Soap Lily: A Poinsettia By Any Other Name Would be a Sunflower!

Newly re-named Sunflower Hot Process soap.

Poinsettias/Sunflower Hot Process

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Today we made the last of the +Glen-Ella Springs Inn & Restaurant order.

We finished this order by making a soap we called Poinsettia. You might ask, "Why, did you call it Poinsettia?"

Well, originally we tried (and basically failed) to make a sunflower. For one reason or another it didn't work as planned. Our design looked so non sunflowery, that we named it using the closest "flower" we could think of - Poinsettia.

Pictured above is the original Poinsettia soap. As I said, it was supposed to look like a sunflower - Ha!

Today's design will not have a flower on it, but it will have the same colors as the original. We think that with an abstract, swirled representation of colors, we can safely go back to our original intended name for this soap - Sunflower.

For our HP batch we are using the same scent used in the original - Sweet Pea and Ivy from +The Lebermuth Company. Lebermuth describes the fragrance as having "top notes including lily of the valley, fresh floral, sweet pea and a delicate pear. The heart of the fragrance is a melody of hyacinth, rose, gardenia, carnation and lavender. Base notes of violet, a light coconut and a gently lingering musk."

For the red we mixed two colors from +Bramble Berry, Fired up Fuchsia and Brick Red.

We sifted to keep lumps out, and once we blended the two colors we decided that it was too red, so we added 1/2 tsp. of TD to lighten it up a little.

The yellow was another color from +Bramble Berry, Fizzy Lemonade.

It's such a happy, cheerful yellow, perfect for the center of a flower (whether it's a sunflower, sweet pea or a poinsettia!)

The green is not the same color as the first batch, we are totally out of Chrome Green, so did the next best thing and used Enchanted Forest Mica from www.rusticescentuals.com.

Pictured above are the colors. We mixed each one in a TBSP of Safflower oil.

At this point we had not added the TD to the red.

We added the lye/water mix to our oils (coconut, sustainable palm, castor and olive), used the stick blender to achieve medium to heavy trace, set the temperature to low, and put the lid on.

We tried something new today, rather than checking and stirring the soap every 15 minutes, we let it go for 30 minutes, then checked it. It was interesting that after 30 minutes the batter was already gelling and was very easy to stir. In our previous HP batches, we stirred after the initial 15 minutes, and the batter was always very hard. Leaving it for that extra 15 minutes makes a big difference in texture.

The above photo shows the batter about half way through the cook.

After letting the soap cook for 1-1/2 hours, we tested it with Ph strips, then

performed the zap test, and the soap was fine. We added the

Sweet Pea and Ivy fragrance oil and mixed like crazy.

We didn't want very much of any of the colors, but rather just a hint of them

swirled throughout the soap. We removed between 1/2 and 1 cup of batter

for each of the three colors.

Above is the Enchanted Forest as we pour it into the batter.

Enchanted Forest mixed and ready to put into the soap.

Here is the Fired up Fuschia, Brick Red and TD combination.

Here is the mixture of reds (sorry it's a little blurry)

And here is the Fizzy Lemonade.

And the Fizzy Lemonade mixed into the batter.

We put all the white batter into the mold and tapped it down, making sure to eliminate as many air bubbles as possible.

Now we added back the three colors of batter on top of the white.

We folded, we stirred, we pushed and prodded working to swirl the colors throughout but not over mix them. Pictured above is the color swirl we created.