This year the Cville Craftacular is doing two Pop-up Markets before their big holiday show in December. We have had the privilege of being part of both of them! The next pop-up market takes place at the Scottsville Pavilion this Sunday (November 15th) from 10am-4pm. Come check out all of the amazing handmade items and pick up some of our goat milk soap.
Recently two new stores started carrying our goat milk soaps! It is always so exciting to add new stores to our list and give our customers more opportunities to purchase our soaps:
The Spotted Pocket is a new online store that sells all natural baby items like cloth diapers, baby carriers, and more. They also offer all natural products for moms! That’s where our goat milk soap comes in! The Spotted Pocket now carries a large variety of our soap.
Aw Shucks Store is a country store in Glen Allen, Virginia. This is is not your average, everyday convenience store! They have an amazing selection of local products and we are so happy to announce that our goat milk soaps are now among those local products.
People are often shocked to see that we give away FREE samples at our farmer’s market and craft show tables. They are little samples, good for a few hand washings, but are enough to give you an idea of the quality of our soap. We do this for one very important reason… Because we believe that once you use our soap that you will be in love! We have a very high percentage of people returning to purchase soaps after trying one of our samples. So for us the samples are a great way to build our customer base!
If you are interested in trying our soaps stop by one of our booths and pick up a sample… We are confident that you will love it! Check out the “Where to Buy” page on our website to see where we will be next!
We absolutely love hearing from customers! Over the weekend we received a message from Sandy about her experience with our Canine Shampoo Goat Milk Soap:
“We purchased a bar of your Canine Shampoo when we attended the Harvest festival at Monticello for our Jack Russell/Beagle rescue dog. Barkley had his first bath with it today. All I can say is WOW!
He smells great and his coat is so soft. He appears to be shedding less and is not scratching his coat. His white coat is so bright.He loved being rubbed down with bar and we loved how easily it rinsed off.
Thanks again for recommending it. It is definitely Barkley approved.”
If you are interested in trying our Canine Shampoo you can find it here.
We are so excited to announce that The Freckled Farm Soap Company’s goat milk soap can now be found at the Wholefoods Market in Short Pump, VA. We are thrilled to continue to add to the list of stores that carry our line!
What to do with that last little bit of soap? You know, that thin little sliver that is left after you have been using the bar for a while. It begins to have a softer constancy and you use it up quicker. So how can you prolong the life of this little piece of soap?
There is an easy solution to this… Add it to the next bar of soap. It’s as simple as that! It keeps that sliver from washing away quickly, so you get more bang for your buck! There are a few ways of doing this…
1. Get both bars of soap wet. Press them together. Make sure that you rub and press the edges of soap sliver against the new bar of soap so the whole sliver is firmly against the new bar and it makes a seal. Allow the soap to dry entirely before you use it again. The soap will have melded into one new bar. If you use it again before it has had a chance to dry completely the bars may come apart again. This is how I do it and it works quite well!
2. A friend of mine, who works with clay, suggests combining the two bars like you would combine two clay pieces: With a knife score one the side of each bar. Wet both bars, then press the scored sides together. She swears that it holds the bars tightly together quicker and that you don’t have to allow it to dry for the bars to successfully stick. This friend of mine also likes to combine the Deep Sea and Tea Tree bars to make what she calls “The perfect bar of soap.”
3. Finally I have had customers tell me that they collect all of their slivers and once they have a good collection (I can imagine this would take a while considering the longevity of our soap) they get all the slivers wet, then press them all together to make this organic shaped soap hunk. Like with the first method allow the “hunk” to dry completely so that it will hold together tightly for future uses.
I hope you found this helpful to make your soap last longer!
We often have customers ask us what makes our goat milk soap different from the bars they get at the store. The answer they get is probably more than they asked for, but it’s something we’re passionate about. So here goes.
Aside from the obvious difference that ours is Goat Milk Soap, what you typically find in stores in the form of a bar soap is actually not soap at all. The major chemical companies that make up your major brand “soaps”, deodorants, toothpastes, etc have carefully marketed their products to look like soap and most people refer to these as soap. In fact if you look at the labelling these products do not contain the word soap anywhere on their label. They call themselves moisturizing bars, beauty bars, etc. but not soap. The reason for this is that the Food and Drug Administration has a pretty strict guideline for what constitutes soap: “To be regulated as “soap,” the product must be composed mainly of the “alkali salts of fatty acids,” that is, the material you get when you combine fats or oils with an alkali, such as lye.”
The major chemical companies worked very hard to make products that were cheap, plentiful, and easy to manufacture. They took a bunch of synthetic chemicals like lathering agents and detergent cleansers in order to mimic soap. Many of these detergent bars are missing glycerin (a natural byproduct of the natural soap-making process), and other beneficial properties of real soap.
The following is a list of some of the chemicals that are found in these detergent cleansers. The best way to avoid these chemicals is to use natural soap like ours:
Triclosan: a key ingredient in antibacterial products. According to the FDA: “Animal studies have shown that triclosan alters hormone regulation.” and “Other studies in bacteria have raised the possibility that triclosan contributes to making bacteria resistant to antibiotics.”
Propylene Glycol: a petroleum-based product that is dangerous when inhaled, an irritant, and a metabolic disruptor. Known to exert high levels of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) during degradation in surface waters. This process can adversely affect aquatic life by consuming oxygen needed by aquatic organisms for survival.
Polyethylene Glycol: can be a skin sensitizer, resulting in allergic contact dermatitis in some individuals.
Sodium Lauryl Sulfate: causes skin irritation, there are studies that point to residual levels of Sodium Lauryl Sulfate in the brain, lungs, liver, and heart. It has been linked to hormone imbalance because it mimics Estrogen.
Butylated Hydroxytoluene: acts as a synthetic vitamin E. It is absorbed through skin. Long-term and repeated exposure caused renal and hepatic damage in rats.
So how can you avoid chemical’s? By using OUR SOAP! Alkali salts of fatty acids from all natural vegetable oils which are formed when those oils are mixed with lye. The lye is not existent after the chemical reaction with the fatty acids in the oils and is no longer present in the final product. Then we add essential oils (literally the oils of the natural product itself) of things like lavender, tea tree, etc. And of course there is the goat milk, which comes directly from our small diary goat farm. We never add anything that isn’t natural and necessary for a great bar of soap.
At The Freckled Farm Soap Company we offer custom orders for our goat milk soap. This can be for wedding or party favors, or even a gift. This week we sent out a custom order for a Bed and Breakfast in NY! These half bars will be used as their guest soaps.
If you would like to learn more about our custom soap orders please visit our website.
At The Freckled Farm Soap Company we do whatever we can to ensure that we are making products that are good for you. One of the ways we do that is to never use dyes or other colorants in our soap. Yet, our soaps have very different colors. So I thought it would be a good idea to go over what it is that gives our soaps their color.
Many of our soaps end up being a nice tan/cream color. This is primarily due to the color that the milk turns when heated by the lye. We make our soaps at room temperature all year long, so there is always a little bit of variation in the exact temperature of the soap when it is set aside to cool.
Aside from the ambient temperature there are a few other factors that influence color:
Essential Oils: Though many essential oils come out mostly clear, some can have some natural color to them. The most notable of these in my mind is Orange Essential Oil. This is what gives our Sunrise Citrus soap its orange color.
Other ingredients: Of course anything we add to the soap has the ability to change the color.
We use a green tea powder to make our Lemongrass Green Tea soap since we don’t want to add any unnecessary water. This gives that soap a nice green/brown color. One thing to note about this soap is that due to the tea this soap is prone to oxidation before it cures. This can result in different shades of green and brown from the same batch of soap.
Rosewood Salt is made with Himalayan Pink Salt, which naturally colors it.
Deep Sea, is made with Kelp and Spirulina powders. The Spirulina especially gives that soap a deep green color.
Honey Oatmeal is a warm honey color due to…. well, Honey!
In the end anything that colors our soap, as nice as some of them are, are there only for their intended topical or aromatic benefits. The colors that those ingredients produce are just a nice addition.
People are always asking us how our Canine Shampoo works. It’s in bar form, like all of our soaps, and most people are used to working with liquid dog shampoo. Does it lather well? How is it applied? Does it rinse clean? Does it work on long haired dogs? So I wanted to do this post to show it in action…
Last week our two dogs, Frankie and Annabelle, got out and ran away. They were gone for two days and it was awful. When we finally got them home we noticed that they were completely covered in ticks. I spent time picking the ticks off, but when it came to Frankie getting the ticks out of his hair was nearly impossible. I removed any I could on his stomach, but we were going to have to find an alternative for the rest of his body… So we used our Goat Milk Soap Canine Shampoo on him. For the rest of the evening ticks were practically falling off of him…
Our Canine Shampoo lathers great, as you can see in the pictures below, and it rinses very easily and clean. It’s applied by rubbing the bar directly on the dog. This avoids waste. With those liquid soaps, at least in our experience, you end up using half the bottle in one wash. You pour the soap on their back and have to pull it all over their bodies. You end up using a lot more than you need. With our soap we have only used one bar on our dogs since we debuted the soap last summer. That would make for four or so washes with two dogs and the bar is still not gone. It leaves Frankie’s hair, who has a long wire hair, soft and clean!
