Many BIG changes have directly impacted Garland Goat Soap!

The first inkling of change began in May of last year. At that time, a fine young man by the name of Greg Moore, and I began a courtship, desiring to get to know each other with the intention of marriage. We had met two months earlier at a friends’ wedding. Greg’s family resided in a lovely rural Vermont setting, while I and my family lived a seven hour trek away in Maine’s country-side. Greg and I both made that trip multiple times as we visited back and forth and our relationship deepened.  Change in both of our lives was slowly but surely marching on…

In-between our visits and lengthy phone conversations, I continued to run my business, Garland Goat Soap of Maine, while Greg worked at his own business, Little Valley Piano Service. Greg, an RPT (Registered Piano Technician), started his own piano technician service just out of high school, and built up a steady clientele over the intervening years. Amongst the many subjects we discussed, we sometimes enjoyed “business talk,” sharing our ideas and experiences with our businesses.

Greg helped me sell Garland Goat Soap at the Common Ground Fair in Maine.

August 18th, 2009, marked another wonderful change for us! Greg asked me to become his wife; my reply was a delighted “YES!!!!” We began planning for an October 31st, 2009 wedding.

Delighted to be ENGAGED!

Time flew rapidly by, and October 31st arrived, bringing with it another huge change in our lives…the commencement of our lives as husband and wife!!! With great joy and thanksgiving to the Lord, Who has lead us change by change, we embarked on our married life.

Mr. and Mrs. Greg Moore

We settled comfortably in our cozy apartment in a quaint Vermont town. Greg’s business proved quite busy with the additional work from the purchase of a retiring piano technician’s business. Garland Goat Soap had not been getting much attention; my time no longer was poured into that business, but into my wonderful husband! I wanted to be available to work together with him in Little Valley Piano Service.

More change was just around the corner for us. We discovered, with delight, that we were expecting our first child! With this blessing on the way, we realized it was time to think about passing Garland Goat Soap on, freeing me up for other responsibilities.

The perfect solution came up when Greg’s family expressed interest in taking over Garland Goat Soap. Greg and Linda Moore, and their eight children still at home, were eager and apt at learning how to produce, package, and ship Garland Goat Soap’s all natural goat milk soap. I was so delighted with their enthusiasm as I transferred more and more of the business responsibilities over to them! Under their work, Garland Goat Soap of Maine has beome Garland Goat Soap of Vermont.

It’s been a pleasure to provide gentle, completely all-natural handcrafted goat milk soap to all of my customers. I am so thankful for the years of opportunity I had to research soapmaking, create thousands of bars of soap, ship orders, run my business, keep in touch with customers, and much more. However, much as I enjoyed the years of running Garland Goat Soap, I am equally glad to pass it on now, and move into another stage of my life as wife and helper to the most wonderful man in the world, and soon mother to our little one. I am eager to see how Garland Goat Soap of Vermont will blossom under the diligent, hard work of the Moores, and am confident that they will do a wonderful job with it!

And now may I introduce the new OWNERS and MANAGERS of GARLAND GOAT SOAP OF VERMONT:

Greg & Linda Moore

Pamela, Nathaniel, Emily, Caleb, Hannah, Joshua, Matthew, and Daniel

As I mixed up several batches of this Milk and Honey soap, I was considering the different ingredients I was adding and what they contributed to the soap. Honey lays down a clear, protective film that helps skin maintain moisture. It hydrates and soothes the skin and is thought to be slightly antiseptic and bacteriostatic. It does all of this without being greasy, even contributing astringint value. Propolis is antibacterial, reduces inflammation, and stimulates the immune system.

To quote one description: “Two natural treasures in one bar of soap help repair sores, fight acne, soothe chapping, and balance uneven or oily skin.

Bee products—honey, propolis, pollen and wax—meet goat milk to clean up the toughest skin problems you can muster.

Honey cleanses dirt and impurities while smoothing wrinkles by increasing your skin’s elasticity. Propolis—a mixture of the essential oils, pollen, and wax bees harvest from plants—nourishes dry, itchy skin. Pollen, rich in enzymes and vitamins, contains the complete family of amino acids. It promotes new skin cell growth while scrubbing away built-up dead cells without stripping the skin of its natural protection.

Milk & Honey’s beeswax base is the all-natural “carrier” for other ingredients that leaves your skin feeling soft and clean.

Raw goat milk is rich in enzymes beneficial to your skin, and five natural, skin-replenishing oils balance and moisturize. This abundance of revitalizing components is topped off with a touch of sweet orange essential oil for an agreeable, bright aroma.”

Our Milk and Honey Soap has proved to work great for our customers, as noted by what these customers had to say:

This is the best facial soap bar I have tried. I use it at night time to wash off the days dirt and make up (with no moisturizer afterward since I have somewhat oily skin), and by morning time my face is smooth and clean. I love how it lathers up, and the sweet smell makes is so pleasant to use. I have stopped using the expensive clinique and estee lauder products completely since this has worked out much better in every way. It does last a long time, too. I recommend it to friends whenever I get the chance.

This soap is great. I have problem skin and have never used a soap. Actually I’ve used the same cleanser on my skin for years and just didn’t like how my skin was looking lately (lifeless and dry). I tried this soap thinking it wouldn’t make much of a difference and WOW! I was able to stop using the medication on my skin that I had used for years. My skin looks great and glowing.

Try it out for yourself! To find it, click HERE.

Some soap molds stacked to dry.

With over two hundred soap molds in my stock, it can be a lengthy process to clean all of them. In fact, many facets of the soapmaking process are made more complicated by the use of these detailed soap molds. It takes longer to set out all the molds for the pouring process of the soapmaking. It takes longer, and is trickier, to pour the soap into the molds, since each individual soap mold cavity must be carefully filled.

Pouring Soap

This limits the amount of soap I can make at one time, since it is necessary for me to be able to get all the goat milk soap poured into the molds before the soap becomes too thick. The molds take up a singnificant amount of storage place. They are relativiely expensive to invest in. With these factors in mind, most soapmakers deem it too much work to produce soap for sale using these molds. I, however, think that the beautiful goat milk soap resulting from these molds is well worth the extra work! I can get a bar of plain old square, retangular, round, or oval soap anyday — maybe even natural soap. But how often can I find an all-natural, goat milk soap bar that is as beautiful to look at as it is nourishing to use? I want to be able to offer such a product to my customers, even it if means a bit more work and time for me, and these molds are the perfect tool to help me do that.

Molds such as this one produce the beautiful, detailed designs of Garland Goat Soap of Maine!

By the way, do you have a particular design you’d like to see in our goat milk soaps? Please offer your suggestions…I’m delighted to hear what you’d like so that I may be able to suppply it for you!

To superfat soap is to leave unsaponified oils in the final bars for the mildest soap. Unsaponified oils do not form compounds with the other soapmaking components but, instead, remain in their original form in the bar as emollient ingredients.

The percentage of sodium hydroxide in a soap formula is carefully calculated according to the degree of saponification desired. (Remember, saponification is the process whereby the oil molecules and sodium hydroxides molecules mix to form the new substance — soap.) When enough sodium hydroxide is used to supply all of the fatty acids with sodium hydroxide mates, the soap is considered fully saponified. No discount is taken from the percentage of sodium hydroxide required for complete saponification. This fully saponified soap does not contain excess oils. By using less sodium hydroxide than is required for a complete saponification, however, fat and oil molecules run out of lye mates. The excess oil remains in the final bar of soap as a soothing moisturizer. This milder soap is called a superfatted soap — a soap provided with excess fat and oil to make it more moisturizing.

Nearly all bath soaps clean, but the degree of saponification determines how gently or how harshly they do their jobs. An excess of sodium hydroxide not only can strip the skin of dirt and excess oils, but it can take away important natural oils as well. People with dry skin are especially affected by the strip-clean. When emollient fats and oils are added to soap as superfatting ingredients, they lay a hydrophobic film on the skin’s surface that softens the skin by holding in internal moisture.

So by superfatting our goat milk soap, we are providing our skin with a milder, gentler, and more moisturizing skin-care experience!

In cold process soapmaking, the method I use to make our goat milk soap bars, an acid and a base must be combined to produce soap. It is the reaction that occurs between the acid and base which forms soap. The acid is the oil, whether a neutral oil or a pure fatty acid. The base must be the sodium hydroxide, for fats and oils cannot be converted into soap without it. As the sodium hydroxide and the oils are combined together, the process of saponification occurs as the triglycerides of the oils break down into fatty acids  that react with the sodium ions of the base lye solution to create a whole new product – SOAP!

The proportion of sodium hydroxide to oils in a soap recipe affects how they react…and we use a discounted proportion of sodium hydroxide in order to produce a “superfatted” bar of soap – an extra mild, moisturizing soap. I will share more on what this means in the next blog post. For now, though, you can understand how our soap is made with sodium hydroxide yet contains no chemicals and is very mild and gentle!

In the beginnings of Garland Goat Soap of Maine, I handcrafted all our soap right in our kitchen, one batch at a time. After many hours of soapmaking in the kitchen, producing thousands of bars of soap, I had developed as system that was as efficient and streamlined as possible under the circumstances. More recently, I have set up a separate soapmaking room in the spare area of the basement. This has been a valuable upgrade, allowing much more efficient production of my soap. It’s also given me the opportunity to “test run” the setup and based on those observations, plan for the new soapmaking room.

It’s not the goal of Garland Goat Soap to become a mass manufacture of soap; we will always carefully handcraft our soap in small batches with all-natural goodness. However, the new soap room will provide an easier way for me to efficiently produce soap, giving me more time to work on new types of soap and all-natural goat milk skin care items! Of course, no matter how hard we work, we can’t build our new house…and the new soap room…instantaneously, so I look forward to it in the future. In the meantime, I am content to keep on working in my little soap room, carefully handcrafting soap one bar at a time!