Thai Pina Colada Soap

Pineapple and coconut was one of my first ever fragrance combos that I tried when I started soaping a few months ago, and I still love it.  I was born in Thailand, so I am in search of the perfect "Thai" fragrance blend.  I also wanted to do a soap with the Iowa Hawkeye colors, so here we go:

 

 

 

For the blend, I used pineapple-cilantro from Brambleberry, as well as Coconut Cream from Save on Scents, along with a dash of Lemongrass-lavender (local vendor) and Basil from Brambleberry.  It smells mostly like pineapple; I am hoping the scent will mellow a bit as it cures.

 

The color does look faintly green on top in the "wet" pic but it's more of a gray.  The batch took a while to set up and I kept futzing with it, trying to get the ridges on top.  Which mixed the colors more than I would have liked.  But I like the inside swirl!

Results of Rebatch & Blackberry Patch Soap

Here's how the rebatched soap turned out.  My husband's effort is stacked on top of my glop-n-pray effort:

 

My part is definitely a wash (pun intended!)  It's just horrible.  I'm going to let it harden and then grate it down for laundry soap.  DH's soaps, the ones on top, are nice but they are soft.  At least they're usable.

 

Last week I made a new blackberry soap.  The Blackberry Sage FO comes from Peak Candle Supply, and it's so fruity that it makes my teeth itch.  I tried to cut it with some patchouli FO from a local soap supply store, but the BS FO drowned it out.  This one will definitely be a giveaway or selling soap as I just don't like the fragrance, but I'm sure someone will!

 

Wet:

 

 

 

 

Green Tea Soap

I gave away a bunch of sample sized bars at a client site last month, and a friend of mine from there ordered 3 bars of the green tea soap!  Yay!  I tried a new color combo.  I'm not sure about the gray-moss-green part of the swirl, but it sure is dramatic.

 

Wet:

 

 

Cut:

 

 

 

I'm pretty darn close to my standard formula - coconut oil, castor oil, grapeseed oil, and pig lard.  I have no problems using animal fat, personally, and that list is all available locally for me.  Whatever works, right?

 

Lemongrass Lavender Coconut

My father-in-law made me a new mold!  Now how do I line it =\  One of my mailing lists recommended craft foam, so I may give it a try.

 

Yesterday I made a new soap using Celene's swirling and texturing messages.  This is Lemongrass Lavender Coconut.  I need to find a creating naming formula!

 

 

 

 

Rebatching Photos

I wasn't thrilled with the Spiced Chestnut & Pear soap that I made earlier this month, so I rebatched it.  My husband asked me to let him try adding more liquid than I was, to see if we could get it pourable, so I let him.  Apparently I'm just too cautious on some things, because it worked out well.

 

 

Shreds added to crockpot with a dusting of dry milk and 1/4 cup of aloe vera juice, then we added more juice as needed.

 

 

 

This was as pourable as we could get it.

 

 

 

Now husband and I want nachos...

Finally figuring it out ~ Chai Tea Soap

I have watched just about every swirling video put out by The Soaperstar and I think I might finally be getting the hang of it!  I made this on Friday:

 

Wet:

 

 

Cut:

 

 

Closeup:

 

 

This is a Chai Tea scented soap with FO from Rustic Escentuals.  I found a local distributor of oxides and glitter - so happy!

 

 

 

Coffeehouse

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving here in the States!  I tried a new swirl technique that I saw on Youtube for a coffeehouse scented soap - my husband's coworker asked if I could make one.  Not that he's paying, mind, but it gave me an excuse to order some new fragrance oil.

 

Wet soap:

 

 

I used a light tan base, then swirled near-white and darker brown on the top.  It was still a little squat, like the chestnut/pear soap from last week.  Need to work on my volume!

 

 

Smells nice and coffeelike, though!

 

 

 

Spiced Chestnut & Pear

Here's the soap wet in the mold:

 

 

And when cut:

 

 

It's a little squat for my taste.  This is the result of my not taking notes .. I can't remember which was the successful formula, i.e. # of ounces, that filled my log mold.  Back to the drawing board, and taking notes this time!  But this soap smells really good.

 

I took this up to one of my client sites last week:

 

 

 

Gave it all away!  The soap went over very well.  Even got a paid order for 3 green tea bars out of it.  Huzzah!

 

 

Cut Pics - White Shoulders 2.0

 

I'm very happy with the swirl!  This is much more along the lines of what I was thinking of for White Shoulders.  I do need to clean up the bars but they're still very soft.  I'm not sure why - Soapcalc listed my recipe as falling within the recommended range for hardness.  I imagine they will firm up while curing.

White Shoulders v. 2.0

Here's what the final version of that first attempt at White Shoulders soap looks like.  As you can see, it turned very dark brown.

 

 

However, in the shower, it's WONDERFUL!  It has so much slip and it smells very nice.  It was outstanding for shaving. It smells too much like my mother-in-law for my husband to be 100% comfortable using it himself, but you know.  Men.

 

As I said in my last post, I wanted to try again, so I bought more White Shoulders FO from Bitter Creek and just tried it again, this time attempting a pink and blue and white peacock swirl:

 

 

Now, I bought the Neon Blue Gel Colorant and Neon Pink Gel Colorant for this soap.  I used perhaps 10 drops in each bottle of raw soap (about 8 oz of soap per bottle).  As you can see, the colors are pretty faint.  I would have had to use the entire bottle of each to get a really bright hue.  Should have used more, but my recent mistakes make me very cautious when trying new products.  We'll see if the color fades out or stays in the swirl.  Will post cut pics soon!

New cut pics - swirl attempts

Here's the cut pic for my Gunpowder "Manly Man" soap that I tried to make for my husband but that traced and thickened too quickly to try a peacock swirl on:

 

 

And here's a more marbled soap that I made with Coconut Cream and Curry FO's from Save On Scents:

 

 

I've decided to try to redo the White Shoulders bars for my MIL's Christmas present because they have seriously darkened to a very dark brown.  Serviceable, but not very pretty.  Will hopefully be doing that this weekend; just waiting on some more FO.

 

 

New peacock swirl effort

 

The actual goal was to swirl purple, blue, and brick red with some "Gunpowder" FO from Save on Scents.  Unfortunately, it traced super fast - I don't know if it was the FO or my recipe (I'm still searching for the perfect one, am narrowing it down).  So I had to glop + pray.

 

So this one is a whitish base with purple swirled lightly in it, with this peacock swirled blue top.  Will post the cut pics soon!

In Which I Make A Mess

Note to self when using Brambleberry's column soap mold - make darn sure the cap is on before thumping it on the table to get the soap to settle.  Behold:

 

 

 

Eh, oops.  I was very glad that I put down a vinyl tablecloth and THEN a textured mat to catch spills.

 

This was Snickerdoodle soap in the column mold.  I tried to make it one uncolored plus one brown color swirled, but the uncolored part turned yellow on me.

 

 

Not a fan of the sickly yellow color.  Thankfully, because I'd added a titch of Vaniglia de Madagascar (Vanilla) FO to the uncolored part, it turned it brown.  So the soap is currently a nice solid darn cinnamon-y brown.  Very nice!

 

 

 

Raiders Soap

My friend Stacy is a huge Oakland Raiders fan, so I made this Raiders soap for her Hanukkah present this year:

 

 

 

 

I think it turned out quite nicely!  The "silver" isn't quite as silvery as I wanted it, but that's ok.  I used Japanese Winterberry FO from the ScentWorks.  The little beads on top are sugar beads that I got from a baking supply website.

 

 

 

White Shoulders Type Swirl Soap

I made some swirl soap using White Shoulders type FO from Bitter Creek Candle Supply, because my mother-in-law requested it as a Christmas present.  I think it turned out nice, however you can see the struggle I continue to have with getting white soap as opposed to beige/brown.  I did add 1 oz vanilla FO along with the 1 oz of White Shoulders, so that's probably why it's so brown, as vanilla FO apparently colors CP soap.

 

Also I've noticed, as with my peacock swirl soap from last week, that the less olive oil I use in my recipe, the lighter the coloring of the soap.

 

Anyway, I'm pleased with the swirl!

 

 

Peacock Swirl - Cut Pics

The colors definitely muted a bit, but I still think it's lovely!  And the scent is just right.

 

 

 

My first peacock swirl

I finally buckled down and bought a slab mold - here's my first attempt at a peacock swirl!

 

 

 

 

I have been struggling with getting my soap white as opposed to olive-oil-beige.  I finally tried a recipe that didn't use OO and I like it a lot.  It stayed nice and thin and pourable while I was pouring out into the mold.  I'd recommend it for this type of soaping.  I blended my micas with 1 TBSP sweet almond oil each.

 

12 oz coconut oil (76 degrees)

6 oz grapeseed oil

6 oz safflower oil

2.5 oz shea butter

16 oz beef tallow

16.15 oz water (38%)

6.08 oz lye

2 tsp tangerine wow colorant from Brambleberry

2 tsp mango margarita mica from the Conservatorie

2 tsp strawberry mica from SJSupplies (Etsy)

4 oz Ginger Souffle FO from ScentWorks

 

Will post pics after the cut!

Circle Swirl Tutorial Attempt

Yesterday I tried following this tutorial from Soap Queen.  I had some issues with the Titanium Dioxide - namely, that it wasn't whitening my soap!  I got some good recommendations from other soapers at The Dish - next time I'm going to try putting the powdered TD on top of the lye and then dump it all into the water to mix. 

 

So the soap is orange-turquoise-yellow instead of orange-turquoise-white:

 

 

I mean, it's pretty, it just doesn't look as much like Anne-Marie's as I would like.  The scent is interesting, if not one that I would have picked on my own.  I do like the column mold and will try this technique again once I get some nice new colorants.  I have a lot of lovely new FO's to try out!

 

Check out what my FIL made for me!

My awesome father-in-law made me this mold!  I'm so excited!  As you can see, I've already used it.  This is an orange scented soap with orange/metallic gold swirl.  I'm not sure if the colorants did much as they were liquid colorants from Michael's (I really wanted to soap with my new mold but didn't have a colorant to match the orange FO). 

 

Edited to add the cut pic:

 

 

Rebatching!

I rebatched batch #4 in the earlier "ew" post.  That was some gross soap, although it smelled good and had a pretty color!  I grated it and threw it in the crockpot:

 

 

I read a website that recommended milk while the rebatch was melting, and then dry milk as the "secret ingredient" when stirring just before glopping it into the mold.  The secret ingredient didn't do much, IMO, but I gave it a shot :)  Behold the ugly glop!

 

 

I didn't insulate it since it had cooked in the crockpot.  I just left it in the (cool) oven overnight where the cats wouldn't bother it.

 

When it came out of the mold 24 hours later, it was extremely soft.  I think the extra milk and/or dry milk made it that way.  It was so soft that when I put it on a wire shelf, it glopped down onto the next shelf!  We remolded it into bar-like shapes, and it's finally firming up after a few days of curing time.

 

So I'm writing that batch off as a bad job; we'll just use it for our own bathing purposes.

 

I did another batch last night to try out the oils that I got from Soaper's Choice.  I decided to try soaping at room temperature; instead of using thermometers to keep lye and oils at the same temp, I just poured the lye into the room temperature oils.  It worked great!  I finally feel like my soap looks somewhat like the shiny glossy soaps that I see on YouTube:

 

 

Coconut Oil (76 degree) - 8 oz

Palm oil - 12 oz

Rice Bran Oil - 12 oz

Tallow - 12 oz

Water (33%) - 14.52 oz

Lye (5% superfat) - 6.09 oz

1 oz China Rain FO from Symphony Scents

1 oz Green Tea FO from Symphony Scents

1 oz green mica from 2 different Etsy sellers, different shades.

 

I think it turned out really nicely, except that I tried doing a Celene Swirl again and it just has the darker green blob in the middle:

 

 

Still, I saw the texturing technique on YouTube and I tried it and think it came out pretty.  The fragrance is a little light but you can still smell it.  All in all, a success!