Cotton Candy Cane Soap

Here's an easy melt & pour soap project using some Goat  Milk soap base (for the white portion) and Clear Glycerin soap base that's been coloured with pink mica. The pink soap is fragranced with Cotton Candy fragrance oil and the white soap is fragranced with Peppermint Essential oil. Smells yummy. I've made them the same way I made the After Eight Joy soaps, the link is here. Just fill the mold with Goat Milk soap leaving a little space at the top. Fill the mold the rest of the way with the coloured glycerin soap, if you top the mold up right away the glycerin soap will sink. That's how the colour ends up on the bottom. All Christmas molds are currently on sale.

Thanks for looking!

Minty Fir Soap

Here's a soap I recently made with my son in mind. His favorite candle is a Minty Spruce fragrance and sadly has been discontinued. I don't have any spruce oil for fragrance so I've done a Fir plus Spearmint scented soap instead. The recipe I used is the same one as this post, only I adjusted it for a 3lb loaf mold.(divide by 4 and multiply by 3). In the picture above you can see how uneven  my layers were and you might me able to pick up that there are two different greens. Both green layers are coloured with chromium green oxide and the bottom layer also has some dark green mica thrown in. The top is a mish mash as usual.

Here's what the end piece of a soap looks like with a hanger swirl.

And here it is cut. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, originally I thought I didn't have enough white, there's not much you can about that once the soap is coloured:) Anyway, considering the crazy day I was having - I measured everything out then went to work for an hour that turned into four hours due to a power outage- I'll take it. Thanks for stopping by.

After Eight (Chocolate Mint) Joy

These are my first Holiday soaps of the year, made in the Milky Way Joy mold. I was going for the fragrance of After Eight chocolates, its always a happy surprise to get those in a restaurant. I used goat milk soap base with a bit of emerald green liquid colourant and honey soap base coloured with cappuccino mica. The green soap is scented with Peppermint Essential Oil and the dark brown soap is scented with Chocolate Chip Cookie fragrance oil. These bars are 5.5 ounces each and I filled the molds all the way to the top, next time I'll leave a little space cause these were hard to get out of the mold. That little space will help:)

I like the unevenness of the colours, it gives the bars a little more rustic look. That can be hard to do with melt & pour soap. Hopefully I can make these again and get the same effect, letting the goat milk soap cool or thicken a little before pouring the honey soap through helps if you are going for a more uneven look. If you like mint chocolate you will love the scent of these soaps.

Thanks for looking!

Mini Chocolate Covered Oreos

I've used the Milky Way Pumpkin Wax Tart mold to make these mini chocolate covered Oreo cookies. I used to make chocolate covered full sizes Oreos and they just had so much chocolate, and were so filling ( but sooo good). I think these are more of a treat sized option, and you can always have two, right? The mold has eight cavities, the picture below is of a wax tart made in the mold from the Milky Way site and below that are some Pumpkin scented wax tarts I made last year.

 

Back to the cookies, just place a little melted chocolate in the bottom of each mold cavity, insert a mini cookie and then cover the cookie with more chocolate. I let them harden and then put the mold in the fridge for an hour, they pop out easier that way.

These molds are 10% off for the month of October.

 

Pumpkin Biscotti Melt & Pour Soap

 

If you crave all things Pumpkin this time of year, this is a fast way to whip up a batch of pumpkin soap without making a batch from scratch (see post below). You could even make this with kids. I've melted 1.5 lbs of goat milk melt & pour in one container and 1/2 lb of honey glycerin melt & pour in another container. To the goat milk soap I added 1 tsp each of Pumpkin Crunch Cake fragrance oil & Biscotti fragrance oil. To the honey soap I added a pinch of bronze mica. I had already placed my Paisley Tray mold in a cookie sheet of ice water. I dumped the melted & fragranced goat milk soap into the mold and then poured in the melted honey soap. What you see above is what I got, it smells so good but still needs some trimming. Thanks for looking & happy fall!

Pumpkin Soap 2014

(Yikes, this closeup shows little white bits where the Titanium Dioxide didn't blend, it doesn't show so much in real life, I think I enhanced it when I was editing the photo:)

 



Recipe for a 3lb batch:

300 grams Coconut Oil

298 grams Palm Oil

385 grams Olive Oil

60 grams Pumpkinseed Oil

152 grams Sodium Hydroxide

300 grams Distilled Water

70 grams Pumpkin Puree (Canned Pumpkin)

30 grams of Cream or 1/2 & 1/2

 

The 1st four items are the oil portion of your soap. Get the lye/water portion ready first by adding the lye to the water and setting it aside to cool. While that is cooling gently melt your solid oils and add the liquids, and blend the pumpkin & cream together in a small container, I use glass because I warm it a little in the microwave. I tried to work at around 90 degrees ( pumpkin tends to create a lot of heat), so once everything has cooled to around there, heat your pumpkin mixture a little and then add the lye mixture and the pumpkin mixture to your oils and blend to trace.

 

Optional: I used 4 tsp of Pumpkin Crunch Cake fragrance plus 1 tsp of Clove essential oil for fragrance. This was added at trace and didn't seem to accelerate the trace or cause any extra heat. However, after the soap was in the mold for 45 minutes ,I felt the outside of the mold and it was hot. I popped it in the fridge for an hour and then took it back out. I wasn't worried about gelling , I didn't want the top to crack!

 

Also Optional: I usually don't colour my pumpkin soap but I wanted to do a bit of a top layer and was wanting contrast so I removed about a cup of soap and lightened it with some Titanium Dioxide and to the remaining soap I added a pinch of bronze mica.

 

You can see in the pictures that I poured the large amount of soap into my mold and then carefully added the lighter soap. I did a teeny bit of swirling with a coat hanger, still practicing that technique.

 

There's a picture below of a Pumpkin soap without any colour or layering and a slightly different recipe linked here. You don't need Pumpkinseed oil for this one and the batch is around 4lb.

 



Licorice Swirl

 Here's another hanger swirl soap and as I mentioned in a previous post, I decided not to go back and forth with the hanger on this soap. The last two I had swirled across and back and was curious to know how it would look if I just took the hanger across once, and I really like it. I was originally going to have only one layer of black soap but I coloured too much of the soap so ended up with two.  The white soap has titanium dioxide and poppy seeds and the black soap is coloured with some black oxide (mixed with almond oil) and bit of silver/grey mica. Of course, the Licorice scent comes from Aniseed Essential Oil, yum.

 Here's the top, I should have sprinkled on some extra poppy seeds.

The recipe I used and one of my other swirl soaps are here. Thanks for looking!



Lemon Biscotti Soap

 Here's the Lemon Biscotti Melt & Pour soap I was going to make for the last newsletter. I got one made and then decided to do another. For a 2lb tray  mold I used 1lb each of Goat Milk and Yellow Glycerin melt and pour soap, I melted both soaps together. Once melted I stirred in a pinch of bronze mica and 1 Tsp each of Lemon Essential Oil and Biscotti Fragrance oil. The pictures are pretty plain, I just wanted to show how the bronze mica tones down the bright yellow. The soap above is done in the OpArt tray mold. The one below was done in the Paisley tray mold. Tip: If you have trouble getting the mica to mix nicely, spray it with a little rubbing alcohol.

 Soapy group shot below, don't know why the colour looks so different, it stays the same when you cut it. The above photos are more true to life. Thanks for looking!

Teak & Sandalwood with Patchouli Hanger Swirl

Had to try the hanger swirl again just to make sure I had it down, please see the post below for recipe and details. This soap is fragranced with a new scent we are carrying called Teak & Sandalwood. I also added a bit of Patchouli essential oil, and the micas I used were Cappucino and Bronze. For this soap and the last one I moved the hanger up and down through the soap across and back. Next time I am just going to go across once and see what a difference it makes. Thanks for stopping by.

Blackberry Sage Tea Hanger Swirl

 

I used my own recipe for this soap but all the credit for the technique goes to the Soaperstar video here on You Tube.

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

Also used 6 tsp Blackberry Sage Tea fragrance oil, Titanium Dioxide and Purple Ultramarine

 



I blended to a very light trace and then divided the soap into three large measuring cups, I had a little more in the container of soap I was colouring white. So to that measuring cup I added some titanium dioxide and to the other two  I added purple ultramarine colourant. I was working with powders for my colours so I mixed them with a little water first, the extra water also helped keep the soap thin. One container got a little more purple than the other so I would have two shades. This is how I layered the soap: white, light purple, dark purple, white, dark purple, light purple and then white with sort of a mix of all the colours on top. Fragrance was added to all three containers after the soap was coloured.

 Below is a picture of the end of the soap loaf before cutting and at the bottom of the post is a picture of the hanger I used.

 

So the next two pictures are of what I did with the leftover soap, my loaf mold only holds 3 lbs. I used a 6 inch drawer organizer for the remaining 1lb of soap and poured it as if pouring over a column. You just keep pouring layers in to one spot and pushing the previous layer out. I should have taken a picture of the top before I cut it, sorry.

 And lastly, my hanger, hand bent by me and thickened up with a couple of chop sticks and some tape. Am I high tech or what? Thanks for stopping by!

Wrapping Soap: Coffee Filters + Flowers

Above is a soap I bought because I love the wrap on it. I love the coloured tissue, turns out its a little thicker than regular tissue paper, more like a coffee filter which is what I used to wrap a couple of my own soaps (pictured below). I left one filter white and stamped randomly on the other.

 

Usually if I wrap with a coffee filter I tape the top flat and cover it with a label. The picture below shows how I tied it with string instead, then you have to flatten the excess down as much as possible.

Below is the filter I stamped. I'm sure you could stamp on a Kraft filter, they would look nice plain too. Lastly I glued all of my layers of flowers etc together and then glued the layered flowers to the soap. Mine look different, I wasn't trying to copy exactly and wanted to use what I had on hand. This would work with bath bombs too and be pretty in a gift basket.  Thanks for looking!

White Chocolate Mousse + Green Citrus

I really need to get some soaps ready for fall and haven't used any recipes from my Soapmakers Companion for a while, I don't even think I've used the book this year. I pulled it out and made one of my favorite recipes from the book, named White Chocolate Mousse by the author, because of the quantity of Coco Butter used. Its really a nice soap and I usually leave it white. This time I used some chromium green oxide and yellow lake, both powdered colourants that were mixed with a little rubbing alcohol. For a green citrus scent a blend of Lime, Litsea Cubeba and a little bit of Lemon essential oils were used. The little decoration on top is some mini limes that I sliced and then dried in my oven.

 Recipe by Susan Millar Cavitch
187 grams sodium hydroxide
538 grams distilled water
312 grams olive oil
226 grams jojoba oil
454 grams coconut oil
226 grams cocoa butter
226 grams palm oil

This recipe also calls for an optional 12 grams of grapefruit seed extract. A lot of recipes from this time used to call for this, but I don't recommend adding it. I coloured most of the soap with some chromium green oxide, a small portion is coloured with yellow lake. I recommend adding a little rubbing alcohol or water to these colourants as they are both powders. For the green citrus scent I used 3 tsp of Litsea Cubeba, 3 tsp  of Lime and 1 tsp of Lemon essential oils. Dried lime slices may not be your thing, I think this soap would be really nice without them too.

I filled a 3lb loaf mold and 8 sand dollar molds.

Email with any questions. Thanks for looking!


Scented Wax Sachets

I've been wanting to try making these for a while. I gave some that I had purchased (from Pure Living) as Christmas gifts and they were a big hit. I used Soy Wax flakes and a little bit of leftover red wax from a soy candle and some Rose Fragrance oil. I melted 85 grams of the wax, it melts easily in the microwave, with the bit of red wax, and then added 2 tsp of the fragrance. I only wanted to fill the mold up to the scallops so I put the extra wax in to a heart in the 5 Heart Mold.

Then I tried some of these scented wax wafers. These are a blend of soy was and paraffin wax so didn't melt so easily. In the microwave, which is what I used, you have to make sure the measuring cup doesn't get hot and explode, so I did 40 seconds and let the container cool and repeated (many times). A water bath would have been the better way to go. Anyway, one of these wafer bars filled one cavity in a 5 Heart Mold.

To make a hole for ribbon or string you need a drill, using a nail will split the wax. I made the smallest hole I could to accommodate what I was putting through. I think these turned out cute and they all smell really good. I'm going to hang a couple in my closet and put the other two on towel bars in the bathroom. Thanks for looking!

Shell Tray & Starfish Sand Toys

Yikes, its been a month since my last post and as you can see I am still using and loving the Milky Way Shell Tray soap mold. This soap is done is subtler colours using Goat Milk soap base with a bit of Honey soap base, 1.5lbs of the Goat Milk & 1/4lb of Honey done like this. I like to pair these soap with some starfish bath bombs made using some sand toys as molds, just scroll down to see a picture of the sand toys.

 Starfish shaped bath bombs.

 

These starfish came in a package of sand toys, there were 4 or 5 other shapes which I may or may not use one day. It doesn't matter because they were only $1 per package.

Here's a little group of both together. There's lots of tourists around right now so these go fast.

Thanks for looking!



Milky Way Shells Tray

Here's the other new Milky Way tray mold. This mold has only been in stock for a week or so and there are only a few left. As you can see, I've filled the shell portions with soap coloured with gold mica and then poured green into the rest of the tray. The shell pairs in the middle row required a fair bit of cleanup LOL! I like the way the green turned out kind of minty, I think I used 1lb of emerald green glycerin soap and 1/2lb of goat milk soap, melted together. This mold holds 1.5lbs of soap.

 The picture below is from the Milky Way site. This mold makes really pretty soaps without the layering, love this baby blue colour. Thanks for looking!

Hibiscus Tray and Five Heart Molds

Originally this post was just going to feature one of a few new molds, the Hibiscus Tray mold. This is a newly designed Milky Way Mold and since I have quite a few of their tray molds and since most of them hold 2lbs of soap, I assumed this one did too.

I melted 1lb each of white goat milk soap and (purple) coloured glycerin soap together, I did add a little extra purple colourant to the melted soap. This soap was scented with Lilac fragrance and then poured into the tray mold. If I had checked on the Milky Way site I would have seen that this tray holds 1.5lbs of soap so I had a fair bit left over. Luckily I had another new mold on hand, the 5 Heart Guest mold, and I had planned to make something with it, so I saved myself a step and filled it with the same soap.

These Hearts are really cute and would make great Wedding favours, they have kind of a Celtic vibe to them.

I don't know why the Hibiscus soaps are both such different colours, its all the same soap and the actual colour is about what these hearts look like. There's a couple of other new molds too, I'll play with them next week. Thanks for looking!

Mothers Day Boxes 2014

 I made some bath bombs last night using the Milky Way Guest Hearts mold. They are fragranced but I left them uncoloured. These are a great size bath bomb, but could also be soaps, for small Take Out Boxes.

 I put the bath bombs in to little cello bags and place two in to each box.

 To decorate the boxes I cut strips of paper 1 & 3/4 inches wide and use stamps and punches to make a decorative sentiment. You could also buy paper flowers or stickers to decorate them.

 I wrap the paper strips around the boxes and tape it at the bottom, be sure to use thin paper, not cardstock. Then I put a couple of  sticky pop dots on the box and attach my sentiment. I get the pop dots at dollar stores, scrapbooking stores carry them too.

Here are the finished boxes with a little ribbon on the handles.

I made some birthday boxes too, thanks for looking!