Archives for "Crafting"

I have no idea how I started making soap. Honestly.

I get asked it a lot. A LOT. To be fair, making soap isn’t something you’re just supposed to fall into. But I think I did.

You see, I started doing really simple bath and body stuff in 2004. I got a lip balm kit from Michaels which was super-awesome! My own lip balm, woo! (It was like a block of wax, gross.) So I think that started the need to craft. From there I went to sugar scrubs, bath salts, bath fizzies…nothing involving fancy stuff like “formulas” or “recipes.” Just threw some stuff together, added coloring, and hoped for the best.

From there it started to become an OCD/control thing. Somewhere along the lines I did melt and pour soap…and I hated it. I felt (and this was ME so please don’t take offense to this, anyone! I definitely don’t mean offense to anyone who is actually talented with melt and pour) that my soaps were inferior and fake compared to “real” soapers, like cold process soapers. I would get embarassed at shows when I was near the “big time” soapers, and me with my pitiful strawberry & champagne pink soap I had poured into a mold the night before.

I remember I tried cold process soaping once after I graduated college. I had a fancy mold, one of those ones that comes apart and is guaranteed not to have the soap stick to it…well, the soap didn’t stick to it…in fact it leaked out of the mold. nice. It’s funny, I don’t even know if that WAS soap cause I don’t remember buying the lye…who knows.

I tried hot process soap about a year and a half later because I didnt want to wait the weeks and weeks for the cold process soap to be finished. i made 2 batches. the first one was ugly, like painfully ugly. i remember craters in the soap. The second batch never worked out because somehow, some way, I had managed to burn a hole THROUGH my crockpot. I guess it was the lye but who the hell knows.

Finally, I decided to give cold process a try (the Fight Club style of soap). It was ugly…it was rootbeer soap that I added too much fragrance to. It had a brown swirl and was soft and mushy. I thought it was amazing and gave it to everyone…one of my friends ended up with a stained washcloth that never really got clean and my bosses ended up with soap boxes with oily spots all over them. I was mortified.

Still I carried on and finally got the hang of it. My old bath and body company closed in Dec 2008 and in January of ’09 I opened Metropolis…well, sort of. The website wasn’t done til Feb so I guess technically February was when it “really” opened, but I had the business cards in January

So that’s my long-winded story of how I got into soap. There’s a better marketing story, about my cousin who has allergies (he really does) so I made him some soap that wouldn’t cause a reaction (I really did and he really uses it!), or the other story of how I was tired of giving more money to corporations that didn’t care about their consumers (which is true) so I decided to do-it-myself and haven’t looked back. These are all different versions of my how-I-did-it story. They’re all true, and actually happened, but as to which version is the one that “caused” me to become a soapmaker…hell if I know.

I just fell into it!

Im not the tidiest of people…theres a lot of clutter in my life and running Metropolis out of our apartment doesn’t make it any easier! But I thought I might share a little bit of how we do it:

This whiteboard holds all of the stock we have on hand and when the batches will cure. Each batch takes about 6 weeks to fully cure. This way we’re able to let big orders know how long of a lead time we need.

The smaller boxes below hold the cured soaps and are also the boxes we take to shows. The bigger boxes hold the curing soaps…they hold about 60 soaps each

Fresh soaps on the curing rack..they’ll stay on the rack for about 2 weeks then go into the big boxes

shelf we found on trash night some months ago (dont worry, it was scrubbed down!). It holds most of the ingredients for soap and the other products we make. Also holds the soap molds.

It’s a tad messy, should’ve cleaned before I took the pictures! This is where our displays are for shows and shipping materials.

There’s more on the flickr, too, if you want to see how messy my apartment really is

I’ve done etsy a couple of times, or rather I’ve tried to succeed on etsy a couple of times. The first attempts I didn’t really try to do much, just sorta thought it would all fall into place. I had a shop there all the way back in 2005 when it was free to try out (I think it was trash.etsy.com or trashcouture.etsy.com). My shop was jewelry and I figured I was probably getting swallowed up by all of the other jewelry shops there (imagine 2005 compared to now, ha!). So when I went into bodycare I figured I’d make a killing…oops! Didn’t try hard at all.


It was about this time I realized I had to put work into my etsy. Sigh. I hate work. I did a challenge to list once an hour every day for a week (12 hour period). And I guess it worked, except I had $60 in fees. Ouch! I think if I had tried a little more to promote it rather than just listed it would’ve worked better. (So now you know, that challenge CAN work!)


My most recent incarnation I’ve been more active in the forums, but its hard to be there for very long…you sort of get tied into whatever drama is happening that day and lose any productivity. I never did any teams, I sort of looked at them as another thing to distract me and force me to work. Consequently I’ve had 14 sales in almost a year. Pitiful!


So now that my countdown has begun to full-time self-employment (holy hyphens!), I’ve decided to get a little more involved in etsy and see it as a potential additional leg to Metropolis. I’ve applied to two teams and I figure I’ll have a hell of a lot more time to dedicate to them since I won’t have another job shortly!

So do I love etsy? Maybe, we’ll see how this relationship turns out. I think if I make a promise to etsy to work at it etsy might pay off for me.


I still have that etsy feature I haven’t put up here. Damn. Gotta get on that!