I've had to wait a really long time to reveal this soap and it's very exciting! :-) I really love how it turned out. I do like the faux funnel pour! Who knew? :-P
I tried to get all snazzy with my picture taking and added a vanilla bean and some blackberries and raspberries in a small jar with cream. I'm not really sure it worked out but I still really like the picture.
Be sure to head on over to the link-up page to see the other soaps from this challenge.
Check out my new itty bitty soap mold! It's just a small bamboo drawer organizer box but I love it. It's so cute! I didn't realize how fun it would be to make a mini soap loaf. I have many little one ounce fragrance samples and I do get tired of using individual molds.
The first soap I made in my little mold is the raspberry patchouli fragrance from Rustic Escentuals. When soaping it, I did not smell any patchouli at all. I hope it blooms during the cure.
I colored the base with a bit of swiss chocolate mica but it was more of a funky green once the orange fragrance oil was added. So we'll see! I textured the top of the base, did a copper mica line, and then added unscented raspberry-colored soap to the top. Well, the soap was originally raspberry colored but it faded out a bit.
I noticed that the soap was heating up in the mold. Quizzing some of my soaper friends, they haven't had patch heat up so it will be interesting to see if I get a partial gel or a full gel as I let it just sit without the fan. I like to see what a mold is going to do on it's own. So we'll see!
Before I made my challenge soap, I made a different soap using a mix of the Bella and Alice fragrances inspired by their characters in the Twilight series. It's a beautiful mix of fizzy citrus and soft florals. I used almost the same colors as my challenge soap. I was really in the mood for white, pink, and purple soap. I didn't intend for both of the tops to be the same but oh well! :-) Belle sorelle means beautiful sisters which fit Alice and Bella perfectly.
I just poured a little here and there to swirl the soap.
The challenge this week is to do a faux funnel swirl. I've seen it done on YT lots of times but I've never had the desire to try it myself. I used a bit of extra water so I'd have enough time to play and used an easy going fragrance. I used black raspberry vanilla from Wholesale Supplies Plus. It is just the most perfect berry scent. I've soaped it many times and I keep forgetting how much I love it! Due to the purple...um...chest...um...look of only having two funnel pours in one mold...I chose to dollop the top and swirl it.
I made this soap on Saturday and I cut it earlier this afternoon. I must say...I LOVE IT! I can't wait to show you all!
I am beyond thrilled with my soap! My scheming and planning really paid off! :-D As you'll see, the base lightened up from the original caramel color. Pretty snazzy if I may say so myself!
Warning - this is a long, descriptive post so if you just want to look at the pretty pictures...scroll down! Heeeee!
After what seemed like an exhausting amount of planning, I finally made my alcohol soap! I have always wanted to make a vodka soap but the alcohol content seemed just too high. I've never made a beer soap so I had my mind made up that I was going to make a beer soap. However, I was talking to hubby about it one night earlier this week and he said "You know what would be cool? A pirate soap made with rum!" OKAY THEN.
I did some research and talked to several of my soaping friends and decided that the rum really wasn't worth the effort. Then I mentioned it to hubby again and he said, "Awe..I was really hoping you'd make the pirate soap." OKAY THEN.
Off hubby went to the liquor store and he bought some Capt. Morgan's Coconut Rum. He also got me some beer as a back-up. After all, he said I could drink it if I didn't soap it. :-) I figure it's a six-pack, why not do both! :-)
I was talking to a friend and she suggested I soap with coconut water. I decided that was a great idea so hubby got some coconut water at the store as well. Let's get this party started.
I started off by pouring almost the entire bottle of the rum into a heavy pan. It was incredibly precise...some for soap...some for some pina coladas later that evening. (Which totally hasn't happened yet by the way.) I boiled it on a rolling boil for 5 minutes and then let it simmer for 40 minutes. My goal was an hour at a low simmer but it had boiled down so much that I wanted to have some left and turned off the heat. By the time that process was done, I had only 5 oz of coconut rum syrup. I let it cool down to room temperature and then mixed it with 5 oz coconut water. Let me tell you, it smelled delish! I poured it into my little bug molds and put it in the freezer. I checked on it that night and it looked like it was frozen. When I went to unmold the rum/coconut water cubes yesterday, they were frozen but not completely. I think it was the sugar content. They were just like popsicles in consistency and had the syrupy liquid around it as well. I wasn't sure but I decided to use it.
You can watch the video but basically, I was impatient and dumped the lye into the frozen rum/coconut water cubes and the sugars burned. At first it was yellow, then orange, and then bright red!
I didn't mind the burning. It didn't stink and I was wanting a darker color for the base of the soap anyway. I let that caramel colored lye solution cool down and then went ahead using it in the soap. The soap was not accelerating and blending so well that I figured something was wrong. It did come to a medium trace relatively easily but not fast like I thought.
Then I stopped to clean off my blender. In that time, it got pretty thick. Then instead of suh-macking my mold right away, I let it sit while I tried to get every last bit of soap out of my bucket. I shouldn't have done that either! LOL! The consistency was just like caramel, including the air pockets like caramel has that I couldn't get to release.
So after watching Amy's video and then it happening to me as well, the key here is to just stop blending sooner than later. Once you get a light trace, just go ahead and pour it. Either that or don't dilly daddle and get that soap in the mold! This is your number one priority!
I wanted a nice colorful top to emphasize the parrot part of my pirate soap. Hubby said color was fine and swirls were fine, but I was NOT to texture the top. LOL! OKAY THEN!
I had another small batch of soap ready to be blended. I left it unscented and rather thin and colored it blue, yellow, and red.
The pictures don't show the red well because it was raining at the time and dark.
So there you go! I'm going to unmold it later this afternoon and see what my situation is. Here's hoping!
Have you noticed how I dilly daddle if I'm not excited about my soap? I made this last Wednesday, cut it this last Saturday, and took pictures on Monday. This soap is just OK. It smells good and I'm sure the piped colors will be pretty once I use the soap and wash the ash off. For now, there really isn't much to see here. I think the soap will darken a bit more still. That is the influence of the frosted lime cupcake fragrance in it.
I love all the extra little soaps I made from the leftover colors!
Be sure to go check out all of the other participants.
I think I've come up with a plan for my alcohol soap. I'm pretty sure it's going to seize on me but I'm going to try anyway! My husband is determined that I try. I'm being heavily influenced to try one thing in particular. So try I will!
Hi All! It's challenge time again! I must say I'm loving this challenge business! Thank you so much Amy! It's so nice to have a goal to work towards each week and I'm learning something new with each one, which I bet was Amy's goal in the first place. This is only going to make us all better! I certainly don't need any more soap around here and so I had planned to quit soaping for a while. But I HAVE to do this so you know...the soap piles higher! :-)
The challenge for this week is to pipe soap. Now, I have done this before with some cupcakes. It was so long ago (almost two years) and long before I ever watched Karen with Eden's Secret pipe cupcakes over and over and over again. Here is the best looking one of the six I did in May 2010:
I feel like if I had attempted the cupcake again, that I would have done alright now. However, I don't care for the cupcake soap when it comes to use. They are so pretty and cute and fun but when it comes to using them, I don't really want to have to cut it in two pieces to actually use it. To me, that defeats the purpose of the work put into it. Not to mention that it has lots of bubbles and gaps and I prefer a smooth bar. But to each her own right?
I was still going to make cupcakes (it IS a challenge after all) but I didn't think I had the appropriate icing tip. You know, if you use a tip that doesn't make big ridges while piping, things can start looking a little...well, dog-like and gross. :-) Turns out I did have the right tip but by then I was downstairs and had my oils melted and my mind was already going in the loaf direction.
To this batch I added a bit of cream and made up my own scent blend of fruit loops fragrance and frosted lime cupcake fragrance. I originally was going to do mostly frosted lime cupcake but the fruit loops smelled so good that I made it the dominant fragrance in the mix. I poured my base plain as it will discolor (oh such a sad thing for fruit loops fragrance!) and mixed up five colors for the piped topping. All was going great and the soap in the bag looked so cool. I used pink, green, yellow, blue, and purple. It was like the best spoon swirl...only the soap was still in the bag.
Oh look! I figured out a snapshot from my video!
Once I began piping, I realized that my soap was blending too much and the blue and purple were overwhelming the batch. I continued on and I didn't get the color payoff but oh well! I don't get too caught up on such things. But I did learn that you must (and I'll have to try this sometime to find out for sure) add your colors to your bag in bigger amounts and not just spoon by spoon. The color has to squeeze through such a small opening. I would have rather had a pink star here and a green star there instead of the grayish tinge the stars took on.
Here is my soap for the Week 2 Challenge. It is my four milk soap of goat milk, coconut milk, buttermilk, and cream. It has a scent blend of grapefruit, litsea, lime, and a smidgen of white vanilla fragrance. It smells so good! It is one of my most favorite blends.
I am really excited about the success of this milk soap. I really enjoyed melting the large milk pieces with the lye and now I feel more confident doing it again. It was very relaxing. It's a good thing because I had a bunch of leftover milk so I have another 5-6 lbs of milk separated out into ziplock bags in the freezer. I liked freezing the soap into the fun bug shapes but I just had way too much milk to get frozen right away.
You can oogle over all of the other Week 2 participants here at Amy's blog.
The challenge for this week is to make piped soap. I have done that before and it wasn't something I really enjoyed and so I am debating whether I will do it or not. However, that should be a good enough reason to challenge myself to do it again. I have seen lots of piped soaps made since then and maybe I've picked up a few hints along the way. We shall see! Don't wait on me! :-)
