My Lemony Love

It started with an angel.  Long story short…  Boy meets girl.  Girl needs angel for her Christmas tree.  Boy suggests this shop at the beach (not knowing that Girl LOVES this shop).  They go to the shop, buy an angel, start a flotilla tradition.  At one point, Girl sees people watching the flotilla from large balconies of an inn while sipping wine or hot chocolate – and not grappling for space on the boardwalk.  Girl thinks, That sure would be nice.  Over time, that becomes a reality, a part of the tradition.

That inn – an interesting hybrid between a bed & breakfast and a hotel – offers lovely, well-appointed rooms, great views, convenient location, and quite nice toiletries, one of which is lemon verbena soap.  We’re talking real soap like what we make, not mass-produced syndet bars that leave the skin dry and itchy.  One sniff, and I was hooked.  The scent was lightly sweet and sharply lemony at the same time with beautiful green notes and just a tinge herbaceous.

It took me forever to find a similar lemon verbena scent.  I found what was marketed as a lemon verbena essential oil, which was pretty nice, only to find out later it was a blend of synthetic and natural ingredients.  L’Occitane‘s Lemon Verbena is fabulous, but too strongly lemon for what I was seeking.  Imagine how excited I was when I found both a duplication of L’Occitane’s Lemon Verbena and another lemon verbena fragrance at one of my suppliers’ online stores!  The L’Occitane is still too lemony, and the other fragrance is a bit too floral.  But when I put them together in just a certain way…  Whoa!!!  It’s perfect!  Lemony, green, floral, herbaceous.

Lemon Verbena Soap - Sunshine in the Shower!
Lemon Verbena Soap – Sunshine in the Shower!

I found my lemony love in this Lemon Verbena soap.  it’s like sunshine in the shower, perfect for cold days, grey days…  Shoot!  It’s perfect for any day that you need your eyes opened.  Yes, I’ll admit, I did have to steal a bar for my shower, but there are still several bars of this dream soap left for you to fall in love with.

 

Bringing Back Some Favorites

Do y’all hear that deep, straight-from-the-toes sigh?  It’s the sound of a woman/mom/entrepreneur who is able to shed some additions to her schedule and get back into the business of taking care of business.  Several weeks ago, my younger daughter said, “Mommy, it’s not for long.”  She was referring to my being stuck behind a dump truck on the way to their swimming lesson, but I thought about it in light of all the things I had on my plate at the time.  I was chauffeuring them to swimming lessons Mondays and Fridays, soccer practice (including coaching my younger daughter’s team) Tuesdays and Thursdays, church activities Wednesdays and Sundays, and Saturdays were soccer games with all four of us being involved in some way.  But I knew soccer would end in mid-May, swimming lessons would end the end of April, and Wednesday night church activities would be over for them before our trip.  In short, “it wouldn’t be for long.”

All that’s over now.  We’ve returned from our EPIC Spring Break trip, wrapped up the soccer season, we’re days away from the end of our school year, and I am plowing head-first back into work.  I kicked it off with three batches of amazing soap restocking.  That was Friday evening’s fun.  Mostly this weekend, though, I did minimal production and lots of resting.

Two fresh soaps - Fresh Cut Roses and Lemon Grove Gardeners Soap
Two fresh soaps – Fresh Cut Roses and Lemon Grove Gardeners Soap

In my mad soapmaking endeavors Friday evening, I started with a glorious batch of Soap of Milk & Honey (and Oatmeal!), which you can sort of see a bit of in the bottom of the picture.  I followed that with Fresh Cut Roses (the pink soap) which I’m making primarily to restock for ConTemporal, but also to add to my line as a Special Edition.  I brought the production home with Lemon Grove Gardener’s Soap (the pale yellow there with the specks of calendula petals), a perennial favorite with its scrubby properties and all natural, fresh lemony scent.

Up next is a rendezvous with The Perfect Man.  Stay tuned…

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