Welcome to our second and final soap of the 2018 holiday soaping season—Christmas Tree Soap! These clean white bars feature an abstract Christmas-tree-inspired swirl down the centre and a topping of dancing mica swirls. I had so much fun creating these bars, and the saponification anticipation was strong! I couldn’t wait to slice these bars and see how they’d turned out—and now I can’t wait to share them with you!
Welcome to our first Christmas 2018 soap—Sugar Plum Christmas Soap! Sugar plum will be one of our ongoing themes this season, and I’m really excited about all the different projects I’ve devised for it. We’re kicking off the theme with these stunning purple, swirly, sparkly bars—I had so much fun making these, and I haven’t been so excited to slice a soap in quite a while (well, until I made our other Christmas 2018 soap)!
I’ve been playing with lots of more complex DIYs lately, and I was itching to get back to something a bit simpler. Something made with wonderful plant-sourced oils and butters that are accented with essential oils. The sort of thing that isn’t intimidating, and really lets some of my favourite ingredients shine. That’s how we ended up here! This simple, rich Lavender Patchouli Body Butter combines a few lovely ingredients in carefully crafted amounts to create something indulgently creamy and moisturizing from some stuff you probably already have.
Back in December I picked up Laniege’s Lip Sleeping Mask at San Francisco’s Duty Free shop during a rather long stop-over on my way to New Zealand. I’d read about the product working wonders for super dry lips and was intrigued by those claims and also by the idea of having something novel to entertain me, however briefly, on my upcoming 13-hour flight across the Pacific.
This marvelous body butter is many things I thought it couldn’t be. It is rich in skin-loving shea butter, but not at all greasy. It smells deliciously of citrus, but isn’t photosensitizing. It is lightweight and whippy (and stays that way!), but you don’t have to do the freeze-whip-freeze-whip thing. You don’t even need any heat. Seriously.
One of the first recipes I ever shared on Humblebee & Me was for a “Super Nourishing Hair Balm“, all the way back in October of 2011. I’d actually made the balm months earlier, before I’d launched the blog, and had been testing it all summer and fall before I suddenly had a platform to share it on. Over the years many people have made it, and many more have asked about substitutions for items in the rather lengthy ingredient list. I thought it was high time I revisited this idea to improve on it—after all, I’ve learned a lot since 2011!
