getting ready for the Maple Festival

the Central New York Maple Festival

CELEBRATING 43 YEARS ON APRIL 13 - 14, 2013

The tapping of maple trees, some as old as the area itself, has been a tradition in Cortland County since the days of the Iroqouis Indian culture. Through the years, maple syrup production has provided income for area farmers, and has grown with the times and advances in technology.

www.maplefest.org - Main Street at Marathon, NY 13803

And first time available at the Festival will be a selection of Rope Soap! We have Calming Chamomile, Milk Soap, Pumpkin Patch, Jasmine Tea and some Pure Olive - all wrapped up and ready to go. Took me some thinking to come up with a nice display - and there the goats helped out! I ended up using the partially stripped top of one of their christmas trees screwed onto a heavy base board and couldn't have thought of anything more appropriate :)

• goat milk soap squares

Nursing Goat and Dairy Goat milk soap squares; available in lard, lard & honey or a vegetable oil (sunflower, olive, coconut) base. The Nursing Goat bars are similar in weight as my bars. The Dairy Goat square is larger than my average and available in a gift set with a hardwood cedar soap dish. Both versions are shrink wrapped with a sticky label on the bottom.

• sunflower milk soaps

One of my favorite mold soaps in my sunflower soap. Of course I use locally grown and processed organic sunflower oil in the recipe, with a dash of organic unrefined palm oil to get the rich yellow color - and to top them off, quite literally, I use a contrasting brown or black soap to define the sunflower heart. So anytime I make a coffee bar or a hot breakfast recipe I also put out my six sunflower molds and carefully dollop 36 little sunflower centers... I just can't help myself :)

To the left you see some of the chrysanthemum flowers. After careful consideration, and hours of googling, I selected two flower shaped molds and one snowflake shaped mold (we do live in Ithaca). And I'm experimenting with a muffin size bundt mold for rope soaps (soap with a hole in the middle strung on a rope to hang up in bathroom) which will be added this season.

The sunflowers I pour one batch of 32 at a time, the mums & rope soaps I pour leftover from a large batch, a few here, a few there - keeps the inventory always a bit different!

• milk soap bricks

Traditional brick soaps with GOAT MILK lettering on top. Made with our own goat's milk with either a lard based or vegetable oil based recipe. I'm sorry to say for you vegetarians, but the lard & milk version is by far the nicest soap, hypo allergenic and moisturizing - my choice for the little ones and people with sensitive skin and/or skin eczema.

On the other hand, I get the lard locally from Kingbird Farm out of Berkshires NY who specialize in organic heritage breed pigs. These type of pigs come naturally with an abundance of fat, a necessary staple of old as the pigs pretty much provided all the fat needed for cooking, baking and candle & soap making. For quite a while lard had a bad reputation - heart disease, weight gain - especially after hydrogenated oil was invented in the fifties (pro oil, anti lard public campaign). Fortunately lard is making quite the comeback with expanding knowledge of for instance bad and good cholesterol. And the quest for good taste: lard does not just make really good soap, it also makes really good apple pie crust and superior french fries!

One more thing: lard is often considered a waste product to end up on the composting heap as most heritage pig farmers harvest way more lard than the current market bears. And one thing I can't stand, apart from factory farming animals, is wasting a perfectly good resource... so I love making lard milk soap, even if I have to render the local lard myself :)

• sleeping cat or sleeping goat gift set

Now available, sleeping cat or sleeping goat on a recycled cedar soap dish. The soap dishes are untreated (you can varnish, oil or leave au naturel) hardwood cedar, made by a Kentucky artisan from horse farm fencing bits and pieces. The cats and goats are a basic milk soap recipe (oil or fat based) and are tinted naturally with botanicals and spices (pictured here are a paprika cat and a kurkuma goat).

The soaps are shrink wrapped and labeled, and wrapped with the cedar soap dish in a cellophane baggie with business card information. The soap and dish are $8.

Let sleeping cats lie...

What could have been an annoying mistake, the mold store sent me the wrong molds, turned out into a blessing in disguise cause I would otherwise never have thought of buying the little sleeping cat molds!

I ordered two sleeping goats but received two sleeping cats instead which inspired me to experiment with red coloring (organic paprika powder) to make perfect little Garfield cats!

Instead of just the Milk Soap bars I now also carry two types of picture bars - I love the one with the nursing goat - three dimensional cats and goats soaps and two shapes of flower soaps. Especially the sunflower shape I pour with a dark heart and yellow soap is a gorgeous looking bar which by it's round shape also holds well in the hand.