Most all of these little bundles have been distributed, so I feel safe in sharing them here with you now. Not that our holiday gift this year was a huge surprise to anyone, but still. Of course, we gifted soap! A Soule Family Solstice Soap Sampler to be precise.
It was late August when we began work on this project, accumulating enough variety and quantity of soap for all these packages. Accounting for curing time and the inevitable failures, it worked out just perfectly that by early December, we had seven kinds of soaps ready for sharing. Though the late night soap making was done by me (and Steve laughing at me in my soap goggles, aka ski goggles), the next part of the project was shared by all. We each claimed a soap as our own - to be tested, named and described. In the end, we had Smelly Wine, Candy & Nuts, Jim, Lovely Lady Lavendar, Pumpkin Pie, Violet Swirl, Oil & Sugar. Adelaide created a library of line drawings for me to scan and use alongside the soap descriptions. And that's precisely how we ended up with a little booklet full of soap ingredients, and descriptions such as these:
"Violet Swirl - Once upon a time there was a girl named Violet. She was a horse girl and was always dirty from mucking out the stalls. One day, a fairy godmother came down and gave her this magical soap. It was pretty and smelled good. And from that day on, she always smelled good too." - Adelaide
"Smelly Wine - It's just good soap. It's super good to use. It smells good. It has wine in it, that's why it's brown. If you like wine, you'll like this soap. If you don't like wine, you won't like this one. Or maybe you will. It's good soap." - Harper
"Lovely Lady Lavender - It's like Old Spice, for hippies." Calvin
Ah, this was such a fun project to create together as a family, and even more delightful to share. And as Harper said one night in a marathon soap packing session, "Our friends are going to smell SOOOO good!!" Indeed!
