I won!! I "follow" my cool friend (and owner of The Soap Dish - an amazing soapmaking supply company) Rebecca on Twitter - she always posts information and interesting info on green packaging and living. And as a bonus, every Friday she does a fun giveaway from people on Twitter. I was lucky enough to win this great book - Smart Soapmaking. It wasn't one I'd read before - but now I'm glad it's on my bookshelf. It's down-to-earth, no-nonsense, and packed with useful and practical info. My favorite part? It's international! measurements are given in both metric and "customary", AND has an interernational list of suppliers. Brilliant, and long-overdue.

So, in short, check out this great book, and follow Rebecca on Twitter...you'll learn alot and have a chance to win some cool stuff too!

As most of you know, we offer various classes, mostly here on the farm. And we LOVE doing so! We keep thinking about a way to offer classes online to our many wonderful customers across the world...but have yet to come up with a great plan to do so. (There are only so many hours in the day unfortunately!) HOWEVER, we do get lots of emails from our (inter)national customers about classes, so I thought I'd post about a few options here.

Our friends Tina and Maryanne, of The Essential Herbal and Lancaster Soapworks, are offering a REALLY spectacular-sounding online soapmaking class! Check out the details here on Tina's blog - they are limiting the class to a certain number of students, so I highly recommend signing up very soon if you are interested.

We are teaching a class here on the farm about Homemade Natural Cleansers. The class draws heavily on an article I wrote for the Herb Quarterly in the Summer 2008 issue. (Did you guys know that I write a monthly column for that magazine, as well as feature articles??) Anyway - it does have some really great recipes in it, if you can find a copy at your local library I'd highly recommend it. Otherwise you can order a copy from their website. I also recommend 2 books on this subject:

The Naturally Clean Home by Karyn Siegel-Maier is my favorite - it's packed with great recipes that really work.

Clean House Clean Planet by Karen Logan is also great!

We also have a great recipe for homemade laundry soap on our website,and we DO plan to add more natural home cleanser recipes to our website soon, so stay tuned.....


Last, but not least - we do offer several natural dyeing classes here on the farm - we haven't yet offered one on rust-dyeing, but I *did* write a tutorial for Hobby Farm Home magazine on how to rust-dye fabrics. It's easy, fun, and a great way to turn rusty "junk" into art. Here are a few items that are dyed with rust (all of these can be found in my etsy store, by the way...)

Here is our beloved "Crazy", aka Karla the Crazy Soapmaker, who makes the majority of soaps here at Prairieland Herbs. She's been making soaps professionally for 8 or 9 years, and is REALLY knowledgeable about what she does. A few times a year, she teaches really rockin soapmaking classes on our farm, and we're lucky she's going to teach not one but TWO soapmaking classes this fall!
Students make and take home their own 2 lb. batch of real, cold-process handmade soap. Soapmaking is amazing - it's art, science, and alchemy all in one procedure. You take fats, oils, and lye, and end up with this amazing bar of bubbly wonderful handmade soap! Magic!Students work in pairs, and class size is strictly limited to six participants, so Karla can ensure the best learning experience for everyone. Lye safety is emphasized. The recipe you use is easy to duplicate at home - no hard-to-find or expensive oils or ingredients are used.

The first class is already halfway full, so Karla's offering a second class in November. These classes truly do fill up quickly so please register soon! (We do not charge your card until the day of the class, just FYI.)

Our friend Fae at Faerie Made Soaps has some great pictures of the soapmaking process on her blog - check it out!

Here are a bunch of pictures, in no particular order, from our Soapmaking 101 Class last Saturday. We had 6 people - 3 guys, and 3 girls, which we thought was really cool (we usually have far more women than men at our classes!). I think they all had a really good time!

WOW! You guys sure love learning how to make soap! Our Soapmaking 101 class is nearly full - we're waiting on confirmation from one person who verbally signed up. SO! If you are interested in learning to make soap...but 1) haven't yet signed up, or 2) want to take the class but that date/time doesn't work for you....let us know. If demand is great enough we will see if Karla can fit in another Soapmaking 101 class. Otherwise, I won't be until June...kind of a long time to wait!

On a related note, there's still spaces available for the Milk Soaps and Hot Process Crock Pot Soap classes. And, we MAY have one space available in our rescheduled March 10th Needlefelting Class...... please email us or call if you are interested!