier to apply.
Anyway, I digress.
I wanted to add a few drops of essential oil to the mask, but couldn't decide which to choose, until I spied the premade blend I'd made earlier in the day. All the oils I'd used were skin friendly, so why not? I added a teaspoon of the blend to the clay mix,followed by enough water to make the mask into a smooth paste. It smelt divine(not at the top of my list of priorities as the mask is meant to be of therapeutic value rather than for scent alone, but it does help!) and so I retired to the bathroom to have a soak and try it out. I applied the mask to my face, massaging the clay gently onto the skin until I had an even layer on, then sat back while the mask did it's work.
Having waited 10 minutes or so, I cleaned the mask off and examined the results. Wow, wow, wow! My skin felt SO smooth, and looked really healthy. I can't stop stroking it!
I think I may have stumbled upon a recipe worth testing and developing into a saleable product to add to the Simply Angelic range. I love these little discoveries, how they shape us and our future.
As you can see, there are lines going down the soap from where the dessicated coconut I placed on top has caught on the cutting blade, but that is a minor problem, IMHO. I honestly believe this is my favourite soap, so far.
......of the Clary Sage essential oil I ordered is torture. I want it NOW godamnit!
Clary isn't an oil I've used before, but it intrigues me, so I took the chance and ordered some, along with my staple oil of lavender, which I couldn't be without.
I've read that Clary is a bit of a marmite oil, you either love, or detest the scent. I'm hoping it'll be the former!
Now, I have plans for this little beauty.
First and foremost, I have read good things about it's use in hair care products, so I hope to make a shampoo bar, and eventually a liquid conditioner. Clary is meant to strengthen hair, which would be great as mine is far too temperamental for my liking.
Clary will also hopefully have a role to play in helping me sleep. I'll be using it sparingly in this regard, but will report back with the results as soon as I've tried it out.
Showing off my packaging for my aroma-melts.
I'm pretty happy with it, although I need to source some slightly larger organza bags as currently the 6 melts contained within fit a littletoo snuggly inside.
Retailing at around £4 for 6 melts, these will be on sale in my Etsy store very soon.
With what you may ask?
Coconut cream.
Or, more specifically, my latest soap, a coconut cream Castille, scented with geranium, bergamot and mandarin essential oils.
Traditionally, a true Castille is made from simply olive oil, lye and water, and is known for it's unique feel which is due to the high oleic fatty acid content of olive oil. Some people, myself included, find this feel to be, um, slimy, and not overly pleasant. However, olive oil soaps are known to be incredibly mild, so, being stubborn by nature, I wanted to see if I could find an ingredient that would still keep to the traditional recipe as much as possible, but that would cut down on the slime factor somewhat!
Coconut cream was 'that' ingredient.
I made a small 4 bar batch, and am so glad that I did. What a beautiful soap it has turned out to be with a thick, lotion-like lather......and NO slime! As a bonus, it smells absolutely divine.
Usually Castille soap is cured, and considered much better for it, for months rather than weeks, as is the norm with other cold process soap.
With this in mind, I cannot wait to see just how good this lovely soap feels in around 3 months time.
This little pot of wonder contains my latest creation, Simply Angelic's All Purpose Beauty Balm.
Unfragranced, and coloured only by the ingredients used, it is suitable for even the most sensitive skin.
It can be used either as a traditional balm on sore or chapped skin, or as a gentle alternative to alcohol based make-up removers.
One of the main ingredients of this balm is Calendula oil, known for it's superior skin soothing properties. Calendula itself is known to have anti-inflammatory properties that make this herb ideal for adding to skincare formulations.
Other key ingredients used in our Beauty Balm include beeswax, mango and avocado butters, peach kernel oil and meadowfoam seed oil.
