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It's Pumpkin Spice Everything Season!

10/19/2014

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In case you’ve missed it, it’s Pumpkin Spice Everything season, and I mean everything:  pumpkin spiced lattés, pumpkin crème double stuffed cookies, pumpkin spice fro-yo, double dunk pumpkin donuts, frothy head pumpkin beer, pumpkin spice candy coated chocolate, pumpkin pie spice potato chips, frosted pumpkin pie spice ala mode toaster pastries, pumpkin spice English muffins, pumpkin spice soy milk, and pumpkin spice marshmallows. Every time you turn around in retail stores, wham!, there’s Pumpkin Spice something staring back at you. While you are numb-struck in your PS glaze-eyed stupor you’ll be jostled by customers as they push you aside so they can snatch up those “for a limited time only” items. We are being pumpkinized and soon nothing will be off limits for an overhaul in a PS version. Comedian John Oliver went over the top in a diatribe about this flavor attack on society and, while his tongue-in-cheek poke at the Pumpkin Spice invasion is funny, his observations are pretty spot on about the overuse of this flavor. Frankly, there are just some things that should never be Pumpkin Spice-ized. 
 And if you think that everything thing with Pumpkin Spice flavor actually has real pumpkin in it, think again. As we learned with “Pumpkingate,” real pumpkin rarely makes an appearance in the ingredient label of these products.
Kumbha Moon Soap Company isn’t immune to the Pumpkin Spice craze either. In early September we made our first batch of Pumpkin Spice soap in response to many customer requests. As you know, our soaps and laundry powder are made with ingredients that are food-grade and we source them whenever possible from places like farmers markets, natural food stores, sustainable wholesalers, our backyard garden, and the woods around us. We did a lot of research on using real pumpkin in homemade soap and contacted many trusted and experienced “olde tyme” soap makers (listservs are great resources for making new friends) to learn from their experiences with working with real pumpkin. We are committed to using real natural ingredients and never add anything to our products that is artificial or synthetic. Our motto is Real. Simple. Soap. and we will not wiggle in our values to even consider adding fake pumpkin or fake fragrances. 

Our Pumpkin Spice soap is made from organic pumpkin puree and organic vanilla bean pods straight from our pantry cupboard and we used real stream-distilled cinnamon leaf and clove bud essential oils to bring up the spice note of this soap. The real pumpkin adds an amazing and authentic pumpkin essence to the soap and also colored it a warm honey-amber color that is reminiscent of fall. We used real ground cinnamon from our pantry and sprinkled a layer right in the middle of the batch so that each bar has an interesting color line in it that also adds more real natural essence. Our Pumpkin Spice bars smell amazing on the curing racks right now and the first batch should be ready in a few more weeks. We’ve had some friends stop by to do a little “sniff testing” on some of our new batches and they declared our Pumpkin Spice soap to be a real winner.
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Real ingredients make real soap


Real. 
Simple. 
Soap. 
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Pumpkin Spice Soap
As we've challenged you before, if you are going to eat it, put it on your skin, or clean your house with it, turn it over and read the label. If you can’t pronounce or recognize most of the ingredients, chances are that you are holding a product made mostly from synthetic- or chemical-based ingredients. Turn over a bar of soap from Kumbha Moon Soap Company and you’ll always be able to recognize each ingredient! 
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And the winner is.....you choose it!

10/17/2014

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We had a terrific response for suggestions on what to name our new cinnamon soap! The Kumbha Moon girlz are impressed to the max with the creativity and playfulness of many of the name suggestion (and yes, even a few of you suggested some naughty names too...shame of you!). We were originally going to choose our two favorite suggestions and then poll our readers and customers to choose the winning name, but we received so many great suggestions that we can't narrow it down to just two. So here are the three names that we really like. You can only vote once but you can also share this with your friends and ask them to vote too (especially if one of the suggestions in the list is yours and you want to win!). We will keep the poll open until October 25 and let everyone know the winning name as soon as we tally the responses. The winner will receive our thanks in the form of soap! Thanks everyone and ask your friends to help you vote for your favorite entry! 
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You choose the name!
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Studio, Sweet Studio

10/12/2014

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Tonight marked the end of what seemed like a looooong renovation project and the beginning of a creative space. For nearly five months we have been in the midst of converting our single car out-dated, fill-to-the-brim-with-junk garage (we never once parked the car in there) into an art studio. The Kumbha Moon girlz have dreamed of having a shared creative space that would accommodate Kumbha Kellie's clay and art projects and Kumbha Kim's writing, sewing, doodling, and now soap production. With only a few more little odds and ends to finish, we have gone from this:
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...to this:
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And tonight we celebrated the near completion of our creative studio space by measuring the oils for three new batches of soap and pouring wine and toasting our little creative dream and all the people that helped to build it for us (and didn't complain too much when we changed our minds about design and function on a daily basis). Thank you Dan, David, and Mike!  
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Cheers!
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Food for Thought; Food for Skin

10/12/2014

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Natural:
naCH(ə)rəl , adjective,

“existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind” 
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Natural ingredients that we love to use in our products include Country Honey, organic rolled oats, and fresh carrots from Canticle Farm.
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Our Honey Oatmeal is made with honey from our friend Bob and organic oatmeal. Honey adds lots of lather to your soap!
 The Kumbha Moon girlz are pretty picky about the ingredients that go into our soap and other natural products. When our label says “all natural” we mean it. Natural can mean many different things to different people and the word has been co-opted by corporate retailers and slapped onto products that, in our opinion, are as far from being natural as possible. Take that box of “all natural” granola bars, turn it over, and we’ll bet that there are ingredients in there that will tangle your tongue when you try to pronounce them. To us, that’s not natural. When you read the list of ingredients on food or products that you apply to your skin, we believe that you should not only be able to pronounce the ingredients but also recognize what the ingredient is. We are careful about what we eat and just as careful about what we use on our skin, to wash our clothing, and to clean our house (um….even though the house isn’t always clean, but when we do give it a whirl we use non-toxic products to get it squeaky shiny healthy clean).

We define a natural product as one that’s as close to its naturally existing state as possible. Let’s go with this web definition since it pretty much sums it up for us:
Natural: naCH(ə)rəl , adjective, “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind” 
That’s natural to us! We love the “not made or caused by humankind” part of that definition because it means the ingredient is as the ingredient was meant to be.

So when we look for natural ingredients to use in our soap and other products, we look to places that the big corporations don’t: farmers markets, roadside stands, natural food stores, area forest, and our own backyard. Our homemade soap bases are made from our own recipes using a variety of all-natural plant-based oils, but the Kumbha Moon girlz love to experiment and add other ingredients taken directly from nature. We’ve used honey (makes the soap lather beautifully!) from our friend Bob Brachmann at Country Honey; rolled oats from a certified organic grower; chamomile flowers; grated ginger root; dried herbs and ground spices; dried rose petals; goat milk; organic vanilla bean pods; organic pumpkin puree, and the freshest juiciest carrots on Earth from Canticle Farm where we are long-time CSA shareholders. We plan to do more wildcrafting and experiment with berries, leaves, bark, and other natural gifts from Mother Nature that will help us create all natural soap while using the ingredients as resources that don’t deplete our Mother.

You can be sure that when you use a product from Kumbha Moon Soap Company that you are using an all-natural product that will be kind to your skin and kind to Mother Earth. We encourage you to become a label reader of all the products in your life and then challenge yourself to make the switch from one product that you routinely use that has a tongue-twisting ingredient list and switch it out for one that has uncomplicated pronounceable ingredients – ingredients that are real and from nature. Be sure to tell us how it goes for you!

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It's time to Name That Soap! 

10/8/2014

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PictureA soap with no name
It's not often that the Kumbha Moon girlz are at a loss for words or ideas but it seems that we are land-locked in the Thought Department when it comes to choosing a name for a brand new soap. We recently purchased a brand new type of cinnamon essential oil that is steam distilled from the bark of the tree rather than from the leaves (from a source that guarantees the harvesting of cinnamon trees is done in a sustainable manner). We had been using the less-expensive cinnamon leaf essential oil which has all the nostalgic essences and high aroma notes that remind you of oatmeal cookies, holiday baking, and cinnamon toast. To us it was the iconic cinnamon essence. 

Cinnamon is as cinnamon does......until we discovered cinnamon bark essential oil. We didn't realize that the difference in the tones and qualities between cinnamon essential oils could be so different. This one is warm, sensual, complex and reminds us of those "red hot" candies, cinnamon jaw breakers, and carnival candy apples. There's even hint of something like a vanilla essence that comes through at the end of the whiff (yes, we whiff essential oils like some people sample wine). The aroma of this essential oil stays in your olfactory receptors (fancy phrase from your nose) and keeps warming itself again and again. We rarely make soap with a single note fragrance and had planned on using the cinnamon in a blend of other essential oils, but once we smelled this amazing fragrance we knew that it was so unique and warm that it should stand on its own. We quickly re-calculated our batch ingredients (using old school math) and added over 4 ounces of the cinnamon bark essential oil to our homemade oil base. We then divided the batch in half (more math - ha!), added madder root powder to one part to naturally color it a deep red, and tried a new pouring technique to create multiple layers and swirls. Then came the waiting.....over 24 hours before the soap is firm enough to be hand-cut from the mold and the test of whether the amazing essence would carry through during the saponification process (more on this another time). It did! This batch smells amazing....almost like a cinnamon candy. It's tucked away on our curing racks for about 7 weeks until it's ready to use, but every time one of us walks past the curing rack, we are swept away with the beauty of this scent.

But we are stumped, flummoxed, bewildered.....what do we name this soap? You see, it's a rather "sexy" essence and every name that we've come up with either sounds tawdry or silly. Does anyone want to use a soap called "Red Hot Momma"? So we are putting the care and naming of our new soap into the hands of our customers. We'd like you to submit a suggestion for a name for this new soap by using the form below. We'll choose two that we like and then ask our customers to choose their favorite (seriously, this is hard for us because both Kumbha Moon girlz tend to be, let's say, just a little bit controlling and we are now letting this go completely out of our hands!).  

Here are the ingredients in case you need some more naming cues: this soap is made from our homemade blend of pure imported Italian olive oil, coconut oil, vegetable oil, shea butter, castor oil, cinnamon bark essential oil, and madder root powder for natural color.  So let's go.......Name That Soap! 

    It's time to Name That Soap! 

Submit
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Welcome! The Kumbha Moon girlz blather on....

10/5/2014

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Welcome to Kumbha Moon Soap Company! We are a small, independently owned business located in rural western New York State, about as far from "the City" as you can get. While our business is brand new, we have made all-natural soap from old-fashioned recipes for several years. We learned the art and craft of soap making from Robin & Archie, dear friends that we consider to be our mentors in so many ways and, like us, live and tread as lightly as possible on Mother Earth. They had gifted us with bars of their homemade Castile soap for many years and we were always impressed with how wonderfully conditioned our skin felt when we used their soap. In fact, the difference between their homemade soap and the commercial products that we had been using was so noticeable that soon let our stock of commercial bars deplete and asked Robin & Archie many times over for refills of their bars. Lucky us that they always kindly replenished us and even luckier us when they offered to show us how to make soap (hopefully not because we were annoyances!). 


As we stood in their kitchen for several hours (yes, it takes a long time to make homemade soap), measuring, weighing, mixing, calculating, watching, stirring, learning, and waiting for that magic moment that soap makers call "trace" to happen, we were mesmerized! The soap making process is just that....a process. We both tend to be a little wired toward liking a process approach to making something, but we also tend to be spontaneous, daring, and creative. We found that soap making could accommodate all of our quirks, satisfy our creative muses, and give us a pure soap that keeps us squeaky clean. We didn't even recoil when we learned that soap making also takes some careful calculation and math skills or even when we heard that we had to learn how to use a lye calculator. From that first batch of Robin & Archie's famous Castile soap that we made in their kitchen, we were hooked! As we left their house and carried home our prized first batch of homemade soap and a copy of their recipe, our heads were full with everything that we just learned and we were sure that we wouldn't remember the process and be able to produce our own batch at home. We couldn't wait to try the soap that we just made.....but wait we would. We also learned that real soap has to cure and age, just like cheese and wine. The curing time is also another magic time in the soap making process: water continues to evaporate creating a solid, firm, hard soap bar that will last a long time. So we waited and waited and kept watching and checking on our little soap bars every day (yes, we are also a little obsessive too). You might think that watching soap cure is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but we noticed the little changes in our little soap bars every day and were just as excited as two people could possibly be on the day that we declared our first homemade soap batch to be cured and ready to use. 


We made more soap and more soap and more soap and haven't stopped since. We even got more daring and started to experiment with things like essential oils, botanical ingredients, and different base oils. As our soap making was obviously turning into a compulsive behavior and our cupboards were overflowing with handmade soap, we gifted our soaps to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors and even used it to barter for goods and services. We also started to hear our friends and family tell us: "You should sell this stuff."  We resisted and resisted some more, but we kept making soap and soon found ourselves with hundreds of bars, far more than we have friends to give it to. When we also realized that our little soap making compulsion was getting quite expensive to maintain (more in other posts about this), we decided to hang out our shingle and set up a small business to sell our soap. 


We officially launched Kumbha Moon Soap Company in May 2014 and are grateful for the amazing support from our family, friends, and customers. Even as we are just getting our feet wet with our business, we continue to grow and evolve our products, our sales models, marketing efforts, packaging, and more. But what we haven't changed are our values and philosophy about environmental stewardship, simplicity, healthy living, and loving-kindness. Our soap and other products are as imbued with our values as they are with the most natural, real, pure ingredients possible. 


{b}lather is our blog where we will prattle on about soap, life, creativity, simple living, nothing, and everything. You will learn more about Kumbha Moon Soap Company and we hope to learn more about you too. Check in with us often and thank you for your support!

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    {b}lather 

    blath-er \ˈbla-thər\
    
    verb to talk foolishly at length 
    noun voluble nonsensical or inconsequential talk or writing

    The Kumbha Moon girls write about soap, simple living,  creative impulses, and life's lather.  


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