One of the biggest issues we have is keeping ingredients on hand. It seems just when we go to measure something or find a great new recipe for soap that we want to try, we find that we are out of a critical ingredient. Our supplies ebb and flow as we create soap.
We seem to spend a lot of time shopping for the best prices, and trying to solve this kind of problem....can we get olive oil at our local Walmart, Sam's Club or Costco for less money than buying 50 pounds at a time from Indiana?
Or what about colorants: who has the best variety, is their quality as good as the one that ships from the west coast?? We find that buying the "cheapest" isn't always the best idea - the adage "you get what you pay for" seems to ring true. So far we've been very fortunate in our buying and had no problems (other than waiting for shipments to arrive). We just keep thinking that surely there is a cheaper way to do this!
Starting this week we were sitting pretty, had lots of oils, colors and scents...and time to get creative.
We made some that we are pretty dang proud of, if we do say so ourselves. We'll post Tuesday's creation here, and then place Wednesday's and Thursday's in separate posts.
The recipe we used had coconut, palm, olive and castor oils
We have actually used this recipe several times now, and just use it's nickname "old faithful" when we talk about it. It is very easy to work with and fills up the Bramble Berry 18 bar wooden mold perfectly, making nice fat bars of soap.
We decided to try a "zebra swirl" today, but after looking at multiple videos and Web sites with examples, we gave it our own twist. Most of the examples we saw show soapers laying a solid color on the bottom before layering in the different colors and then finishing with the solid color on top again. "A" just didn't like the way the bars of soap looked after cutting. She thought the solid layers overpowered the zebra stripes, so we gave the method our own spin.
For this batch we used Palm Island fragrance oil and selected some bright happy colors to layer.
We created our own board to pour the soap down by using cardboard covered in freezer paper. We placed it in the mold at a slanted angle, and alternated pouring the different colors.
When the mold was so full that the board would no longer fit at a good angle, we slowly removed the board, scraping the soap off with a spatula.
We then used the remaining soap and poured it in stripes across the top.
This time "A" took over the power of the skewer, and carefully swirled the top layer. She made sure to go no deeper than the top layer because we did not want to incorporate the zebra stripes below into the swirl pattern.
First short side-to-side swirls down the mold.
Then 4 longer swirls up and down the length of the mold.
wow, the power of google, they created a little movie for us!
above and below are what the soap looked like as we put it away to cure for 24 hours, very happy looking soap
The next day, when we cut it into bars, we couldn't have been more pleased with the result. We felt like
air-teests! (That's our proud-of-ourselves-pretentious way of saying artists.)
several of our FB friends suggested names for this soap, Taffy, Sunshine, Creamsicle, Sherbet, Confetti, Hippy Happy, Marble Magic to name a few
What ever we name it we can promise you it will make you smile and it smells great
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