Several weeks ago Emily Shieh of Shieh Design Studio asked me if I would like to participate in an international friendship soap swap. There are nine soapmakers in the group from the U.S., Canada, Spain, and Ireland. Each one is making a personal soap for one other person in the group. We are to give away two bars from the batch to the intended swap member, and sell the rest. Emily gave us questionnaires not only about our soap preferences and styles, but also our personal information so we could get to know each other better. Names were drawn, and I was chosen to make a special soap for Ayuko Carlton of The Tokyo Factory.

I wasn’t sure how to proceed since Ayuko’s soap preferences aren’t very specific. She likes “mildness, softness of lather, soft fragrance, and moisturizing” soap. I had to ask about fragrances that she likes as well, and she responded, “I am not picky about fragrances. But I am not a big fan of food fragrance such as cheese cake, chocolate so on.. I like floral, herb, fruit fragrances. I will be happy with whatever soap you make. Because I’ve always wanted to try your soap~!!!” So, no pressure, right?

I started with my most moisturizing (non-goat’s milk) soap recipe – the one I use for the peppermint soap. It has a lot of hard, white oils and refined shea butter to make it as white as possible. Then I superfat it at 8% so that it won’t dry the skin or get too hard in the mold! I also used aloe vera juice for the lye solution – very soothing for dry skin. Then I found an essential oil blend that I’ve always wanted to try that smells like lemonade and the soap just took a life of its own. And since a video of the process is one of the requirements of the swap, you get to see what I made:

I’ll post the cutting video next so you can see how it turned out! (If you like what you see, I will have 10 bars available!)

Update: Here’s the link to the cutting video.