I love this time of the year when I get to put the usual soap designs aside and create something new for our Limited Edition Christmas Collections...it's fun and exciting right?!

Well...there are days where I feel like I've skipped merrily through a lovely field of flowers and discovered a beautiful rainbow at journey's end...and then there are days like today where I've plunged headlong into a mine field and narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster!

Have you ever wondered what all the hype is about when it comes to handmade soap?  Like me, you've probably at some time had reason to consider purchasing a bar of handmade soap and thought "What's so special about it?  Why should I buy that when I can get the same thing so much cheaper at the supermarket?  Soap is just soap, right?"  Wrong!  While a bar of handmade soap is often more expensive than commercially-produced soap, handcrafted soap offers so much more in terms of benefits to one...

I touched briefly on the very early history of soapmaking in my previous post to give you a foundation for viewing modern techniques associated with an ancient tradition.  However I thought it was worth exploring this a little further. In this post you will see that with the progression of time has come many changes in tradition and technique. 

As I mentioned previously, soapmaking began in its crudest form in the time of the Babylonians, around 2800 BC.  References have been found on ...

While the making of soap is an ancient tradition, it has changed somewhat over the centuries both in the way it is produced and in its very nature.  The earliest records of soapmaking date back to the Babylonians.

Traditionally soap has always been used for cleaning, whether it be oneself or things such as fabrics or domestic utensils. 

It is believed the term soap gets its name from 'Mount Sapo', the supposed sacrificial site used by the Ancient Romans.  'Sapo' is the Latin term for soap ...