Soapy Sidetracking: Phoenix?

Okay, so the soapy part of tonight's blog is this: Cut soap pictures! Yay!

The cut bars of Green Tea and Willow. Smells AMAZING, nice woodsy clean spa-type smell. Slight bit of ash on the tops, but I'm going to see how steaming them does with the mica swirl (hopefully well!)

Purple Sandalwood! More ash on these, but I LOVE how the inside swirl did -- this trace was still very liquid in the pour, where GT&W was much thicker. This soap had a higher concentration of olive oil as well -- you can see my cutting marks! And fingerprints. I'll use my planar to clean them up, but it's going to irk me with the longer wait. I'm used to heavy solid oil recipes over liquid ones.

And the SIDETRACKING. Little known fact about me (sort of) is that I used to be an art major. I guess I'm still an artist, my media type has just changed (I consider soap an art form!) and I havent lost the spark, and I occasionally sketch still. My amazing obsession, however?

Phoenix.

Any kind of phoenix.

Like Jean Grey from X-men.

Even Dark Phoenix.

And White Phoenix of the Crown.

And this phoenix tattoo on my thigh.

I adore phoenix. In general, and the person. Mythos-wise, it accurately resembles my life. I've seen things. I've done things, and had them done to me. It hasn't always been easy. I grew up in a cold home, I was in a traumatic accident -- but I never let those things define me. Though Ive had a dark and bitter past, I have recreated and renewed myself for the future. Each horrible thing I encounter and survive through marks a moment in my history where I become reborn. Even as Jean battles with the darkness struggling to consume her, she always finds light in the end. 

So, in homage to my artist "past," enjoy some of my old drawings/sketches. Eye candy just for you viewers!

Dark Phoenix

Joker - Heath Ledger

Alduin - Skryim

Hellraiser Puzzle Box book cover for my hubby

Sketches on Notes

TipTopDog Hundesalon - A commissioned mural that's on a dog salon in Germany where my father lives. :) This was a doozy to paint!

Bahamut from FFX

Painted Phoenix from the first sketch

Amy Lee of Evanescence

More phoenix

Another Amy Lee (her eyes are GORGEOUS)

Self-portrait done digitally

So, what are YOUR other obsessions? Anything you do outside of soaping? Used to do? Would like to do? Let me know after the break!

BREAK :D

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!

Energizing adventure!

As you may know from previous posts, this is Energize. It's an amazingly lovely heavy-lemon scented soap, with a soft undertone of sweet. This is the bar as it was originally pulled from my DORIGHT slab mold.

After being annoyed by the heavy ash, even after steaming the bars, I decided I'd give my SMR planer a try.

So off I went! Lovingly beveling the edges of my soap bar, planing the flat sides (I find that if you plane the front and back of the bar first, then the corners you want beveled, and THEN the sides, it works best!), reveling in the scent of yummy citrus as the fresh slices aerated the room. Halfway through, however, I was wondering what to do with my planed leftovers. I had been squeezing them together after each bar, making little squished soap bits. Then it occurred to me.

SOAP BALLS!

Who DOESN'T love soap balls? Even if I just use them as embeds, it's an awesome idea. So I started rolling!

Nice, clean-of-ash, planed soaps. <3

And soap balls!

Size comparisons:

Thanks for reading! And as always -- 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!

Galactic Soap - First CPOP

After seeing Anne Marie's post on CPOP on her Soap Queen blog, I wanted to try it. Beautiful CP swirls but with the HP processing -- what more can a girl ask for? Especially one as impatient as I am! Before I started, I noticed my oven's lowest setting was 200F, quite a bit over the 170F that was recommended. I preheated the oven to 200, but let it sit a while off, so it cooled down. Once it was around 170-180F, I knocked it to warm. One step down!

I made up my soap, choosing to use activated charcoal, titanium dioxide, and fizzy lemonade pigments from Bramble Berry. I also wanted to try a spooning technique I saw on a blog post, though now it eludes me. :( (If anyone knows what I'm referencing, let me know and I'll give credit!)

Layering the first bit of soap. I gues the concept here is plopping it down in somewhat straight lines. Or drizzling.

Looking at the pictures, I realize I got much wider in my lines. Which explains why this didnt turn out the way I wanted it to. :(

Cant have swirled CP soap without a lovely swirled top! Kept this one simple, as I love the mantra-style swirls.

In the oven!

I left the mold and soap in there overnight, popping it out around lunchtime the next day. The colors were SO VIBRANT, especially the fizzy lemonade. It just POPPED.

However, I didnt turn off my oven for about an hour and a half, causing the top to get these little bubbles in them. It made a weird texture, but I ended up leaving it on the bars. Apparently, this happens when you bake your soap! Oops! :)

Here you can see the textured tops. Look how bright the yellow is! Wow!

I packaged this bar very simply, and I'm calling it Galactic. It's scented with SnC Cucumber Melon, but it faded/baked off a bit in the oven, so it isnt as strong. Other people don't notice, but soapmakers might. We're an odd bunch. ;)

As always, thanks for dropping by, and Happy Soaping!

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.