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Still here and staying calm during COVID

Our supervisors hard at work

Like most of our city, we’ve made the painful decision to stay home amid the COVID-19 situation.  Luckily, our main base of operations is our own house and our junior staffers were on spring break for the first week.  The kids enjoyed their free time, caught up with their friends online & by phone, playing games and guitars, and watched more YouTube than their parents would probably want to calculate honestly.  The adults spent most of that time trying to remain busy and calm, counting the days until the next farmer’s market and our children back to school.  Dorothy finished getting the soap making and book keeping all moved into one room of the house (woohoo!)  There was massive progress on getting garden boxes and beds prepared, weeded, and planted.  Then week two kicked in and we faced the dilemmas of school closures, markets and events being canceled, and the general worries of being a parent and small business in this rapidly changing situation.  It’s been stressful on our whole city and we wanted to let you know we’re still here, doing fine but just like most of you it’s a bit crazy.

Our supervisors hard at work
Our supervisors hard at work in March 2020. They make sure we take regular breaks and get some fresh air.

We hope that you and yours are all doing well as you can in all of this.  We’re working with our local markets, fellow vendors, wholesalers, private labelers, and charitable groups from a distance to help share information and updates with our cherished customers and followers until this has passed.  There are no markets or events for the month of March, including Founders Day at Wunderlich; they have all been canceled as of March 19th.  We’ve been advised that Schulenburg SausageFest, Mancuso’s GatorFest, and Chappell Hill’s Bluebonnet Festival are now canceled also.  Fingers are crossed that all of these measures do the trick in ending this, everything will be normal again soon, just in time for spring crops and the farmer’s markets to reopen.  We’re looking forward to seeing everyone again soon, happy and healthy.  Please do keep reaching out to us for information as you need it.  We’re monitoring our texts, emails, and voicemails to respond to everyone as quickly as possible.   We’ll keep posting info as we get it here to the website and our Facebook page; plus more pictures from the scene here on the blog. We’ve also tried to ensure that the website inventory is up to date so your orders will be processed quickly and smoothly.

Great employee
Great employee in the booth at Wunderlich Feb 2020

As you can see, our supervisory crew has approved of the new layout in the soap room and will ensure that we find time to relax a little when stress gets too high here. The kids are back in school and staying busy. We’ve used this time to reflect on how we’ve expanded our skills over the past year, enjoy the little moments, and finished getting our liquid soap making back on track. Dorothy will get posts made for you about when the liquid soaps will be live, how we’ve finally conquered bread making, learned cheese making and canning and blacksmithing, grew new produce, crafted a vendor group of talented local artisans and makers that are outstanding in their fields, and the personal goals we hit over the past year. Make sure to subscribe so you’ll get notified as the posts go live; some of the stories out of it all were honestly funny and a good read.

Stay safe and healthy everyone.

Happy Washing!

The TPC Team

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Floral Soaps

Three new floral scents for your pleasure: Midnight Jasmine, Fresh Cut Roses, and English Tea Rose.
Three new floral scents for your pleasure: Midnight Jasmine, Fresh Cut Roses, and English Tea Rose.
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Now, most people who know me personally would tell you that pretty floral scents aren’t my usual train of thought. I’m not what you’d call a girly girl and my preferences are to avoid overly sweet smells. I absolutely love our flowers out in the garden, have been inspired by many beautiful blooms, eventually took on that requested honeysuckle scent, and we have added many, many more real flowers to our green thumb experience. But to find me humming happily up to my elbows in all those long-awaited floral scents? Only if it’s something like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” or hubby would be checking my temperature again. But that was before a really cool and creative lady lit a fire under me lately….

Honeysuckle has been a running favorite for us for quite a while but I kept receiving requests for other fun floral scents. They were added to our idea list for me to play with when I got some down time or enough requests for that one scent for there to be a real demand. And yes, we got some seriously off the wall ideas from customers in addition to the more normal thoughts. Roses have always been popular but creating the “perfect” rose scent is a true challenge. There are so many components that make up a rose scent and everyone perceives smell a little differently. I also had to decide between keeping it completely natural, trying to work with only essential or fragrance oils, or whether we wanted to completely create our own from scratch scent. This made the floral soaps a little daunting until the perfect project came along that allowed me to go wild with that floral wish list. I owe so many thanks to our little pink haired friend who keeps that fire lit under me!

English Tea Rose and Fresh Cut Roses soaps
English Tea Rose and Fresh Cut Roses soaps

After much researching, trial and error, laughter and frustration, we have started bringing out the results to share with everyone. Please welcome to the website the first three of the additions to our shop: English Tea Rose, Fresh Cut Roses, and Midnight Jasmine. Each of these whisks me away to the garden when I sniff them- the soap room smells like a wonderful wild garden in full bloom! These two rose fragrance oils were voted the most true-to-life in our researching and I’m still in love with how this version of them looks (pink circle and rustic cut white one above.) The Midnight Jasmine has a hint of dew winding thru the background of a not too sweet jasmine and lily fragrance blend. The off white round shape was fun for this one but I really wanted to add some color when I remade this so the next batch was a little different. I will have an updated picture for your viewing pleasure very soon in the catalog. What do you think of the newbies? We would love to hear your feedback and if you have more ideas for our list. These are being added to our catalog as I type but this first release is very limited. Please be patient if you miss these here on the site as I will have them restocked here and in the booth in time for Fenske’s Market September 7th. Preorders will reserve your bars as usual and you are not billed for them until they are ready to ship.

I must now get back to the soap room and get to work again. Please stay tuned for more pictures and updates as I play catch up here on the website!

Happy Washing!
Dorothy

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Mixing Soap Techniques Again

I confess, I did it again. Couldn’t help it really. Had a great, simple, straight forward soap idea to make but I just couldn’t behave. As most of our followers have learned, I love to experiment in the soap kitchen. It’s just too much fun to try new shapes, scents, molds, and off the wall ideas for me to resist. My favorite soaps are the old fashioned cold process style but it is a lot of fun to play with the other styles as projects allow me. Luckily, this one let me go crazy.

Uncut Fruit Smoothie Soap
Uncut Fruit Smoothie Soap

There had been multiple requests from customers (and begging from my kids) for me to give a fruity fragrance oil a whirl. It has a blast of so many yummy fruits like raspberries, citrus, kiwis, strawberries, bananas, and apples. I knew it would be fun and expected a kid’s soap from the batch. A simple log soap that could be shared among us all, maybe one swirl or something, standard recipe even. Nothing too crazy, maybe even somewhat boring compared to the other projects that week. It was a busy week too and I knew I would have two sets of sad little eyeballs looking at me if I mentioned maybe waiting until the following week to make their soap. Ahhh, what a parent will do to avoid disappointing their kids at times. So I decided to whip it up real quick while my visiting sister-in-law hung out with me in the kitchen. No pressure anywhere in this, right? Exit my sanity and enter Murphy’s Law. I knew as soon as I unmolded them that there was trouble with the batch. Sure enough, it failed my tests (don’t think Angie’s ever gonna forget lye testing lol) and I had a loaf of soap that the kids were swooning over but couldn’t touch. Time to grab my favorite knife!

Fruit Smoothie uncut in the paper
Fruit Smoothie uncut in the paper

I had enough extra of the fragrance that I decided to chop the batch up and pop it into the double boiler for a milled light green soap. I tweaked it a bit to fix it to my specs (I am known to be picky about them- another way I drive hubby crazy some days) and then the mad scientist light bulb clicked on over my head. I had wanted to try mixing some more soap techiniques and here, lying so innocently in front of me, was the perfect opportunity. Happy dance! I let it finish its cooking while I mixed up a regular soap base which I dyed with annatto seed powder for an orangey red color to make a big contrast in the bases. I combined the raw cold process soap with the hot process soap and did my best to mix them together without overdoing it. I wanted a definite contrast in the soap styles like when we do some of the confetti soaps instead of a completely smooth mix, I had thought. For those soapers thinking of trying this, plan to work quickly. The temp differences make it tricky to completely combine. It couldn’t decide whether it wanted to stay put or separate in the mold. Hot process wants to clump as it cools and its texture differences are immediately obvious, even to those who don’t really understand the difference in them. The fruity scent didn’t accelerate either soap, luckily, and hasn’t discolored any of it. It was a lot of fun to make though and I’d do it again. The look of this run is most often compared to slices of lava when people see it. What do you think? I love the texture differences on the tops of these too. We’re still debating if I’ll make this the official look for our Fruit Smoothie soap so please chime in if you have a thought on it!

Side and top view of Fruit Smoothie soap
Fruit Smoothie soap- Mixing soap techniques

Please welcome Fruit Smoothie to our catalog as of today. Sorry I never put out a teaser on this one but I kept this batch aside for special monitoring. It has passed all of its tests every time and is finally old enough to be shared with our friends and followers. Truth be told, I was curious enough about this run that I kept it beyond its usual confinement time 🙂 You’re going to love the fruity smell of this one and the bubbles are awesome! I was surprised at the response to this scent from all ages; it appears that this one won’t be for just the kids. Drop me an email or comment here about your thoughts or find us on Facebook too. We love hearing your input and ideas. I must now get back to tweaking the website in the background. Hope your weekend goes well and we’ll see you at our booth again soon!

Happy Washing!
Dorothy