Of course we’re too late for all the High Holy Days of the season, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, even the more appropriate but often overlooked Small Business Saturday. But, still within the holiday shopping season, we have fresh batches of homemade soap available for sale!
Our homemade devil’s club soap, currently a rare commodity! (Photo: Mark A. Zeiger).
It took us a surprisingly long time to get around to making new batches of soap in our most popular variety, Russian tea, and our long-neglected first offering, devil’s club. But, both batches are either cured now, or will be in a day or so. We find it goes a lot faster, and is a lot more fun now that Aly’s home to participate in the process. These two join a batch of tea tree/lavender we made previously.
As ever, our primary purpose was to make the soap we need for personal use. Secondarily, we make enough to sell at a store in town, and online on our Website’s Store page.
You can learn about our soap making elsewhere on the blog, from essays such as Making Homemade Soap. We find ourselves in the rare situation of having all three of our currently offered soap varieties available to the public, along with our books, plans, T-shirts and other items for sale.
We’re particularly glad to offer devil’s club soap again. This is our most natural and indigenous soap, as we make it with devil’s club bark and root we harvest ourselves. The difficulty of harvesting and steeping the plant material in oils accounts for its rarity. We took the big step of getting back into it, so hopefully it’ll be easier in the future. We’ve added a bit of cedar wood scent to it, which complements the natural devil’s club fragrance marvelously!
As always, supplies are limited, and orders will come from our rural Alaska Post Office, so order early for Christmas!