#fruitloops #hotprocesssoap #smellsjustlikefrootloops
Monday, November 24, 2014
Several months ago when Kathy and I placed an order for some fragrance oils, my daughter saw one that she was just dying to try. She even came up with an idea for the kind of soap she thought would be great using this fragrance oil. Well, since the kiddos are out of school this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and Kathy is filling in at her old job, we thought that this would be the perfect time to go for it as her plan would take at least two days.
She wanted to make little loops that were the colors in Froot Loops cereal, and then make white soap to look like the milk in the cereal bowl. We had to start with the colors first, so we made them on Monday.
Here we go!
We purchased this oil from fragrancebuddy.com but I'm not
going to give you their description of the fragrance. It smells
JUST LIKE Froot Loops.
These are the colors we chose: a mixture of Brick Red Oxide and Toffeelicious Mica
for the red color, Tangerine Wow! for the orange, Fizzy Lemonade Mica for the yellow,
Green Chrome Oxide for the green, 1982 Blue Mica for the blue, and Amethyst
Purple Mica for the purple color. The Toffee Mica is from +Rustic Escentuals, and
all of the other colors are from +Bramble Berry.
We mixed a 1/2 teaspoon of colorant in 1/2 tablespoon (aka 1-1/2 tsp.) of
safflower oil for each color. Because we used 2 colors for the red,
we used 1/4 tsp each of the red colors.
We want to use these soaps for Christmas, so we made this using the hot process method. I think that we might get a result closer to what she envisioned if we used the cold process method, but there just isn't enough cure time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. (We really like how they came out anyway!)
Kathy and I have posted so many pictures of our HP method, that I won't bore you with those today. I'm thinking that the colors are more interesting than the cook with this project.
We made 1/2 of our usual batch of soap, and when it was done
we mixed in 1 oz of fragrance oil.
While the soap was cooking, we got our pans lined and ready to go.
This was an act of creativity and patience. We needed something for each of 6 different colors, and it needed to be shallow enough to cut out little dots.
I had one small toaster oven pan, and my mom had one plus a larger pan. We made two liners from a small pan and then placed both liners into the larger pan. That is what you see in the lower portion of the above photo. That made 4, but we still needed 2 more. We found one shallow pan in Kathy's cabinet and since we would be lining the pan and the lye would be cooked out of the soap, we didn't think she would mind. Finally, we found a plastic storage box that we thought would make a good mold.
**Side note - we tested this idea a few months ago with a different plan in mind. We bought a few lengths of pvc pipe thinking that we could pour the soap batter into the pipe, let it harden, push it out, and then just cut the round soap into slices. When we tried it with a CP soap, we finally got the soap out (I think we ended up freezing it for a little while) by using a smaller dowel rod to push it out one end of the PVC pipe. It was actually very hard to do. I think the pipe was really a bit too small, but we decided to try a different approach this time - especially since we were doing HP and wouldn't be able to pour a thin batter into a small pipe.
But back to today's project:
When the soap was done, we were working so fast to color and pour six different colors before the soap hardened that we really didn't take many pictures. My apologies.
Above you can see my daughter spreading out the orange soap.
We took about 3/4 cup of batter (leaving the rest in the crock pot to stay
warm until we were ready for it), colored it, then poured it into the mold.
Finally, we placed a piece of plastic wrap over it and used a rolling
pin to be sure the soap was as flat and even as possible.
Above you can see all six colors poured
and smoothed out.
And below are two shots that are a bit more close up.
Because this was a hot process soap, and because we spread them out rather thinly, the soap cooled and hardened quickly. Quickly enough for my daughter to start cutting out circles while I washed and cleaned up all of the dishes.
She cut circles until her fingers were sore. At one point, my son popped in from wrestling practice and kindly gave her a hand cutting out the colorful dots.
Lots of dots
Really. Tons of dots! (Well, it felt like tons.)
We hated to waste all of the soap that was left over after cutting out the dots,
so we decided to use it.
We put the four darker colors back into the crock pot,
added a little distilled water, and heated the soap back up until it was soft.
We then pressed the soap into cute little gingerbread man molds.
And this is how they looked when we took them out of the
mold the next day.
We knew that the darker colors would overpower the light ones, so we decided to hold back the orange and yellow scraps to melt down separately on Tuesday. We placed those into cute little ladybug molds. No pictures. Sorry. But take our word for it. They really are cute.
Our time was up, and we had to go, so we left part II of the project for Tuesday.
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Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Fruit Loops Part II
Tuesday we were ready to make the "milk" portion of our fruit loops and milk soap. We knew that the FO had some vanilla content to it, so to keep it as milky white as possible, we needed to add some TD. We also wanted it to have a little depth, so we included some diamond dust mica from +Natures Garden as well.
Combining the TD and the diamond dust in 1 TBL of oil
I just like this photo. When we added the TD/Diamond mixture to the oils
it looked a bit like a jellyfish swimming around in there.
We added the lye/water and mixed them together.
When we reached a thick trace, we put the lid on and let it cook.
We usually begin HP soap by letting it cook for 30 minutes before we stir it.
It was really puffing up, so we stirred it about 3 minutes early. I didn't want to take a chance on
it coming up out of the pot. After this, we stirred every 15 minutes until it had cooked for 1-1/2 hours. It actually stayed in the pot on warm for a little while once it was done because we were doing two projects at once, and we had to finish what we were doing with the other before we could get back to this one. In the midst of all of this, my daughter asked me, "Hey! Can we make candles, too?" My head almost exploded at the thought of adding that project to what we were already doing. Kathy would probably revel in so many things at once, but I put the candles off until another day.
We added 3 oz of FO to the cooked soap, and
stirred briskly to incorporate the fragrance completely.
While the soap was cooking, my daughter had gotten the cups ready to go. She wanted
her soap to look like little bowls of cereal and milk, so we used silicone cupcake
cups. In each of the cups, she sprinkled a few of the colored dots that we had made on Monday.
We then put white soap batter into each cup, and used a wooden skewer to mix it with the dots that were in the bottom of the cups. We pressed more dots into the white batter, then added a bit more white batter on top of that. Finally, Emma pressed a few dots of each color into the top of each cup.
It took us a little while to get our technique down, but I think we did pretty well! Our concern was that the dots wouldn't embed well enough and once we remove the soap from the silicone cups they could just fall out. We made sure to press them in very well, so our fingers are crossed that our worry is unnecessary.
We had more batter than we did silicone cups, so we used the left over white batter and dots to make a loaf of Fruit Loop soap. We followed the same process as the cups. We had some dots on the bottom of the loaf mold, added white batter, added more dots, added more batter, and then pressed more dots into the top of the soap.
We really love the colorful effect, and the smell is so wonderful
that we have to remind ourselves that we can't really eat it.
Closeup of the loaf mold.
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
Kathy cut the loaf into slices for me and sent us the pictures. Wow! It really looks festive, and Emma is tickled with how her idea came out. We haven't removed the silicone cups yet, and won't be back in the Soap Kitchen until next week, so I decided not to wait for pictures of the cups.
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