Monday, August 31, 2015

Lavender Circling Swirl Soap

In a previous post I showed you this new to me mold, that came with dividers, that I wasn't really happy with. The soap that came out with the dividers was so wasteful and my swirl did not work either. I'm sure that wasn't all the mold's fault :)
Anyway, it also has dividers that go this way.
 
 
And I used it like that to make this.
If you look up Circling Swirl Soap on You Tube you'll have lots of choice for videos to watch. It's basically a Taiwan Swirl with the stick circled around the edge of the mold a few times to finish it. If you want the swirl to go all the way through the soap you need the dividers.
Here's a link to one of a few videos I watched.
 
 

 After I took the soap out if the mold I cut it into four chunky bars. The picture above shows two top view and two side view.  Now to see the design inside the soap, lay it with the side view up and cut through the side to make two bars.
And there you go! Now they won't all be exactly the same, the two pictures at the bottom of this post show each end of the soap loaf before it was cut. One end of the soap has quite a bit of purple and the other not so much.




I used my 3lb recipe as follows:
 
340 grams Coconut Oil
298 grams Palm Oil
75 grams Coco Butter
370 grams Olive Oil
 
156 grams Lye
404 grams Distilled Water
 
It's my usual 3lb (plus a few extra ounces) batch. Once traced (light trace) I added 4 tsp of Lavender Essential oil and then weighed out 12.5 ounces of soap in to 4 measuring cups. One cup got a little white clay and the other 3 cups each got one of the colourants.  I think you can see the order I filled the slots in the mold, Pink, Green, White and Purple. To help keep the dividers in place I went back and forth filling each slot a little at a time. After  filling the divided sections with soap I pulled out the dividers and then did the swirl. It works best if the soap is still on the thin side, this soap, especially the pink, was starting to thicken to I ended up with a slightly textured top. The next one I did has a nice flat top and I will post some pictures of that in a day or too.
Thanks for reading!

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Blackberry Rose

I finally got around to make some Cold Process soap in my silicone rose mold. It's fragranced with English Rose & Blackberry Sage Tea fragrance oils. I swirled a bit of the pink soap in with the purple and if you look really close you'll see a bit of a glitter where the two colours meet. I still had to support the sides of the mold to keep them from sagging, I just wish it was a larger mold. I made a two pound batch and filled three single cavity molds in addition to this one. Thanks for looking!