  
Fall Edition New! For the Soap Makers Selling Your Crafts Making Soft Pretzels this Weekend! Co-Op Order for the Holidays Subscription Members Ten Best Wines Under $15 Making Chocolate Dipped Pretzels
Handmade Gifts Offer a One-of-a-Kind Approach This Christmas more and more people are taking the time to learn how to create their own unique gifts for family and friends and the whole thing is going over like eggnog on Christmas Eve. There are so many people into making their own gifts because it comes from the heart. It shows you took the time to do something because the recipient is worth the time and effort. But these gifts are not the macaroni photo frames we made in school. Making your own
Christmas Decorations from pre-cut wood forms or glass bulbs is also very hot,
as well as making your own greeting cards and home decorations. 101 Gift Ideas for Under $5
can help decide what projects are right for you.. Everyone is counting down the days of Christmas. As of today, there are only 50 days left! My how time passes. In honor of the up and coming season our 101 Gift Ideas is completely done, our e-Books are Buy One Get One Free, Our Spiral Bound Books on Amazon now all come with a CD ROM, great for gift giving, and our Craft Supply Store offers a CD ROM with every order along with a face mask and plastic gloves. New Subscribers and old subscribers get a free large gold foil pull bow with every parcel we mail out. We find this handy at any occasion. This new CD ROM acts as a screen saver with falling snow and a utility for just about any craft with color wheels, recipes and many other resources you need to get at while crafting. Click here to see our demo CD ROM Screen Saver and Utility. Back to Top. We have a new illustrator in the house and she will be creating patterns, gift cards and many other neat things for the Mabel White Company and for our subscribers to download, print and use. The photo above is a gem soap made with clear melt and pour glycerin and white oil based melt and pour to achieve the veins. Our Melt and Pour Soap Book discusses this method. We have been soap focused all month, experimenting with the ever economical cold process (8 Parts lye One Part Oil) and just having a ball. This month we made carrot soap, tomato soap, and many other cool soap with PVC pipe, cut them as they pushed out of the PVC and hand wrote the name of the soap across each bar while still soft. Because we had so much darn fun doing this, we wrote a book called "The Natural Soap Maker" which only discusses the Cold Process. Lye and fat you can simply get from the grocery store. Back to Top.
Making Pretzels This Weekend! What do we have planned for this weekend? Pretzel making and lots of them! We will be using the Amish Pretzel Recipe, maybe starter yeast for yeast, and making plain, almond, cinnamon-raisin glazed, "everything" including garlic and onion, and great warm cream cheese dip to accompany them. Making pretzels is a great family event and we intend to freeze any left over dough to make more during the holidays. Click here for the Soft Pretzel Recipe, and here for the Starter Yeast recipe. We prefer you right click on these PDFs and save the target to your hard drive. Back to Top. We are into just dipping pretzels in melt and pour white chocolate now. VERY Christmas and VERY decadent! Click here for more about chocolate. Co-Op Order for the Holidays We are about to order enough supplies for our families to make ten soy candles in 6 ounce tins with 2 Pounds of soy flakes, 24 bars of soap with 2 Pounds of White Soap Base, 5 Air Gel Room Fresheners, and scented oils to make these, use around the house, and in other projects: 2 Ounces each of Vanilla, Pumpkin Pie, Apple Pie, Christmas Tree, Chocolate and Oatmeal. This Holiday Craft Package will also include other items such as cute molds, PVC pipe molds to make cold process soaps, large gold foil pull bows we happen to have on hand here, a few ceramic rings for fragrance oils that go on light bulbs and our CD ROM we send with any craft supply order with recipes and instructions. It also acts as a screensaver. Click here for Demo. and will be sold in its entirety for $48.00 each, please add $6.95 for shipping. To participate in this bulk buy deal please e-mail Mabel by clicking this link. Back to Top.
We also had a
customer who owns an old country store ask us to create "drink"
recipes. If you have
noticed our Traditions Calendar is also being paid more attention to with great
reminders of
This year we converted the "Entire Collection" idea to a Mabel White Country Store Subscription Program that made more sense for both the company and our beloved customers. The Entire Collection is still available but it will be limited to the time period in which it was created and not include any new items. We found it was impossible to produce new ideas with no future income from that. Subscription buyers not only get the Entire Collection on CD, but anything new that comes out as we produce it and usually before it becomes available to the general public. If you are a former Entire Collection buyer we recommend you do consider becoming a subscriber. If you refer a friend who does subscribe, and you let us know, you get a free Entire Collection CD ROM each time you may give as a Christmas gift!
Last but not least, we have quite a nice line still coming for this season to include: Atkins' Recipes for the Holiday's, Making Soap in a Blender, Twentieth Century Housekeeper: Making Herbal and Natural Cleaning Solutions, Recipes of our Famous Friend's and Seasonal Soap and Candle Recipes to name a few. Click here for a glimpse of the Holiday Offer. Speaking of holidays I have always wanted falling snow in the Contact Us section and finally got to it! Wishing You the Best!
Deborah R. Dolen Soap Idea! Making our own natural soaps with lye is becoming a big focus this month. We find the ingredients easy enough to obtain, (the grocery store) and extremely economical to call a hobby. Our experiments shown us that most recipes are 8 parts fat or oils to 1 part lye solution. Mixing this formula in a blender until it is thick like honey (traced) and then adding your natural colors and scents are easy enough to do. We simply pour the product into already prepared molds--such as a 3" wide 6" long PVC pipe that has been treated with mold release, and capped of at the end with plastic and a rubber band is the way to go. But our biggest tip yet is that you can obtain nice oils, such as walnut and hazelnut at the dented can food stores for almost nothing! Usually a label is ripped and so they sell an $8 bottle of gourmet oil for $1. One of our readers, Shirley Mulanix says "I have also started adding shredded Cold Process soap to my glycerin M & P base to make the glycerin soap a little harder and last longer. My customers really like it that way. I use Shea Butter, once you try it you will be spoiled. The bars are hard and shiny. I just made a Green Tea batch with Grape Seed Oil, it looks like it turned out great."
Many of our customers have been asking for ways to sell their craft products. Click here for a free PDF introduction to our "How to Turn Your Crafts Into Gold" book. The introduction itself is excellent inspiration and direction. You get anything we discuss here at no charge. Please e-mail us and we will HAPPILY forward you the new e-books and manuscripts as we produce them. We truly thank you for your support of the Mabel White Company. Just e-mail us from here what title you would like. Amish Soft Pretzel Recipe: This is a very cute recipe sent to us from one of our readers who have family gatherings centered around making these Amish pretzels. They tell us it is a family tradition to get together a few times a year and make these. The recipe, they report, is straight from the Amish hub Lancaster and has been handed down through their family for years. To see the original version click here and click this link for our conversion. Sweet Tomatoes Recipes: If you have ever been down south to a Sweet Tomatoes Restaurant you would appreciate this recipe book. Sweet Tomatoes restaurants are set up buffet style but offer many interesting light salads and such. I liked their style so much I wrote a cook book based on their ensemble so I can make these combinations myself for entertaining. This is one of my favorite cook books to use at home but since many people do not to seem to know the concept, it is not a big seller. Click here for the recipes. The Story Behind the $250 Neiman-Marcus Cookie Recipe: This is the funniest story we have hear in a long time and you almost have to read her e-mail to appreciate that recipe that is included in this file. The consumer thought she was paying $2.50 for the recipe straight from Nieman themselves and discovered a $250 charge on her account they refused to remove. Therefore, she feels we should all enjoy the recipe for their chocolate chip cookies since she did, in fact, pay $250 for it! Click here for that recipe.
Based on my book The
Self Apothecary, and 101
Soap Making Recipes, we have been busy making
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When we asked her "What KIND of drinks?" she replied Hot
Chocolate, Cider Mulling Spices, and things of that nature. We not
only came up with a great document on 
rituals we would like to honor if only us busy mothers could remember.
We really write that stuff to remind our own selves! Other news includes
the 
After a year or
so, we are actually almost done with 
We determined to
begin FREE "
our own shampoo, conditioner, and many other bath
products from our test kitchen. We find making your own bath items does
produce a much higher quality product than most stores offer and with great
savings. When our staff mentioned what we were doing over one weekend,
people who barely knew us wanted to come over and play! Some were even
a few thousand miles away! But we did have fun and proved most of our
points. The primary result was that we CAN make the same great things
on our own, if not better than, the nice products we see in the stores. 
Some of the recipes we
were testing were actually from our customers. We did note one e-mail
describing how to make a relaxing body spray. The recipe did include one cup
of vodka! We assumed if the lavender in the spray did not relax you then you just
have to drink it! We did have fun and among many things we answered this
long standing question: Why do some bath bombs fizz like a dream and some
just sit there and appear to do nothing? We found the fizz to be directly
related to the amount of citric acid used, and more importantly, what grade!
A company up in Montana sent us several grades gratis so we could figure out if
cost of a higher grade even mattered. It did.
As a result of that work shop we determined to
always make our own soaps, lotions, shampoos and creams and to locate nice
permanent jars or bottles to store our products in such as the ones displayed in
our