Joy Lane Happenings

One of the trickier parts of scaling lotion is actually getting distilled water in bulk. It's not expensive, but because it's so heavy, you can't get it shipped, even though we looked for drum sizes. For a while now, Katy has emptied the display at Market Basket while every dad she passed on the way to the checkout asked, "Thirsty?" A huge THANK YOU to the crew at @marketbasket that now let's us pre-order and has two carts waiting for us when we get there. Also! Exciting news! We had a bunch of you ask if we could have regular...

Today was lovely Katy took the girls and let me sleep in till 8:45, which I haven't done in years! Then, we had a tea party with the girls and their grandparents and introduced them to Anne of Green Gables, one of our childhood favorites. Plus, we are still on a high from everything you guys did to make our Cinderella sale a success. We were blown away as we sailed past our goals for the month and just kept going. Thank you from two very happy soapmakers! We just put in an order on Friday for an awesome new...

We just cleared our biggest hurdle to scaling our soap batches by June 1st! If you’re not familiar with soapmaking, you might not know that making soap with 100% milk (no water) is notoriously difficult. You have to add lye to milk without scalding it. When you add lye to water, the temperature jumps in seconds to over 200 degrees, so you can imagine what happens to liquid milk. It burns almost instantly. You get around this by adding your lye to frozen milk and stirring it slowly. Hence the problem with scaling: It’s pretty laborious to stir five pounds...

We just cleared our biggest hurdle to scaling our soap batches by June 1st! If you’re not familiar with soapmaking, you might not know that making soap with 100% milk (no water) is notoriously difficult. You have to add lye to milk without scalding it. When you add lye to water, the temperature jumps in seconds to over 200 degrees, so you can imagine what happens to liquid milk.  It burns almost instantly.You get around this by adding your lye to frozen milk and stirring it slowly. Hence the problem with scaling: It’s pretty laborious to stir five pounds of frozen milk...

These are just a few of our failures so far in 2021. New shaving soap that seized, candle formula that dried with a giant hole down the middle (I literally sat there staring at it thinking, 'I have never seen wax behave this way before), and a batch of soap we made with a slightly different process that worked beautifully and would allow us to scale our batch sizes, only to be cut open the next morning and be gel on the inside. I had actually jumped up and down when I thought this one worked. Now, we have to...