Castile Soap

I really need to make some soap soon. I have been wanting to make a Castile Soap (soap consisting of 60-100% olive oil) for a long time but time constraints with the move and other things keep getting in the way.

Castile Soap is an interesting thing, though. Some say it has to be 100% olive oil, some say you can add palm and coconut oil for better lather, or even canola oil for creaminess.

If I am able to craft this weekend I think I will make it according to this recipe:

90% Olive oil and 10% Palm oil

I hope it turns out nice. Has anyone else tried using a Castile Soap before?

What to do when bored...

If you have a hobby like knitting, crocheting, or maybe you walk to work or you're at the gym or doing other mindless, repetitive tasks I have discovered a great way to keep from being bored.

Audio books!

But, you may say, they are so expensive and I can't afford it right now. Well, there is a site you can go to that is totally run by volunteers that read books that are in the public domain. When they are done reading you can download the book for free, put it on your mp3 player or just play it from the computer.

There are lots of classic books that you may have meant to read but never got around to. Like "Little Women" by Louisa May Alcott, and they also have all the sequels to it. Or all of Jane Austen's work. There's a lot of Shakespeare on there too.

And if you want to, you can help read the books as well. The people who read are not professionals (mostly at least) so the feeling you get when they read is kind of like when your parents read to you. Which I like, at least. :-)

Oh, the site is LibriVox


Hope you have as much fun with it as I have had!

Photo tips

Just found a GREAT blogpost for processing photos in Photoshop.

And another one about the whole process.

Oh, and turn off your flash, use the macro setting on your camera and take the photos in natural light if you can.

More research...

I have been so busy this week I haven't had time to blog. This weekend I was in Oslo for a huge party for my current job (IT). We stayed in the best hotel in town and had a great dinner, a special show and then an all 80's music show with all the top names from the 80's in Norway playing 3 songs each. Amazing.

But I am totally drained and need to get crafting soon to regain some energy.

Today, I have looked at a lot of shops on Etsy and learnt the following:

I will wait with opening my shop until I have quite a bit of stock and really good photos of it. I will also have packaging ready and have stickers and business cards and samples ready for sending with the items I will be selling. And I will have a nice banner for both my shop and this blog (the one I have now is just *ugh*)and it will match my avatar at Etsy.

I have also learnt not to blab too much personal stuff in online forums, at least any forums where I can be recognized as me.

So, I am learning everyday, and when the move is over and we are more settled I will have a gameplan for putting it into action and starting up in an efficient manner. I would LOVE to start up right now of course, but as it is not possible I will use this time for research instead.

Have a great day!

Things I need to start my shop

1. A camera to take nice photos with. The cell phone camera just doesn't do it.
2. A shop banner that looks nice
3. Labels with ingredients listed for my products
4. An Excel sheet to calculate the cost of the product and the shipping
5. Packaging, boxes, jars, tissue paper, bubble wrap
6. A lightbox to take my photos
7. Ingredients
8. Business cards
9. Stickers to put on the packages


And most of all, time to do all this. I think my research will pay off eventually though. I never knew it would be this much work! I like the thought of it though, even if it is going to take a while for me to get started. I'd rather get started right and have it take longer than start wrong and have to do it over again.

Beautiful design

Cosmopolitan Girl Scrub at Trunkt

Ok, I found this beautiful design site today. Well, it is not really a design site, it is a site like Etsy but it focuses more on the beauty and composition of the photographs and apparently it is pretty hard to get in there. Definitely a place to consider once I have my products, labels and photos in order.

Oh yeah, I didn't tell you about Etsy, did I? That is where I will have a shop. Or one of the places anyway. Fun place, great people in the forum and tons of interesting things to buy. Most stuff there is handmade and people have their own shops so it is nothing like Ebay. Check it out for yourself and you'll be convinced!

Things I would like to make

Since making stuff seems to be out of  the question for now (except for soap) I have been trying to save tutorials and ideas. Today I have been researching making banners and labels for products.

I have found that most people print labels on inkjets, which is good since I feared I'd have to have things printed on a laser printer. I have also looked at branding and packaging. My hero in this is SpaTherapy. She has the prettiest labels and design I have ever seen. 

I am not great with graphics design (can't you tell?) but I do have a friend who works in advertising so I will ask him to give me some lessons.

More research tomorrow.

Moving countries

I originally started this blog in Norwegian, my mother tongue, but as our family will move to the States within a couple of months I figured it was best to start writing in English.

My husband is American, I am Norwegian but with a half-Norwegian, half-American upbringing. Less of a culture shock that way.

For various reasons we have to move countries yet again. I moved to the States when we got married, 6 years ago. We moved to Norway to be closer to my parents 5 years ago, but my husband is too homesick and we will have to move to the States again in a couple of months. There are other reasons for the move too, of course, many of them beyond our control. Our son has ADHD and is not receiving proper follow-up in school is one of the other reasons for the move.

Anyway, the result is that I will be unable to properly dive into the world of beauty product crafting until after the move, so for now I will only make soap it seems. The less stuff we need to bring over, the better.

I hope this is the last cross-planet move we have to make, I am really tired of getting rid of 80% of my belongings because it is too expensive to ship. If anyone is reading this blog and knows of a cheap international shipping company that ships from Norway, let me know.

Almost winter

I can feel winter approaching. Not only by the frosty clouds of smoke emanating from my mouth every morning but when I checked my son's face to see if it was clean before he took off to school I saw that his lips were dry and cracked. This happens to him every winter but as I am now making my own beauty products I realize that it is time to approach this problem in a new way; I need to make my own lip balms. The problem is how to find the ingredients in this country, at least without paying an arm and a leg.

So now I am researching the best recipe and the best ingredients and then I will be back with updates for how this is going.

Giving out free samples...

The last couple of weeks I have given out free samples of my soap to people I know so they can be my guinea pigs. :-) It has been an interesting experience. Some are a bit worried about using the soap. Some like it, some don't. Some dislike the color, others dislike the scent or texture. So I have tried out a few different recipes to see what people like the most.

Yesterday I gave a few of my Peppermint soaps without olive oil to my mom so she and her friends could try them out for me and give me some feedback. Personally, I prefer soap with olive oil as it works better for my skin, but some people like it better without it. It will be interesting to find out what they think about it.

Do you have any preferences for how soap should be? Smell, color, texture, etc? Please leave a comment.

Welcome to my blog

Hello and welcome to Zenobiah Natural Beauty! 

I have made soaps for a little while now and had fairly positive feedback (from people unused to handmade items...). I enjoy it a lot so I decided I might try selling some in order to support my soapmaking habit. Hence Zenobiah Natural Beauty was invented. 

Who Zenobiah is?

Zenobiah was a beautiful woman from Roman times. She was married to a Roman ruler of a small kingdom called Palmyra. Zenobiah was so intelligent and beautiful and well-liked that when her husband died she was made ruler in his stead. This fits well with my intention to make intelligent beauty products so I promptly made her my figurehead. Read more about Zenobiah here.

When I say I make soap I don't mean using a soapbase and adding color and fragrance. I make soap from scratch, with lye and vegetable oils and store them for a couple of weeks so that the chemical process called saponification finishes. There is no lye left in the soap when it is ready to be sold. I use essential oils or fragrance oils to give my soap a nice fragrance. I also add coconut milk, cocoabutter or sheabutter to make the products even better for the skin.

Does this sound interensting? Send me an email! As soon as I manage to take some photos I will upload them here so you can see how things look.