giftie goodness
‘That time of year’ isn’t creeping up on us – no, it’s approaching by leaps and bounds, the days arriving too soon and never lasting long enough.
Still, we love this season – the lemon curd yellow leaves against steely grey clouds, falling asleep to the sound of rain pattering against the windows, dreaming winter-borne dreams that seem to hatch only in the heat provided by down comforters, wood fires and cheery, colored lights.
Camamu’s unique, hand-made gift boxes have started nosing their way into our studio. Decorated with hand-made paper from India and gossamer organdy ribbon from Japan, they pair beautifully with our lovely soap. You’ll find a number of gift set combinations under our new ‘Gift Set’ category; soap paired with soap, soap paired with Wild Carrot creams and salves, shaving kits… see for yourself!
We’ve also just added the ability to purchase bulk soap on this site. Imagine what you can do with a nearly 3 pound piece of soap! Put your imagination to work and we think you’ll be amazed at what you can come up with for your own holiday gift giving.
Thanks for stopping by. We’re so glad you did!!
It’s harvest time and Camamu has a luscious crop of new products to share with you. Our new burdock root shampoo, Happy Hair, is fully cured and ready to hit our virtual shelves. Infused with organic burdock root and calendula flower and scented with spearmint, peppermint and lavender essential oils, it provides a gentle cleanse, puts a spring in your hair’s step and refreshes spirit and scalp. We’ve also reformulated our Neem Sacred Tree soap adding neem leaf powder to boost its therapeutic properties and changing the essential oils to tea tree, Himalayan cedar, wild marjoram and red thyme essential oils. I’ve been using our original Neem Sacred Tree soap and love how silky smooth my skin feels afterwards.
Spring to fall… in March we went out to a lovely island close to Portland and harvested cottonwood buds from branches that had fallen off of poplar trees. The buds have been infusing in organic olive oil ever since and this week we made a spectacular, resinous salve from the oil – combining it with St. John’s wort oil made using flowers from Sarah’s garden. This analgesic salve is in extremely short supply and when it’s gone, it’s gone until next year.
Lastly in the harvest report, we have a lovely new body butter from Jody Berry’s Wild Carrot Herbals. Her Citrus Sunrise Body Butter is so rich and creamy – we can’t stop dipping into our tester jar!
All for now, dear Camamu-ettes! Enjoy and dig in!!
August is here and Camamu is enjoying a respite from a patch of summer heat and humidity. Today we’re working on a new shampoo which will be ready to ship out in about three weeks. We’ve been reading lately about the skin and hair benefits of burdock root and decided, because of its properties of improving the quality of hair, decreasing dandruff and decreasing hair loss, we would be terribly remiss in not featuring it in a shampoo. Burdock root is also renowned for being an across-the-board anti-bacterial and anti-fungal and for being effective in treating acne, eczema and psoriasis. We’re adding some calendula to augment the general healing properties of this shampoo and scenting it with a scalp-tingling blend of spearmint, peppermint and lavender essential oils – we can’t wait to share the goodness with you!!
It’s almost August and Camamu is busy enjoying the luscious fruits of summer between making batches of our delicious soap. Peaches, plums, Merri-Mint and Unrepentant Rose – we hope you too are enjoying abundance!
One reminder, for those of you ordering our soap from outside of the US, our shipping costs are currently set for domestic orders only. We will let those of you outside of the country know what your shipping costs are when you place your order.
Thank you all!
Yesterday evening featured June’s full moon which we watched come up while sitting on top of Portland’s cinder cone volcano, the spectacular Mt. Tabor. The moon rose with Mt. Hood glowing pink to the left, a hawk circling and bats jittering across the deepening sky. We celebrated the full moon yesterday by making a new batch of our luscious Green Goddess Healing Herbal Salve. We infused extra-virgin, organic olive oil for three days with organic calendula, comfrey and plantain, added some raspberry pink St. John’s Wort oil, borage seed oil, rosehip seed oil and Vitamin E oil. Burnished golden beeswax and essential oils of frankincense and geranium brought all the other goodies to ground yielding gleaming pots of soft green healing goodness. We’ve got 4 oz, 2 oz and 1/2 oz tins available of this special moon-blessed salve. Use it on yourself with love.
Who doesn’t love summer? There are such delicious associations connected with this time of year. From school days coming to an end to warm nights under the stars, we’re hoping to make a few more fond memories in the coming months. Two lovely summer soaps we can’t get enough of this season are our Summer Garden soap and the Get Dirty Gardening bar. Covering both extremes of our favorite time of year
, the Summer Garden is a colorful tribute to all things in bloom while Get Dirty Gardening is a super scrubby bar with cooling and antiseptic essential oils of tea tree and eucalyptus. We invite you to choose your soaps like you do your footwear – try on something new that fits the season just right!
We were recently watching the movie, ‘Angels in America’ and heard the line “Your body is the garden of your soul”. It got us thinking about all the levels on which that statement resonates as ‘true’ – how the care we give to our bodies and how we treat our planet impacts the health of our souls – the world of the individual magnified up to the world of the world. Is it too much to imagine or to believe that our souls benefit from a decent place to live?
Dig deep, honor the worms, plant your seeds and revel in your harvest.
It’s raining ever so effortlessly here in Portland. The green hills out of Camamu’s west-facing window are draped with fog-edged clouds and the pattering of rain falling provides a steady rhythm to stir soap by. It’s getting warmer though – almost time to step out at night, bar of luscious soap in hand and have a real rain shower.