Born of this earth…Signature Handmade
I have always sworn by 3 principles when looking at body care products…and strangely…my husband agrees…well at least on this one !!!
Is it made using natural ingredients
Is the source of ingredients known
Are they using more when they can use less…I do believe strongly in “less is more”.
I have been using mill ground whole channa (chickpea or Cicer arietinum if you fancy Italian) floor, kasturi (wild) turmeric, coconut oil for my daughter’s skin. This is the same wonder mixture used by grand moms in many Indian households during winter. Same goes with the baby food as well, she was brought up on our traditional baby food – raji ganji and bele kattu (water of cooked dal).
Yes I hear you…I am full time employed as well. I do my best to follow these or “beg borrow steal” help from my mom, friends and husband.
Though not from a farming background, we are passionate weekend farmers as well and are learning organic farming the best but hard way…by trial and error. Loads of people, including some farmers around our farm land, offer advise (borrowed wisdom or got through sorrow!!!) but seems to have lost the traditional farming methods. They strongly advocate use of chemical fertilizers and there is this same dull choice of crops that has seen some success in that region. This results in dumping the land with fertilizers, killing it of all organic matter (micro organisms, earth worms etc) and mass production of crops resulting in over supply. Even otherwise farmers in our country are always at the receiving end, they lose it both ways.
Our choice was strongly for organic farming and this, happily now, is paying off. There is also a growing network of organic farmers. Organic farming forums fed inputs to our own trial and error methods. The bananas (yelakki/rasabale) are getting healthier and yielding better, the peanut harvest has given us loads of cold pressed oil and the newly planted pomegranate are growing lusciously – primarily fed with Jeevamrutha, gobar and loads of good wishes from family and friends !!!
Around the same time is when I had a spine injury and was grounded of my full time job for 2 months. My husband always feels that if I have time on my hand I go crazy. True to form, I jumped headlong into this idea of handmade soaps after reading about them and the process of soap making.
Fanciful ideas of using the rich oils generated by the crops in our farm came to haunt my dreams. I woke up to realize that we had all things in place for making handmade soap and thus started the journey…
My husband gave up on me and my fascination with a “do as u like” look and thankfully left me to my own experiments. The very first batch of bright white soap (coconut and castor oil mainly) measuring ~ 100gms (measured on a old veggie weighing scale) was a success. It smelt of coconut with no additional flavoring, got my daughter super excited and managed to get a 'look' from my husband…no comments or complements yet (that would come later along with lots of support).
After a lot of more research, experiments, lots of completely spoilt batches, I can now call myself a Soap Maker (phew!!!) not an expert yet....
I believe you sleep only if you are extremely tired or want to have wonderful dreams. I was slowly sleeping to dream and woke up blending natural ingredients like turmeric, besan, honey, shikakai, henna etc into soap – bringing the convenience of the soap bar with the additional goodness of these ingredients. Successes lead to many other such combinations – green gram curd, Cinnamon honey, aloe vera soaps and henna shampoo bar and so on…
With a supportive husband you can beat the world!!! “Signature Handmade” was christened by him and he is now an integral part of it.
Signature – Sign+Nature. All natural and traditional skin /hair care ingredients designed to leave an impression on your skin.
Don’t take my word for it…try it yourself!!!
I have always sworn by 3 principles when looking at body care products…and strangely…my husband agrees…well at least on this one !!!
Is it made using natural ingredients
Is the source of ingredients known
Are they using more when they can use less…I do believe strongly in “less is more”.
I have been using mill ground whole channa (chickpea or Cicer arietinum if you fancy Italian) floor, kasturi (wild) turmeric, coconut oil for my daughter’s skin. This is the same wonder mixture used by grand moms in many Indian households during winter. Same goes with the baby food as well, she was brought up on our traditional baby food – raji ganji and bele kattu (water of cooked dal).
Yes I hear you…I am full time employed as well. I do my best to follow these or “beg borrow steal” help from my mom, friends and husband.
Though not from a farming background, we are passionate weekend farmers as well and are learning organic farming the best but hard way…by trial and error. Loads of people, including some farmers around our farm land, offer advise (borrowed wisdom or got through sorrow!!!) but seems to have lost the traditional farming methods. They strongly advocate use of chemical fertilizers and there is this same dull choice of crops that has seen some success in that region. This results in dumping the land with fertilizers, killing it of all organic matter (micro organisms, earth worms etc) and mass production of crops resulting in over supply. Even otherwise farmers in our country are always at the receiving end, they lose it both ways.
Our choice was strongly for organic farming and this, happily now, is paying off. There is also a growing network of organic farmers. Organic farming forums fed inputs to our own trial and error methods. The bananas (yelakki/rasabale) are getting healthier and yielding better, the peanut harvest has given us loads of cold pressed oil and the newly planted pomegranate are growing lusciously – primarily fed with Jeevamrutha, gobar and loads of good wishes from family and friends !!!
Around the same time is when I had a spine injury and was grounded of my full time job for 2 months. My husband always feels that if I have time on my hand I go crazy. True to form, I jumped headlong into this idea of handmade soaps after reading about them and the process of soap making.
Fanciful ideas of using the rich oils generated by the crops in our farm came to haunt my dreams. I woke up to realize that we had all things in place for making handmade soap and thus started the journey…
My husband gave up on me and my fascination with a “do as u like” look and thankfully left me to my own experiments. The very first batch of bright white soap (coconut and castor oil mainly) measuring ~ 100gms (measured on a old veggie weighing scale) was a success. It smelt of coconut with no additional flavoring, got my daughter super excited and managed to get a 'look' from my husband…no comments or complements yet (that would come later along with lots of support).
After a lot of more research, experiments, lots of completely spoilt batches, I can now call myself a Soap Maker (phew!!!) not an expert yet....
I believe you sleep only if you are extremely tired or want to have wonderful dreams. I was slowly sleeping to dream and woke up blending natural ingredients like turmeric, besan, honey, shikakai, henna etc into soap – bringing the convenience of the soap bar with the additional goodness of these ingredients. Successes lead to many other such combinations – green gram curd, Cinnamon honey, aloe vera soaps and henna shampoo bar and so on…
With a supportive husband you can beat the world!!! “Signature Handmade” was christened by him and he is now an integral part of it.
Signature – Sign+Nature. All natural and traditional skin /hair care ingredients designed to leave an impression on your skin.
Don’t take my word for it…try it yourself!!!