Adding Social Media Icons to your Blog

As you have probably noticed, I am making a lot of upgrades to both my blog and online store. My newest additions are the pretty social media icons you can see to the right. Adding these icons to my blog took a lot of trial and error, looking at the source code for other sites and trying to figure out how to modify it for my site. Well in the end Dylan helped me and I FINALLY got it to work.  Since I found this process so difficult, I thought others might be going through the same struggles as me and perhaps I could save them some time and hassle. These directions are only for Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. So here we go:

Step 1:
Find some social media icons that you like. A simple Google image search for "social media icon png" will bring up a ton of options. Download the ones you decide to use. For my site, I am using a set called "Minimalist" that was designed by Zee Que at designbolts.com. You can get them here for free.

Step 2:
If you have your own website upload your images to your Public_HTML folder. This will allow you to access the icon at www.YOUR_WEBSITE.com/IMAGE_NAME.png. Obviously, you need to change YOUR_WEBSITE to the name of your site and IMAGE_NAME to the name of the image (likely something like Twitter.png or Pinterest.png).

If you do not have your own site to upload the images you can upload them to a place like Flickr where you can get a link the the specific icon image.

Step 3:
Go to your blog and select the layout tab. Then click on the 'Add a Gadget' in the area of the blog that you would like to place your icons. In the popup, select the "HTML/JavaScript add third-party functionality or other code to your blog" gadget.

Step 4:
Give this gadget a title if desired. Then you will have to type in a modification of the code given  below. You will need to add the text highlighted in gray between <a and </a> into the content box. The first example is for Facebook. In the text below, where it says YOUR_USERNAME you will need to change to text to reflect your Facebook name. You will also have to change/modify the link to access your icon image; replacing YOUR_WEBSITE with the name of the site where the image is stored and ICON_NAME to the exact name of the icon.

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/YOUR_USERNAME">
<img width="60/" title="Follow YOUR_USERNAME on Facebook" alt="Follow  YOUR_USERNAME on Facebook" src="http://www.YOUR_WEBSITE.com/ICON_NAME.png"/>
</a>

Here are the examples for Twitter and Pinterest for my site. Now following the directions above, just change where I have Ladybug Soapworks and my website and image name to the appropriate names for your site.

<a href="http://www.twitter.com/#!/LadybugSoapwork">
<img width="60/" title="Follow Ladybug Soapworks on Twitter" alt="Follow Ladybug Soapworks on Twitter" src="http://www.ladybugsoapworks.net/Twitter2.png" />
</a>

<a href="http://pinterest.com/LadybugSoapwork/">
<img width="60/" title="Follow Ladybug Soapworks Pinterest" alt="Follow Ladybug Soapworks Pinterest" src="http://www.ladybugsoapworks.net/Pinterest.png"/>
</a>

 

I hope this tutorial will help you to get your blog looking a little more professional, too!

As promised, more soap!

Here are the rest of the new soap pictures. I am sure I mention this a lot, but Dylan sure can take nice pictures of soap. Luckily all he "charges" me is for his regular shower/shampoo soap and the occasional shaving soap. Pretty good deal don't you think?

This first soap is my Sensitive skin bar. It is made with all kinds of oils that are great for sensitive skin. This bar feels so smooth in the shower, I just love to use it.

This soap hasn't actually changed in look, but we took some new photos anyways. This is Lavender Shea. It has a nice calming scent and smooth texture. If you look closely you can see the tops are brushed with a purple mica to give them some shimmer.

Up next is Jewelweed and Comfrey. It is made with olive oil infused with both of the herbs. Very nice bar of soap and these herbs are reputed for getting rid of the oils from a poison ivy bush.

This is my Jasmine Salt bar. Lovely scent and pretty color. The salt is a fine grain so it does not scratch. It makes a nice lotion-like lather.

Now to make some ginger souffle salt bars! Just need to decide how to make them look...any suggestions?

Tea tree shampoo

I just put a ton of tea tree shampoo in the oven to speed up the saponification process. It is one of my best selling soaps so I made a super large batch this time! This soap smells so good and I just love the way it makes my hair feel and shine after a shower.

I have a lot of new soap pictures that I will be posting here soon and then updating my websites. I finally convinced Dylan that I needed new pictures. I have changed the design of almost all my soaps over the past year and have been stuck using photos of the old designs. So expect a lot of soap porn in the coming days!

Laundry Soap!

I hope everyone had a great holiday and New year. I sure did! It was so great to see all my family and friends.

On the soaping front, I just put a ton of laundry soap in the oven. I am basically all out and it is one of my best selling items! I make my soap with a 50:50 blend of coconut and palm oil. I have also tried olive oil and palm and it worked well, too, but is more expensive to make.

Here I have 3 molds filled with my laundry soap. Next step...shredding all of that. Thank god for the Cuisinart!

I wanted to show a close up of some of my molds as well. I really like Upland molds. I have 2 slab molds now from them and the silicone mold makes removal so easy.
I also have this great mold from Silvermoon Molds. I don't use this one much since I have mostly switched over to slab molds, but this one also has a great silicone liner making soap removal so easy.
One of my other regular molds is a Kelsei slab mold that I use for salt bars since it has separators to make individual soaps that do not need to be cut. So what kind of mold is your favorite?

Long time, no blog :(

Well and for good reason. I have been very busy finishing up my research, working on papers for publication, applying for jobs, working on my thesis, and searching for a house. Wowzers...way too much on my mind! Well Dylan and I found an awesome house today and just pit in an offer. We are so excited! We will know tomorrow if they accept or counter offer. We heard there may be another offer going in today so hopefully our offer is good enough. This house is really a gem. It is a beautiful 1920's brick Tudor style home with nice landscaping and a gorgeous slate roof. The owers have really taken such great care of this house and have upgrated the kitchen and bathrooms. I am still a bit shocked that this house was in our price range. Anyways, I have attached some pictures. Wish us luck! Hopefully, they will accept our offer, then I can start thinking about where to set up my soap lab!

Price Drop!

I have gone through my ETSY store and decreased prices on many of my soaps. Head over there and check out the great deals!

I will soon be releasing shealoe scrubs and whipped shealoe butter, so keep your eye out at ladybugsoapworks.etsy.com and ladybugsoapworks.net for the new products! I will post some picture very soon...I promise. I know the blog has been lacking lately on pretty picture. Must find a way to get my awesome boyfriend to take some pictures for me! I have had some cinnamon and eucalyptus mint soap waiting for pictures for over 1.5 months!

Coming soon to Ladybug Soapworks!

Lots and lots of soap pictures for you all lately! I hope you love looking at them as much as I do! I can never get enough of nice soap pictures. This soap is my lemon poppy seed. It has some shea butter in it (as do almost all the soaps shown in the last few days). I put some calendula in the lye solution to try and tease out some yellow color. I strained out most of the calendula petals, but I left a few which look like pieces of lemon peel. This soap is scented with pink sugar. I really like the way the top turned out. It is colored with titanium dioxide and i let it get very thick before I spread it on top of the pink/brown part of the soap. I sprinkles a bit of sugar and glitter on the top of the soap. The other part of the soap again gave me issues with color. I keep having trouble getting the pink/red colors I want. I now have some pink clay, so I think I will use that in the future for the colorant.
This soap is scented with sandalwood. I colored the top with titanium dioxide and then did a swirl with heavy gold mica. If you look you can see the mica turned from gold to green. No clue why that happened. The mica was from Brambleberry...anyone else experience this before? Dylan used this soap this week and he told me that he actually felt moved to let me know how much he enjoyed the look, feel, and scent of this soap. That is a pretty rare thing...I think the salt soaps was the last time he felt the need to praise me. haha
This last soap is vanilla scented. I let the soap discolor naturally because I like the brown. The top has sugar and glittler sprinkles. All of these soaps will soon be liste on my Etsy site and my main website (which is still a work in progress).

More Soap Porn

Another teaser of soaps that will soon be listed on at my store. This first one is a chamomile soap. It is made with some chamomile infused oils, chamomile EO, and a bit of ground chamomile for texture. This soap is called chocolate espresso. I colored the bottom with cocoa powder and the top with titanium dioxide. I love this photo...part of my payment to Dylan for his photo skills was that delicious espresso I made for the picture. We got a nice espresso machine about a year ago and have since turned into coffee snobs.
On the theme of taste hot drinks...this soap is scented with green tea and cucumber. (Okay okay...I would probably never drink a cucumber tea, but it smells amazing with green tea!) The green swirls are made with my favorite colorant, french green clay. I also sprinkled the top with some clay, spirulina powder, and sparkles for a little pizazz.
This beautify soap looks a lot like the chocolate espresso, but it is lavender vanilla. The color is not quite what I was going for, but I think it looks nice anyways. I had been hoping for more of a lavender color instead of the brownish purple I got. Ah well...it smells great.

A Bad Apple

I made a batch of caramel apple soap that Dylan likes to call the "clown" soap due to the colors. After seeing the final product I am really not sure what I was thinking when I colored the batch. The scent is delicious, but the colors are just horrible. I used a green oxide, red clay, and turmeric for the colors. I think I added too much clay because there are obvious streaks of red from cutting the soap. If I remake this batch I need to get rid of one of the colors. These soaps may be sold on my site as seconds. I just can't imagine selling these ugly babies for full price. Those of you that sell your soap, do you have a seconds/dent & ding section? Do you find that they actually sell?

Lots of new soap...

I have been super busy lately, so I have not had a chance to upload photos of my new soap. All these lovely pictures were take my my partner, Dylan Maxwell Reilly. I will be posting a bunch more over the next few days. This first soap is a shampoo bar that is loaded with luxurious ingredients. It was made partially from olive oil that was infused with a bunch of Indian Ayurvedic herbs that have been touted to prevent and stop balding, gray hair, and it is supposed make your hair thick and very healthy. I am not sure if it really can stop balding or gray hair since neither of them are a problem for me, but it certainly makes my hair thick and shiney. I have some guy friends that are testing it out for the gray/balding issue. These herbs have been used for over a thousand years, so I would not be surprised if they do work. Too bad I can't actually market the product as a gray/balding prevention without breaking the law.


This is the same shampoo as above, but in a more manly shape for my friend, Will, that will not rub a ladybug in his hair. haha
This is part of a Bayrum shaving soap that I had to rebatch because only some of it poured nicely into my pvc pipe mild. You can see the soap that poured nicely and did not have to be rebatched here.
This soap is scented with black raspberry vanilla, which is now my favorite scent! The purple swirl was made with alkanet root powder.

Costa rica part 2

This is a continuation of my Costa rican adventures. I will hopefully get back to my soap soon. With school starting this week I am really busy with my other (less exciting) job. But here are some pictures that I really liked from our trip. This on is of a large lizard that jumped onto a tree very close to the dining area in our rainforest lodge.
This is a white-faced capuchin monkey. He kept trying to steal bananas from the lodge kitchen.

This is a picture of Arenal volcano in La Fortuna. It is an active volcano as evident by the big smoke plume. In the evening you can see the lava flow if it is a clear night.

Cool bug we saw in the rainforest. Dylan has some amazing photography skills.

Dylan spent a morning taking pictures of all the butterflies that he could find. I really liked this picture.

Hope you all had a great Labor Day weekend. I went to Vermont to see my parents and we went to Montreal and then I went for a hike on the Long trail up Jay Peak. It was a nice and relaxing weekend...though the hike was tough and my body is still recovering from it.

New Soap

Well no luck getting Dylan to take pictures, so instead you will have to check out my bad photography skills. I have a few more new soaps that the pictures are just way too bad so I will have to hold off on them. All of these soaps are made with a newer recipe I have been using that has olive oil, palm oil, coconut oil, castor oil, and shea butter. I really love the silk lather that the shea butter provides.

The first soap below is scented with pink sugar. Unfortunately, the FO had and orange tint to it and it turned my soap a funky could instead of pink. So, I am trying to come up with another name for the soap...any suggestions?
This soap is scented with green tea and cucumber FO and the green comes from French green clay. I sprinkled some sparkles and spirulina powder on top.
This is my sandalwood soap. I colored a portion of the soap white with titanium dioxide and another portion with heavy gold mica. Too bad the mica turned green. I still like the look though.

Chamomile soap made with chamomile tea and chamomile infused oil. I also sprinkled a bit of ground chamomile in the soap and on top.
Lemon Poppy Seed Soap. I tinted the lye solution with calendula petals and at trace mixed in poppy seeds and a lemon FO.

Vacation!

I am leaving for Costa rica on Wednesday!!! I am so excited. I will attempt to blog while there, but we are going to some very remote places so I may not have access to a computer or internet.

Hopefully, I can get Dylan to take pictures of the many soaps I have curing on the rack before we leave. Last weekend I made a chamomile soap, green tea and cucumber soap, pink sugar soap, sandalwood soap, and some soy mocha cafe candles. So that is at least 10 picture that are due. I really like how all these soaps have come out. The scents are all great too. I think I will be keep them as permanent scents in my line. I will probably start making my Halloween/Thanksgiving soaps when I get back. I am planning right now to make the following scented soaps pumpkin pie, cranberry, caramel apple, apple pie, and brown sugar.

Tomorrow I am going to try to make nag champa soap, neroli soap, white tea and ginger soap, and coconut lime verbena soap.

Pirate Party

It has been a busy few weeks planning for our annual Pirate party. The party was on the 21st and we had a great turn out. Probably around 50 people showed up. My brother came down from Vermont and we had a lot of friends that came from all over New England and New York. This party is always held sometime between May and July depending on when most people can make it. We started the annual party as a party for Dylan's birthday, though he would never tell people that. So every year I make a pirate boat type cake and I thought you all would like to see a picture. I am quite happy with how it came out. It is certainly my best so far. Of course I have only made a couple fondant covered cakes so I am sure there is much I can improve on. The cake was a chocolate vanilla swirl covered in a layer of buttercream frosting and then decorated with fondant.

Dylan and I always get decked out in costume. I made all of mine except the corset and Dylan has compiled his costume over the years. He bought the Jacket last year on Ebay and had a local tailor put in pockets this year. He also had the tailor modify the pants he picked up at Goodwill last year so that they tied off just below the knees. Dylan made the shirt he was wearing and I made his hat a couple of years ago. I was excited to see that many of our guests actually got dressed up in costume, too, though none quite as elaborate as ours. Next year I may try to get some on my girlfriends to wear wench costumes like mine.

Soap curing rack

When the undergrads moved off campus a couple weeks ago, I did a little scavenging. I found some large plastic storage containers that now hold most of my container supplies for packaging product. I also found a bunch of those 1ft x 1ft metal cube rack pieces. I decided that they would be great to use for shelves in a soap curing rack. We had some extra wood just sitting in the basement so I asked Dylan for help cutting the wood and I was lucky enough that he decided to do the whole project for me! He put some caster wheels we had in a toolbox on the bottom of the rack so I can move it around. I really love it...I am wishing that I had another! There are plenty of shelves left so I would just have to get some more wood. So maybe in the future I will have more..Dylan are you reading this? Haha

Anyways, I thought I would post a picture since I always love looking at others soapers spaces, I thought you all might enjoy.

New Logo!

Dylan created a new logo for Ladybug Soapworks. He took a macro picture of a leaf and placed a little ladybug graphic on the stem. I think it came out great, though we are hoping to find a ladybug at some point and replace the graphic with a picture.

Cream Soap

I made a basic cream soap recipe from a class on the yahoo group cream soap making a few weeks ago. I was getting really concerned because it had not thickened up...I was about to buy some boric acid to thicken the soap. I decided today that maybe it needed to be whipped. So I put it into my kitchen aid and mixed for about 30 minutes. It ended up turning into a thick marshmallow fluff-type texture (without the stickiness). You can see below the initial water type texture of the soap.
Below is a photo when it thickened up. It is like a cool whip texture...dense but fluffy cream.I added French green clay and ginger souffle FO to this part of the cream soap batch. Dylan tried it out and thinks it is really cool. I can't wait to see what it does with a mesh sponge in the shower.

Peppermint Massage Bar

I just made two peppermint massage bars. It is probably best used on your feet, but could be used all over. I just tried it on my feet and it really feels nice. I put it on about an hour ago and my feet still feel nice and tingly. I used a peppermint essential oil in it which can help smooth and relax muscles when applied to the skin. I think this will be really great to use are a hard workout or after standing on your feet all day. I am going to use Dylan as my guinea pig for this product. He just had a black belt test on Friday for Kempo and has been complaining all weekend that he is sooo sore. Let's see if this massage bar help to relieve the pain!

Pictures of new soaps

I finally motivated my partner, Dylan, to take pictures of my most recent soap. He does such an amazing job so I really have to just wait for him to take the pictures otherwise they just turn out horrible. This soap is my Calendula castile soap. I made it with 100% olive oil, calendula infused water, and a pinch of silk fibers.

This next one is for the hippie in you. It is a Patchouli scented soap with shea butter and silk fibers.