The love of the craft

As a result of my international shipping scam blog posts, I made the wonderful long-distance acquaintance of Rosa Ziv from Carmel Gifts in Israel, who offered me the incredible sequence of contacts she'd had with a shipping scammer for publication in my blog post International Shipping Scams: Part 3.  Thanks to Rosa's help, thousands of people have read about exactly how these scams work, and many have been saved substantial time, trouble, and money in the process. 

The spike in the number of visits to my blog immediately after
publishing the post on which Rosa and I collaborated.

And, as a result of our having collaborated on the shipping scams post, Rosa invited me to write a guest post for her store blog!  I was delighted to be asked, and greatly enjoyed doing it.  (Amazing how the Internet can build relationships between people who would never meet or cross paths in any other way!)

As I considered various ideas about what to write, I finally settled on talking about – and correcting – a few of the common misconceptions people have about handcrafted soap.  I focused, for example, on the issue of soaps vs. synthetic detergents because in my experience, many people don't fully understand that there is a difference, or what that difference is. 

I talked about the environmental and skin care ramifications of using cleaning products that are manufactured with chemical vs. natural ingredients.

I also addressed the issue of whether handmade soap made "has lye in it," which is another area of misunderstanding for people who are unfamiliar with the basic chemisty that converts oils and fats into soap.

Given this, you might wonder why Rosa chose to title it Handmade Soap Contains Love. 

One simple reason.  As a crafter myself, as one who has always delighted in the uniqueness of anything that's handcrafted, and as one who's had the privilege of meeting, getting to know, and working with crafters in many different media, I know that what draws and binds us to each other is our love of what we do. 

As I put it in the post for Rosa's blog, "whenever you buy anything that’s handcrafted, you’re also getting – at absolutely no extra charge – all the love and care that went into making it.  You can’t put a price tag on that."