Here is the final bar in this #nomowmay inspired series and it's a beautiful swirly delight! Now I need your help to pick the design that is the best!!

And we are back with the third bar in the Mindful Meadow series and it is a super cute bar of soap!

So we are back for design 2 in our Mindful Meadow series - for this soap I went for a hidden flower design.

As it is #nomowmay it is the perfect time to redesign our wildflower inspired soap, Mindful Meadow. I 'm creating 4 different designs and I'm going to need your help to decide which design is best!

Now that I have sorted out my natural colourants the next thing I needed to do was to decide on a design for each of my soaps...

I thought I would revisit natural colourants and show you the soaps lafter they have cured - have the colours faded or changed at all. And does forcing the soaps through gel really make a difference?

So this week I tried out a new technique, one that I have really been looking forward to having a go at ever since I first saw a YouTube video of it. It is called the secret feather swirl...

So what have I been up to this week? Well strangely enough I have been thinking about Christmas! I know it is way too early, but...

After last week when I had some mixed results when it came to testing my natural colourants I am back making a whole kilo of coloured soap. Let's see how it goes...

As promised this blog post reports back on how my experiments using natural colours went. Well if I am honest, it has been a little bit mixed!

I am pleased to report that I have finally managed to order everything I need to finalise my soap formulations. The next step is to test out the natural colourants...

Have I managed to move forward with getting my soaps ready to be safety assessed? Well the honest answer is no! It has taken me a ridiculous amount of time to purchase my ingredients...

I am now getting to the point where I need to finalise my soap recipes so that I can submit them for safety assessment and this is leading to some serious procrastination.

This week I thought I would show you my first attempt at videoing my soap making and share how it didn't quite go to plan! At all!

I thought that this week I would report back on how my soaps have fared at my Mum and Dad's.

So this week I designed and made a hemp seed oil soap recipe and as this amazing oil is a rich green I decided to try and colour my soaps for the first time too, using organic nettle powder!

So I have designed my recipes, made them, let them cure and now I get to test them - but what actually does a good bar of soap look like? How am I going to know if I have got it right?

I made up enough Lye solution for both batches. But what hadn’t occurred to me was I didn’t have enough containers to weigh the lye for each batch separately. This was my first soaping mistake!

Luckily before I measured anything out I checked all my oils and to my absolute horror there was something floating in my castor oil!

Although I am a PhD scientist who worked for 10 years at the bench, I left over 9 years ago to work in Scientific Affairs so I wasn’t thinking enough like a bench scientist whilst designing my soaps.

I decided that before I went too far down the path of setting up a business selling soap I had better find out if I actually enjoyed making soap...