May 12th, Mother’s Day is almost here! Why not surprise the moms you know with a little gift from the Cloister Shoppe. A special soap, a basket, maybe some cream. Then a book to nourish her mind and heart and maybe even a rosary or a statue to help her in her spiritual life?

So, we’re having a sale. Any ONLINE purchase $25 or more gets an automatic 15% discount. No xyzw285 of a promo code to remember. Any $50 purchase or more gets an automatic 20% discount.

And as they say on the infomercials, “There’s more!”

We now can offer PICK UP for those who wish to order online but pick it up at the monastery. Please give us 24 hours to fill your order.

Thank you, Mom Sale is applicable ONLY to online orders. Not applicable to purchases at the gift shop here at the monastery.

I’m sure you are enjoying the longer afternoons of sunlight just as we are! After Lauds one can hear the sound of the birds chirping. Here in New Jersey the trees are beginning to bud and flowers are coming up from the ground. We know this will happen every year but every year it seems nothing short of a miracle!

This year we are offering a new collection of spring scents with our SPRING TRIO. This is a lovely box of three 4 ounce bars of soap embossed with a floral motif. The bars come nestled in green fill and packaged in a clear box with a gold bow.

The scents of the 3 bars are: sweet honeysuckle goat’s milk soap, lavish lilac shea soap and delicate lily of the valley shea soap.

We hope you have seen our new Facial Care Combo Bag. It’s a wonderful collection of our new Facial Cream (it’s becoming a best seller), facial soap and a trio of our lip balm. All come packaged in a mini organza shopping bag in either green or ivory.

We have some new books in our shop, as well! Our latest offering is a new biography on St. Francis of Assisi by a Dominican–Fr. Augustine Thompson, OP. Fr. Thompson has been a friend of the monastery for many years and we are happy to see the years of research come to fruition.

The sisters have been reading this book and while some found it a big boring, other sisters said reading the book gave them an increased understanding and appreciation for this great saint!

Don’t you just love this cute organza mini-shopper?

The sister who does our packaging design and ordering thought they were cute, too, so she had to find a reason to order them!

Not really! Seriously, this is our new Facial Care Combo Bag. It’s 1 jar of our new face cream, 3 lip balm and 1 facial soap all tucked away in this cute bag and nestled in a bit of crinkle fill.

It’s a great gift for this time of year. Maybe for Valentine’s Day (don’t forget to add in some chocolate, too!) or just for any time for a gift and even for yourself!

Presently the bags are in either moss green or ivory.

To celebrate the feast of St. Margaret of Hungary, patroness of the Seignadou Soap Department, we’re having a sale on all Creams and Lip Balm.

January 18th ONLY! 20%! (Discount will show up in shopping cart!) Enjoy!

Why is she the patroness of the soap department? Well, in her lifetime you might say she had no use for soap. We figure that now she is heaven she probably sees it’s a good idea!

Last year we made a limited edition supply of hand creme with a wonderful fragrance of French Vanilla & Pear. It sold out quickly and we planned to add it to our line of cremes but time gets away and before we knew it Christmas was here!

January is a wonderful time to go to the soap department and experiment with ideas we’ve been talking about for months. It’s sort of like going into the kitchen and making a mess just for fun!

We’ve also been working out a formula for face creme which many of our customers have asked for! Nun testing being unreliable (we don’t use face creme!) we asked our friends who were brave enough to try it out! They were quite pleased with it and both our Face Creme with White Tea Extract and our new French Vanilla & Pear hand creme are now available.
January is a good time to try out our cremes, too with the cold weather and skin drying out, etc. We hope you’ll like these new products!

Sr. Deepa is our designer extraordinaire and during our slow months has been experimenting with all sorts of colors and fragrances. We’ve been talking about Christmas. Already? But we do need to have “Christmas in July” in order to be prepared for the fall!

Our soap mold supplier has come out with a mold that Sr. Mary Catharine has been waiting for: a St. Nicholas soap, not a Santa Claus! We’re still disagreeing on colors/fragrances, etc. but we’ve got the packaging down! We hope to have it up on the store sometime in October.

We’re planning another fall sale as well. We don’t want to bug you with sale emails but truly want to show our appreciation of your support by helping you save a little money! Unfortunately, cost of ingredients and supplies has gone up but we think we can hold off a price increase for the next 6 months at least. With the additional space in the soap department we have a little more room to store which means we can purchase larger quantities of supplies which means lower costs!

We’re also experimenting with some formulas for facial creme! By the time we get it right our faces should be permanently at 25! Seriously, we have this awesome White Tea fragrance that you will really like! It’s unusual when ALL the soap nuns agree on something the first time and White Tea fragrance was an unanimous winner!

You might also have noticed that we’ve updated the header photos on both this blog and our website. The blog photos show up in random order. If you refresh your page you should see the next one.

Spring is here and that means new things at Seignadou Soaps! The nuns can’t help it, they come up with some great ideas that we’ve been busy trying out. Sometimes, the idea seems simple but making the new product turns out to be, well, first a disaster and then not-so-simple and then we’ve got it!

For a long time we’ve wanted to offer the option to Make Your Own Gift Basket. We finally came up with a solution: each basket starts with 1 Rosary made by the nuns, 1 book: 16 Nuns, 16 Journeys, 2 lip balm and a wonderful luffa scrubber. You can add your choice of 2 soaps, 1 hand creme in a pump and 1 room spray. Add a custom message and we’ll make up your basket and send it to that special person!

We are offering Rosaries made by the Nuns of olive wood from Bethlehem. Long before items made in the Holy Land were popular here in the USA we were making rosaries of olive wood beads and offering them here at the monastery. These rosaries are well made with cord and we will restring a rosary you purchase from us at any time!

For the summer bugs and mosquitoes we now have Don’t Bug Me Spray! All-naturally made from soybean oil and lemon eucalyptus essential oils. Studies have shown that soybean oil keeps those nasty critters away for up to an hour and half!

We’ve got the spring scented soaps available and we’ll be offering some special selections for Mother’s Day! STAY TUNED!

You can now make a donation if you wish when you purchase items from the store!