Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Pink Licorice

So I took a break from using my mold dividers and did a hanger swirl. I used a dark grey mica and was happy with the resulting black and mixed some pink ultramarine and hot pink mica for the pink.
A mix of Raspberry fragrance oil and Aniseed Essential oil make up the Pink Licorice fragrance.
I got some nice big bars from the batch. Using my silicone mold without the dividers means I can fill the mold all the way up and it stays full. I still haven't mastered pulling out the dividers without loosing soap.
Below is a photo of my Licorice soap from last year and the recipe. The recipe makes a little over 4 pounds, for my 3lb silicone mold I multiplied the amounts by .75
Recipe:
Lye/ Water Portion:
208 grams lye
539 grams water
Oils/Butters:
454 grams Coconut oil
398 grams Palm oil
100 grams Cocoa Butter
495 grams Olive oil
 
If you want to see my home made hanger you can check out this post.
Thanks for reading!
 

Friday, September 18, 2015

Lemongrass with Poppy Seeds & A New Soap Cutter!

This a some Lemongrass with Poppy Seed soap I made last week. I coloured it with some Black Oxide, Chromium Green Oxide and Titanium Dioxide. I used the same mold as in my last two posts with the dividers. What's new is my nice straight cuts, I finally  bought myself a proper soap cutter. I have a picture of the cutter posted at the bottom of this post.
 Nice cuts means the bars are all exactly the same size and with the type of swirling I'm doing you get these mirror image bars and its easy to pair them up for photographs.
 I have four pairs, each pair is a little different. In the dividers I alternated rows of white and coloured soap, two rows of each. The coloured rows have a mix of green, black and a bit of white, I just kept layering in the different colours, this resulted in a real variety in the way the bars look.

I forgot to put my Titanium Dioxide/Water through a strainer, you can see little TD dots in the bars on the left.

 
But overall I'm really happy with this soap and I love, love this cutter.
Here is the cutter, I bought it  on Etsy from Workshop Heritage, if you look them up type the name
as one word. Thanks for looking!
Oops, I also meant to post a picture of the soap before I cut it. Here it is along with one of the 4 bars before they were split. They were taken with my tablet in a darkish kitchen :)
Thanks again for reading!

 
 

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Lavender, Cinnamon & Clove

 I made another Circling Swirl soap, this time scented with Lavender, Cinnamon & Clove essential oils. I forgot to take a picture of the soap before I cut it but I did snap the photo above right after it was poured.
Above are the cut bars and below are a couple of bars showing what the soap looks like on the bottom, its a nice pattern but very different from what the top looks like after the swirl.
See the previous post for recipe and details, thanks for looking!