After a year off from soapmaking due to major house renovations (including our kitchen) and my daughter getting married, I thought Amy's latest challenge, Soap Curls, would be a good motivation to begin soaping again. My mother-in-law has been asking me for Christmas soaps, so I decided I wanted to do a Christmas Tree. I found some quilling pictures of trees on Pinterest at artsycraftsymom.com and quillingcard.com. I drew a couple of pictures using their art as inspiration and to see if I thought I could make the soap curls fit in the size mold I was using. I really wanted an image that would work on a single bar of soap. I tested curls with a year old soap...
Before we can talk about the ingredients in our soaps, we need to understand what soap is. Remember chemistry? Ugh, you say? Trust me, if I could have learned chemistry by making soap, it would have been a fun class! Soap is a salt. When sodium hydroxide (lye) combines with fatty acids through a process called saponification, a salt (the soap) is produced along with glycerin and a small percentage of unsaponifiables. Some of what we buy at the store and we think is soap is not really soap but rather detergent bars. They are not made of fatty acids and sodium hydroxide but with detergents. Next time, check the label. Only real soap can be labeled soap. Detergent bars...
Best. Challenge. Ever. Oh my gosh, I can’t tell you how much I loved Amy Warden’s (of Great Cakes Soapworks) latest challenge. For October, we were to make a wood grain soap using either natural or synthetic ingredients. I chose synthetic. I have a lot of micas so I had a good amount of colors to choose from plus I had gotten a sample of Rustic Escential’s Cedarwood and Patchouli fragrance oil and I thought that would be perfect to try out. This challenge could not have been timed more perfectly. I had been planning on making a Nutcracker* soap for Christmas and I wanted to make it wood grain. Even though I had never done that before I was...
August Great Cakes Soapwork's Challenge uses a technique created by Tatsiana Serko of Creative Soaps by Steso called The Dancing Funnel. No funnel involved though! This technique looks deceptively simple. I found it much harder than it looks. The key seems to be getting your soap batter to just the right consistency as well as laying down your soap in the right proportions. I was not as successful at either as I would have liked to have been but I do like my results just the same. First TryWe had two categories to chose from--natural or synthetic. I was really excited to try to make a black soap with neon green lines. So on my first attempt I followed the...
I was so excited to hear this was Great Cake Soapwork's July challenge. I had bookmarked the Thorns and Roses video from Soapish almost a year ago--just shortly after I began soaping. Her technique of using "pipes" in a slab mold as dividers is so beautiful and I am hoping to use it for a Christmas soap in a few months. Now was the perfect time to try it out. The idea is that you use tubes (most often pvc pipes) and adhere them to your slab mold using cocoa butter to form a seal of sorts. Then you pour a base soap (in our case the challenge was for two colors) and then two colors down the pipe. You...
