Warm Vanilla Sugar (And plans!)

I would like to think I've been a busy, busy bee over the last few weeks.

And in a way, I have. But I also haven't.

I did, however, make a new batch of delicious smelling soap. Warm vanilla sugar. This was actually a request from a coworker, whose face lit up when I brought her a few bars when she was in the hospital for surgery last week.

Delicate little swirls!

I love how the little sugar beads look, though they sort of melted a little bit as it heated. :(

I used the hangar swirl technique to get the white swirls with the layer on top.

I'll be working on some more batches soon enough -- right now I'm focusing on saving money for our next move, plus a week long trip to Cali for my boyfriend's cousin's wedding. Woohoo!

Soap gremlins and Mica swirls

So I wanted to try the peacock/bouquet swirl, and the above photo is the soap I got instead.

"But it isn't even close!"

No, I know. Because soap gremlins.

I HATE soap gremlins.

Granted, I was using a fragrance oil I knew accelerated, I just forgot HOW FAST. Tried adding more water, nope. Got stuck in my soap condiment bottles. Ohmygod. Dumped bottles out into soap, layered, hoped for best.

Instead, I got CRAYOLA BARF. Oy.

So I rebatched, sliced the soap up nice and thin, put it in a crock pot (it was still soft and squishy after 3 days from all the water I added) for about an hour, stirring occasionally. Plopped into mold. Still smelled of Freesia, silly white florals, and had a lovely lavender color to it:

Brushed the top with some oil-mica and glitter.

Decided to try a heavy olive oil recipe with my other planned batches for the day, to slow things down a bit. Soaped a green tea and willow silk/shea soap with french green clay, wanting to try the oil/mica swirl again. I was impressed! Soaped well, smelled beautiful, and look at the SWIRL!

This is after drying a bit. Yay!

Wanting to take the opportunity to use the gremlin-free soap time, I started on another. Purple sandalwood, colored with a purple mica and activated charcoal. Smelled yummy and odd, musky. This is BEYOND my favorite mica swirl to date:

SO PRETTY. <3 Finally, after all those tries, I got it. Took me long enough, LOL. Can;t wait to see the inner swirls with the green tea and sandalwood soaps. Exciting! I'll just have to wait longer to unmold due to extra olive oil. Here's another pic of the lovely purple swirls!

So happy with my soap results today. The gremlins were beating me down for a while.

And here's the paradise soap cut!

Love the hanger swirl, just wish the colors had come out brighter. I'll get usage rates down soon! The green and purple seemed to do fine, so we'll see. :)

Thanks for reading, and HAPPY SOAPING!

16lbs of Cut Soap!

You guys remember this lot from yesterday, right?

Oh yes. Getting all of this soap out of the molds was a challenge in itself, but cutting it -- whew! Hand cutting it, I might add. The bars arent all even (let me tell you, I LOVE my slab mold now - it does it for me!) but money is tight, so I'll have to wait for a special day to invest in one of the fancy wire cutters.

But here are the soaps!

This is my Energize bar. A nice little (no column!) swirl done in my slab mold. It's got a bit of ash on the top, and some of the bars are sweating, but it smells heavenly. Scented with a blend of yuzu and lemon verbena, it's strong citrus top notes have a nice, sweet undertone. Lovely for morning showers!

This is the batch that accelerated so much it nearly hardened in the pot! Whisper, it was meant to have a hangar swirl (which is present in like, two bars) but whatever. It smells wonderful, a nice, heavy white floral (which I know accelerates anyway, duh) with a slight tinge of perfume. The tops of these are ashed as well, though I'll be using my soap planer/beveler from Soap making Resource to clean all of these babies up!

You can see how bad the ash is really well on these.

Probably my favorite one in terms of design out of the previous bars, this is Pink Lavender. Scented with a blend of lavender and some nice light florals, it has lavender buds sprinkled along its textured top. Lavender buds are also present throughout the middle of the bar (meaning there were some streaks when cutting). I used purple labcolor from RE to color the top part with, with TD mixed into the whole batch. Not sure if it's the TD that mixed with the labcolor, or the CP method that made it turn this delightful pink color. Happy accident, yay!

And, finally, Rustic. This is scented with a blend of eucalyptus and musk, a nice manly scent. I went with a simple grey bar, dusted the top with black glitter (more manly than -- pink glitter? I don't know) and ohmygawd it smells amazing. This bar and the Pink Lavender were softer out of the molds, more sticky -- though they were 3lb batches versus the 5lb of the others, so I'll account it for a cooler saponification temp.

Yay glitter!

These are some of the more professional soaps I've made, as these will be the ones I show to a wholesale client later int he week (wish me luck!) I never would have imagined that my hobby would have evolved this fast, and I have all of you to thank for having such an amazingly insightful community of soapers for me to explore! 

Happy soaping, my lovelies -- I will be updating more past batches until I get more palm oil in, as I barely have enough for a 3lb batch!

Cinnamon-Clove Textured Soap

I've really been wanting to experiment with textured tops and soap. I always see these amazingly detailed soaps, but I always pour at too thin a trace. Well, tonight while making soap I realized that my scent was accelerating very quickly, and hit a nice gloppy medium-heavy trace. Time for textures!

I wanted to swirl this one like I had swirled my charcoal detox bar, with a deep black against a nice dark red. Which is the other color, by the way. It's hard to tell in the picture. That brown is a grungy burgundy, promise!

I used Bramble Berry's Merlot mica, and activated charcoal (yay deep blacks and clear lather!) and layered the black colored soap int he bottom of my silicone pan. Next I zig-zagged the red in, and folded it into the black with my spatula. We'll see how well that works tomorrow when I cut the bars -- but man, once I took a wisk and detailed the top, it became so lovely. I couldn't stop taking pictures of it.

Here are some more:

Look at all that texture! <3

And it smells of delicious cinnamon-clove. Mmm. Maybe more of a fall scent, but I had a few customers specifically ask for bars like this. Yay!

Bramble Berry's M&P Soap Swap: Oatmeal Milk & Honey Cybilla

So I've been hankering some more soap making recently, and have been struggling to get up the urge to just DO IT. It finally happened today, as the stress of a failed motherboard in my gaming rig and my starter being shot in my car culminated into an "I NEED TO SOAP" distress. Soaping honestly gives me time to myself to really focus on something other than what's going on around me. It's an escape, and the only thing I'm thinking about is the soap. No kitties, no lovers, no car, job, home, etc. Just soap. measuring, calculating, taking notes about the process, what changes, what's different, what was successful, etc. I record these in my soap-book, where I keep ideas for soaps, recipes, and new scents I want to try cataloged.

With the Bramble Berry Soap Swap coming up, I knew I needed to get to work on my second batch for the M&P swap! I chose to do Oatmeal Milk & Honey Cybilla, since I had that one on-hand from the sample scents sent out with last month's order. I also LOVE how that kind of fragrance colors white M&P base.

For this one, I wanted to incorporate organic jojoba meal and dry oatmeal into the bars. I only had normal white glycerin base on hand, non-suspension formula, so I knew ahead of time this bar would end up "layered". With that fact in mind, I embarked on filling my molds!

I heated the soap base int he microwave, adding fragrance and the jojoba meal into the melted mix. After stirring for a while to make sure the meal was incorporated, I poured it into my acrylic log mold. 

IT SMELLED AMAZING.

Seriously, I've never smelled an oatmeal milk and honey fragrance I literally wanted to eat. Most of them seem to be too sweet smelling for my liking, and some even turn my stomach. But this one was so fresh and delicious, mmm.

Once it was in the mold, I spritzed it with alcohol, and then added a layer of oatmeal. I also sprayed this down with alcohol, causing some of it to sink down into the bottom of the loaf mold.

After waiting several hours, I popped it out of the mold and cut it! Yum!

The meal and oatmeal stayed ont he top or bottom of the bar, so I guess that means someone can decide whether or not they want exfoliation during their shower, LOL.

New Soap Recipe + Spatula Swirl technique

Since I began soaping, I've been using very cost-efficient, vegan recipes to get plenty of practice under my belt before taking on the task of formulating my own recipe incorporating pricey ingredients. It's not so bad to lose a batch when your only ingredients are coconut oil, canola oil, and vegetable shortening! Do the same with a recipe with shea butter, palm oil, sweet almond oil, and palm kernel flakes -- YIKES. The list of expenses add up quickly.

Now that I've been at it (extensively) for a few months, I thought it was time to figure out my recipe. This was a big step, as this formulation will become the trademark recipe I make my soap with (so no, no sharing!  (: ) So I sat down with SoapCalc as a backup reference (and to keep track of the INS totals of my recipe) and a list of all the possible soapmaking oils, their INS values, and what each one was good for.

Then, I asked myself: What do you want in a bar?

Easy enough. I want a nice, creamy, hard bar of soap that lathers well with decent bubbles and stability. I also want it to be hard enough to be very long-lasting, so that my customers don't have to worry about purchasing them often. I also wanted to make sure that there was enough skin-loving oils to make the "necessity" of using lotion after a shower -- well, non-existent. And easily obtained oils were a plus.

Considering I work at Rustic Escentuals, the oil-supply issue isn't much of a problem. I currently get my coconut oil, castor oil, and sweet almond oil from there. The Chemistry Store is where I get my Palm Oil and palm kernel flakes, as those are some of my preferred ingredients. I couldn't live without palm oil in my bars -- it's too nice on the skin and makes them super, super hard! My only other alternative would be to use beef tallow -- and considering I want vegan bars, this isn't an option. Yes, I know the controversy surrounding palm, and I don't agree with it, so I make sure to purchase it from places I trust. TCS delivers, and their customer support is awesome. :)

I also found a great deal on shea butter on Amazon -- 17.99 (shipping included!) for 5 lbs! AMAZING. Of course I bought it -- granted, it's unrefined, pure, natural, lovely off-yellow shea. Some complain about it's natural earthy smell, but I can;t get enough of it. I even use it outside of soaping -- straight out of the bag onto my skin when it needs a little extra nourishing.

So, recipe wise: I had castor oil, which at a mere 5% adds amazing, stable, bubbly lather. Adding coconut oil adds skin conditioning benefits, as well as a more creamy lather. Shea butter for superfatting as well as in the recipe adds a higher level of skin-moisturizing and nourishing properties -- and who wouldn't want shea in their soap? Palm oil is a must, the base for the soap for its hardness and conditioning properties. A little palm kernel flakes for some more hardness, and a pinch of canola oil to pull down the cleansing level of the soap (No higher than 20! And 15 is my preferred.). After fiddling with percentages, I was intensely happy with my values!

Just to make sure the bar was as hard as I want it, I intend to add 1% melted beeswax to the recipe as an additive. Since beeswax takes a much higher temp to melt, and when trying to room-temp melt my hard oils (the beeswax DIDN'T melt at all. HOLY COW), I have to melt this separately and add to my liquid oils while waiting for my solids to melt. Time to go a-testing!

I wanted to make a manly (or unisex) bar of soap, one I can send to some friends I had promised. I melted my hard oils with my hot lye-water, added my liquid oils, and went to blending! Considering my recipe had so many hard oils, I was amazed that it isn't a fast-moving recipe, even after blending in fragrance, adding activated charcoal, and titanium dioxide. I used a 9x9 silicone baking pan as my soap mold ($10 on Amazon with Prime shipping), pouring the activated charcoal first. I then took a mall mix of my titanium dioxide-colored soap and made a grid pattern (being very careful not to pour too high or too fast -- this pattern is only for the top!). Once that was done, I ran my spatula (the soap is still at a light trace! WOW!) through the white lines in a up-and-down motion (if you youtube spatula swirl, you'll see what I mean here.)

I didn't have a chance to take pictures during all of this, as I was focusing on the soap and making mental notes about how it acted through the process, and toward the end of the swirl I circled my spatula around the mold once, for a nice effect.

My beautifully swirled soap in the mold!

A close-up of the swirl

The final bars were already super-hard after 24 hours, and the loaf unmolded beautifully. I originally cut them to be 3x3, though they weighed in at a whopping 7.6-8 oz! I cut an inch off one side (making cute sample bars) to they were 3x2x1.5". I intend to make a smaller batch, as the thickness only needs to be an inch, but I was very impressed with how they turned out. As a finishing touch, I lightly speckled some Diamond Dust glitter over the top for a more fancy finish.

The glitter/size of the bar

They're so thick!

As fragrance, I added 1 OPP of Ezra Fitch type FO (sold by Rustic Escentuals in Amy's line), which smells like straight-up man out of the bottle. It's an insatiably manly scent, and I was hoping it would soap well. After unmolding and cutting, it seemed to morph a little -- it wasn't as strong as it had been, but it had mellowed out very nicely, leaving top notes of a cologne-type scent with bottom notes of heavy musk. The intense-man scent had become a nice unisex one, though this one is still for the guys. ;)

If you guys every have any questions, comments, photos, or anything at all -- let me know! Comments are always welcome!