Soap far so good for so-busy Julia

While most mums have a bit of juggling to do, Julia Walker has more than most. “We have lots of soap orders so I’m just getting those all wrapped up. Tonight I work on music for a movie that is coming out this year whilst also having to pick up my son from nursery, make dinner, then bedtime,” she says in a rare spare moment.

“Overall it is possible, but only if you are prepared to lead quite a hectic life and have fully-booked days.”

Julia, who lives in West Oxford with husband Ben and two-year-old Theodore, is a mum, musician and co-owner of the Of Woodstock artisan soap and skincare company.

“As a parent, balancing these projects is quite a challenge. But I somehow manage, mostly by being late,” jokes Julia, who is expecting her second child in under a month.

Julia is best known on the Oxford music scene as Juju, performing in Candy Says with Ben, who is also a musician and currently playing with Supergrass’s Gaz Coombes.

She started as a busker and formed a garage rock band called Little Fish which was signed by Island/Universal Motown, released an album and toured the world with the likes of Blondie, Courtney Love and Juliette Lewis before returning to Oxford and starting a new musical project – “chic pop” band Candy Says.

Candy Says has released one album – Not Kings – and Julia is also working with Ben Walker and composer Marc Canham on the score for a new British independent film called Burn, Burn, Burn (see imdb.com/title/tt3627488/) written by her friend Charlie Covell.

Alongside this she has started Of Woodstock with friend Louisa Canham (wife of composer Marc) who she has known since university days.

“The soap venture started about a year ago. Louisa spent the years since we graduated building a career as a clinical psychologist,” says Julia.

“She trained at Oxford University and then worked for a decade with children in a variety of contexts across Oxfordshire including outpatient services, adolescent prisons and local boarding schools.

“In recent years she too had become a mum – her children Samson and Electra are eight and six now.

“Despite our experiences having been so different, we both found ourselves feeling that our respective working lives held personal frustrations and in some respects did not fit well with the demands of a young family.

“Louisa had discovered the art of soap making a few years earlier. I think that she found working with her hands – making something tangible – grounding, rewarding and a good counter-balance for the inherent complexity in her line of work.

“Over time she had developed beautiful recipes in her kitchen in Woodstock and had taken the first tentative steps in having these formulations assessed by a cosmetic chemist.”

Julia had been following the developments as a friend and gradually found herself enchanted with the world of soap.

“One thing brought the next and early last year our increasingly joint interest in all things soap-related led to the sense that perhaps there was more in this for both of us” says Julia.

The women joined forces and Of Woodstock was created.

“In retrospect I think that we were both, in some ways, rather insane,” says Julia, clearly not regretting the move at all.

“In addition to being a full-time mum to Theo (who was 18 months at the time), Ben and I were working on the release of our first Candy Says album and Louisa was also still working as a clinical psychologist, juggling home life and a pretty complex and demanding caseload of young people and their families.

“I am not sure what exactly prompted us to think that starting up our own business might bring a little bit more balance into our lives!”

But by taking one step at a time, and with support from their families and friends, “things began to happen”.

Louisa drew a close to her psychology work and, following the launch of Not Kings, Julia pressed pause for a while on the music front to focus on the soap venture.

Julia and Ben Watson perform as Candy Says at Riverside Festival, Charlbury, last year

The response to their products has been “overwhelmingly positive”.

“We feel very lucky indeed and to a great extent it is this incredible response that we have received that spurs us on to develop everything that we are doing further,” says Julia, whose soap studio is next to Eynsham Saw Mill.

Products are sold online and in Illyria Pottery in Jericho. There have been collaborations with Bluedog & Sought in Woodstock and Eau de Vie on Cowley Road. In December, Of Woodstock took part in the Oxford Christmas Market.

“For the months ahead we feel that the rather Bohemian feel that permeates Of Woodstock fits well with festivals (the name inherently invites those associations!), and as such we are working on building links with festivals and other art/music events that capture and reinforce the playful undertones of holistic wellbeing that we believe Of Woodstock stands for,” says Julia.

The summer diary so far involves goodies finding their way to the VIP area at the Isle of Wight Festival, stocking the glamorous Camp Kerala with soaps and providing backstage and goody bags for the June Hyde Park event featuring The Who, Paul Weller and The Kaiser Chiefs.

Any chance Julia may be taking a festival stall and be selling soap and performing at the same place? “Unlikely this year as I am about to have baby number two any day! It is looking like it going to be a very busy few months ahead on the family front and so perhaps we’ll give performing at festivals this year a miss.”

There’s only so much juggling a mum can do.

ofwoodstock.com
candysays.it/

A juicy story of Rock ‘n’ roll

Soap making is not the only artisan project Julia has been involved with.

She and her husband have also had a sideline selling their own apple juice.

“Ben’s parents used to have an apple orchard,” she explains. “Every year involved us eating so many apples that in the end we decided to make apple juice from them. 

“We then took them to shows and sold them as part of our merchandise.”

It lead to a further development for the band.

“This brought about the title from a book **** The Radio, We’ve Got Apple Juice by our good friend Miranda Ward,” says Julia, “which explores the myths of rock ’n roll through the story of Little Fish.”

You can read an excerpt from the book at unbound.co.uk/books/f-k-the-radio-weve-got-apple-juice/excerpt

Long process but worth waiting for

“We make our soaps using the traditional cold-process method,” says Julia. 

“Our recipes are made up of different base oils which hold their own unique properties – for example, olive oil makes a lovely, hard soap; coconut helps with lather and ensures stability, sunflower oil contains Vitamin E and is a natural antioxidant.

“All our soaps contain cold-pressed Rapeseed oil (R-Oil) that we source from a lovely farm in Stow. 

“We are very keen to source as much as possible locally or directly from growers, as we love knowing about the provenance of the materials that we use.

“The base oils are blended with water and sodium hydroxide (which mixed together form what is referred to as ‘lye’) until they reach a certain thick consistency, at which point we mix in our unique essential oil blends as well as whatever clays, spices or other natural ingredients we might be using.

“Then comes the pouring of the soap mixture into long wooden moulds (made especially for us by Louisa’s father, a semi-retired spinal surgeon, who was in need of a project to keep him occupied). 

“The soap moulds are wrapped in blankets for 24-48 hours to reinforce the natural esothermic process which makes the soap harden, after which the long bars are ready to cut into individual soaps. 

“These then need four to six weeks to ‘cure’– which basically means that the sodium hydroxide evaporates – leaving the bars of soap essentially just containing the original natural ingredients. 

“This is really a rather protracted and sensitive process, but the end results are beautifully pure and absolutely worth the wait! The size of our batches varies but we usually make about 240 soaps at a time.

“In addition to the range of natural soaps that we hand-make, we have developed some beautiful natural washes, lotions and face oils that we will be launching over the next couple of months.”