This listing is for one 'Winter Dreamland' Sweetgrass & Sweet Woodruff Ritual Bathing Bar from The heART of Ritual.
 
I've long wanted to create a soap that is blue but it took a couple of years for me to grow and process the woad I needed for the blue organic pigment. I'm simply overjoyed to finally be able to share this one with you, I had no idea what shade of blue would result from this, how intensive it would be, or if a woad soap would stain my hands blue, so had to make it, test it for myself. I am really pleased with the results! (No, the soap does not stain your hands at all).
 
Blue is one of the therapeutic colours of the Air element, the principal element of Spring, so this is the main reason I've wanted to make a blue bathing bar for so long! This offering is both blue and white, the colours of the sky and billowy bright clouds, and created using my own base oils made with wild native European sweetgrass and sweet woodruff. Both of these fragrant botanicals are steeped in lore and traditions, and relate too with the themes of the season - cleansing, cleaning, purifying *and* the air elements themselves...the fae! All this, and more, inspired me and I ended up creating a little magical mid winter dreamtime wonderland filled with fluffy golden 'clocks' (seed heads, and a reference to time/air), delicate dried 'baby's breath' blossoms from the garden, and flakes of shimmery white golden muscovite. As soon as I had finished adorning the botanicals and crystals, I looked at the scene in front of me and it reminded me of what Mister Ziggy and I see whilst out on the land this time of year - animal tracks and paw prints are everywhere! Seeing as this bathing bar relates with the wee folk in so many many ways, I decided to carve a pair of tiny feet shaped stamps from hawthorn twigs (the tree of the Sídhe/fae folk) and created footprints throughout the 'snow' on top. One more thing to note here is that I purposely swirled twigs through the mixture as it began to get solid to try and get little miniature caverns into these bars. I was reminded alot of glaciers, permafrost, crystal geodes and ice caverns when I saw the colour that developed from the woad and so wanted to bring in these little pockets of spaces beneath the surface of the soap as a nod to the fertile places within. All of my cold process soaps take six weeks to cure, and when I saw this particular soap cut into individual bars, the footprints and the miniature caverns beneath, it made sense to me that the fae came from these places and a whole beautiful narrative developed - like all creatures, the winter fae too live beneath the ground during the cold season and come out when the snow begins to melt. Their footprints on top mean the thaw must be arriving soon, and the world is waking up to spring!
 
Note that these are very large bars of soap, so they go a long way! ;-)