Welcome to April 2021! It’s spring and we can sit outdoors, socially distanced, with people outside of our household this month, so yay for that! We had a new patio built in the winter and we will be enjoying a lot of tea and cookies in our yard as we wait for the world to open up again. We’re still restricted to essential travel – medical or work only – but we had occasion to pop into Vancouver for a medical appointment so we had these amazing lobster and crab rolls down at Granville Island, the we saw the actor who plays Kevin on Brooklyn 99 and Shawn on The Good Place, but in true Canadian fashion, we just nudged each other then left him alone, regretting later that we didn’t tell him how much we love his work.
As a note, if you’re looking for some series to binge, I can’t recommend the shows by Greg Shur – Parks & Rec, Brooklyn 99, and The Good Place – as they are just so lovely and awesome and hilarious!
What’s going on in April?
We’re starting up the next Newbie Tuesday beginners’ lotion making series and Formulating Friday advanced lotion making series on Tuesday, April 13th, 2021, with Olivem 1000, a naturally compliant emulsifier with which we’ll be making a variety of products, including hand & body lotion, body butter, cream, and facial moisturizer. If you’d like to join in the fun, click here to see the ingredient, supply, packaging, and equipment lists.
The first post will be an introduction to this emulsifier, and we’ll start making things on Tuesday, April 20th for the Newbie Tuesday series and Friday, April 23, 2021, for the Formulating Friday series.
This is the body butter we’ll be making in the series – look how light and airy it is!
As I have been doing this year, I’ve been reviewing my formulating notebooks and all the stuff I’ve been reading since 2017 to share formulas with you! It’s been quite interesting seeing which ingredients I loved and have added to my regular rotation, and which ones only got a quick look in before I put them aside for one reason or another.
We met quite a few of these new ingredients in March – dodecane, Vitamin C, 3-glyceryl ascorbate, Hyaluronic Acid 4D, ginger root extract, NatraColl™, hydrolyzed baobab protein, Plant Keratin, NatraSmooth®, Fision® Hydrate, Sepilift® DPHP, and Hyaluronic Acid, Oleo-HA. (Holy cow, 12 new ingredients? I think that’s a record!) – and we’ll be meeting more in April, then formulating with them.
I’ve been writing like silly over the last month – seriously, 12 ingredient write-ups? – and I think April will see a lot of posts about hydrolyzed proteins and amino acids as the giant post I’ve been working on for freakin’ ages is finally done. I have six new proteins and amino acids to share and products to go with them, so I think at least a few of those will be up before month’s end.
As for Zoom workshops, based on the lack of comments or interactions when I’ve mentioned them, I think I’m done for the time being. I really enjoyed them, but they are incredibly demanding time-wise – each one takes a minimum of 10 hours for prep, workshop, and clean-up – and it’s probably for the best as it’ll give me more time to write for the blog or e-book and spend time in the workshop formulating.
As we do every month…
If you’re in need of supplies, $10 subscribers to the month will have three discount coupons this monthfor Lotioncrafter, Voyageur Soap & Candle, and Windy Point Soap Making Supplies. Thank you for this lovely gift out of the goodness of your hearts, lovely suppliers!
If you’re a $3 subscriber or higher, click here to see the duplication request post! And don’t forget that you have access to the formula directory! The formula directory is constantly being updated to include even more formulas from around the blog, so if you’re looking for a formula, you’ll find it in the formula directory!
If you’re a $5 subscriber or higher, click here to see the month’s Q&A post! (I’ve continued from last month’s post as there were some great questions I needed to look at again!)
And don’t forget about the monthly Super happy fun member-to-member post for April 2021! It’s more important than ever that we connect with other people during this awful time, so please feel free to share your thoughts on this post or others on the blog!
You can always find the links to these monthly posts in the pinned post section, which is found to the right of just about every page on the blog on desktop and most mobile, or the bottom of every page for the odd mobile device. Or do a search for “Q&A” or “duplication” to find them. I’m afraid I don’t have time to do searches for you if you write to me as I’m swamped, so doing one of those two things will find you those posts very quickly.
If you’re a $10 subscriber or higher, you’ll get the e-zine for the month – which is generally issued on the 27th or later. I’m not sure what the topic will be yet, but there are – as always – a few different ones on the go.
If you missed one for a month during which you were a subscriber, please click here to see those coupon codes. (Please download them as soon as you can as these links can expire after a year or two.)
Last month, you would have received The big book of preservatives, part two – the charts as part of your $10 membership. (The e-book is $20 Canadian in the shop, so you would have saved quite a bit over the cover price, too. Bonus!)
I wanted to pause for a moment to thank my wonderful husband, Raymond, for all his amazing tech support skills. He’s the brains of this operation, keeping the blog going, helping you with subscriptions and lost passwords and everything non-formulation related.
And a huge thanks to Bryce, who is working for us full time now – yay! – gathering links, organizing pages, linking my posts and e-books, and doing some things around the house, like getting rid of our overgrown weed garden and replacing it with soil, which looks so tidy and awesome!
Whether you’ve been here for a twelve minutes or 12 years, I wanted to thank you for your continued support of our site, the blog, the e-books, and our family by subscribing for the month of March. We’re so glad you’re joining us to share your love of making bath, body, and hair products!