Experiment that almost worked

#snowdays #chamomileandsweetpatchouli #coldprocesssoap

Tuesday, February 25, 2015

The plan for today was simple. Alison was heading out early to take her daughter to Atlanta.  I was going to make soap.  Sounds easy doesn't it?

It was fine until we had two inches of snow land in our area overnight.  I know experienced snow people will be laughing at two inches. I've lived in PA; I get it - two inches is nothing.

However, here in N GA, we don't do snow very well. Even if it's a half inch, schools close, grocery stores are cleaned out, almost everyone stays home from work..... it's a mini vacation, and today was no exception.  Alison and her daughter stayed home, their trip to Atlanta will happen next week.

I decided to make soap, specifically a redo of the mystery pink soap from last week that didn't quite work the way it was supposed to.  When we couldn't pour the batter because it was too thick (thin is necessary for this design), we popped over to Plan B, dumped the batter, and swirled a fairly nice looking batch of soap.

My plan today was simple - try again! Can't get any simpler than that.

I chose a recipe that had the following oils:  Coconut, Palm, Olive, Sweet Almond, and Shea Butter. It is supposed to be very luxurious and skin nourishing all on its own, but I also added silk to give the bars extra sheen and smoothness.

The scents I blended are from +Natures Garden.  We have used Sweet Patchouli before and love it.  NG describes it as "an earthy blend of Patchouli and Green Grass intertwined with Fresh Lavender and hints of licorice with crisp notes of menthol softened by amber."   The second scent is Chamomile, described as "the wonderful aroma of freshly picked chamomile flowers with hints of fresh green herbs."  

Mixed together they smell divine!

Colorants are from +Rustic Escentuals - Pistachio, Icicle and Toffeelicious Mica

and from +Bramble Berry - 1982 Blue and Titanium Dioxide

Above you can see the colors after I had mixed them with a small amount of oil.  Since the Patchouli has a little vanilla, the base batter will turn a light beige.  This effectively gives me 5 colors - brown, white, green, blue and basic non colored batter.

I tried something different, straining the lye water as it's poured into the batter.

I poured the scents into the batter. OH! They smell so nice together.

I mixed up the batter to light trace then split batter into 5 sections.  I kept one non-colored, and then mixed the others with the mica colorants.

So far so good. I poured the batter into the corner, making concentric areas of color. Fingers crossed! (Well, figuratively crossed.  I needed them while I was pouring, so I couldn't literally cross them.)

Once the batter got this far out, it began to roll over the colors.  The first band was red, it is now under the white, not what I wanted!

Another Plan B! I started pouring from the other corner; I was not sure that it would help, but I was sure it couldn't hurt.

note on Wednesday after unmolding - I looked online last night and think that our 18 bar mold is too big for this design.  By the time the batter gets 3/4 across the bottom it's getting too hard.  Solution, buy 2 square silicone molds and make a double batch or insert divider in center and save money on molds!  

We are always learning, always!

I wanted the color circles to be even and round, not uneven and blobby looking.

Unfortunately, the batter was firming up, and the first few colors that I had poured were already at thick trace and weren't moving.

I needed the batter to be much looser for this design.

Since I was alone I can't show you the swirling. Starting in one corner of the mold, I pulled the skewer back and forth in a radiant design.  Imagine young children drawing the rays of the sun around a circle. In this case, the center circle was one corner of the mold (upper left in the photo below).  The center stays in the same corner at all times.

Ok, it's not that bad. It still isn't exactly what I'd planned, but maybe we'll try again, third time being the charm and all.

In go the sides and the grids, and soap is headed to the curing box for 24 hours.

-----------------------

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Another snow day!!!

I removed the mold from the curing box and you can plainly see all the colors, including the beige (un-colored) batter in lower R corner.

I like the colors and how they show in every aspect of the soap.

A Cardinal photo bombed this picture, can you see it?

Top L corner

Love the colors, wish we had smell-o-vision, it smells fantastic!

Chamomile and Patchouli will be cured April 8th

Floral Explosion in the Soap Kitchen, No One was Harmed!

#fragrancesandmemories #pinkcarnation #coldprocesssoap #floralandcirtus 

Friday, February 20, 2015

Today we had an explosion of fragrances, an explosion of color, and explosion of memory.  Don't worry!  Nothing literal or painful, just a day of heightened senses.  Do you ever have a day like that?  It was probably one of our fragrance oils acting as today's intensifier. 

Many of our suppliers send us free samples with each order we place (think bait).  Most of the time we are focused on other things or other scents and we forget about the samples. However, when we received not one but two small samples of Carnation FO from +Bramble Berry, I (Kathy) didn't forget. 

I have loved the smell of carnations and their cousin dianthus for as long as I can remember, didn't know why just loved the smell.  A few years ago I found the web site http://www.fragrantica.com/  and looked up a perfume my mom always used called Bellodgia.  After reading the "perfume pyramid" for Bellodgia I realized the connection between this perfume to some of the floral scents I have always loved.  

"Bellodgia was launched in 1927.  The nose behind this fragrance is Ernest Daltroff.  Top notes are carnation and rose; middle notes are jasmine, lily of the valley and violet; base notes are musk, clove, vanilla and sandalwood."

It is interesting to me that a perfume my mom wore years and years ago could shape my love for certain smells to this day.  

(Note from Alison: It really is interesting to see how fragrances evoke memories.  Reading what Kathy just wrote, I can completely see why she is so drawn to the fragrances that I frequently see her favoring. )

But enough of the perfume history lesson and on to the soap making.  

As I mentioned, we had two small (.5 oz each) vials of Carnation, not enough to make much of anything, so we started mixing and testing to come up with enough liquid (3.30 oz) to scent a batch of soap.  After countless combinations the one we both liked was Carnation, Sweet Patchouli, Yuzu, and Jasmine.  With fingers crossed we proceeded.

A brief description of each scent: 

Carnation from +Bramble Berry - "The top note is sweet with strong floral notes. Then the middle notes follow through with clove and fresh cut stem. The fragrance finishes with a base note of pepper.

Sweet Patchouli from +Natures Garden - "an earthy blend of Patchouli and Green Grass intertwined with Fresh Lavender and hints of licorice with crisp notes of menthol softened by amber."

Yuzu from +Natures Garden  - "top notes of mandarin, tangerine, lemon satsuma, and ruby red grapefruit, middle notes of bergamot and base notes of oakmoss." 

Jasmine from +Natures Garden - "the exotic blend of freshly cut jasmine flowers with a base note of rose petals."

For some reason the idea of "pink carnations" popped into my brain.  With faint memories of the Pat Boone song, I chose the color combination of pink, pink, and white.

+Rustic Escentuals  provided the Icicle, Frosty Rose Petal and Blushed Pink Micas.  The TD came from  +Bramble Berry.  

Since the two pink micas contained shimmer I decided to add the icicle mica to the TD so all colors would sparkle equally.

Colors are mixed with a bit of Safflower oil.

After adding the lye/water/silk to the oils (Coconut, Olive, Palm and Castor), I mixed to a light, light trace and then added the FO's.

After dividing the batter ways, I mixed TD+Icicle Mica (white) into one,

Blushed Pink into another,

and then Frosty Rose Petal into the third.

When the colors were mixed I was ready to pour!

OOPSIE!!!!

  I had a plan for concentric pours of batter, starting in a corner, but I had to scrap the plan after trying the first pour....which plopped rather than poured!  The batter was too thick to pour ---- on to plan B!

Plan B - dump all the batter into the mold, no design,  just get it into the mold.

It wasn't that the batter was accelerating terribly, it was just too thick to do much with. You can see by the picture above that we were way past thin trace and almost to thick trace at this point.

All batter is in mold, now what?

Swirl of course....we gently swirled so that the colors were mixed....a little.

To finish, I pulled the skewer diagonally back and forth across the top of the batter

then repeated back and forth in the opposite direction.

It was not exactly what we had envisioned, but it will work just fine.

-------------

Saturday afternoon I unmolded the soap.

This is a view we normally don't show, the bottom of the mold.  You can clearly see where I plopped some of the colors and where the spatula pulled through the different colors.

The finished bar of soap.

Not sure yet if we will call it Pink Carnation.  As I smell the unmolded soap I don't smell any carnation!

I am hopeful that with time as the soap cures, the scents will morph around and the carnation will be more detectable.

It is a pretty soap and smells very floral-ish with a hint of citrus.

The mystery pink soap will be cured on April 3.

The Blues Sisters are in the House (kitchen) with Citrus and Sage

#BlueSoap #GreatCakesSoapChallenge #SageandCitrus #DNA/Helixswirl

February 13, 2015

I love blue, so does Alison, probably because on most any day we both would like to be sitting beside a crystal clear blue ocean on warm sand with the sun shining.  So blue is the color for the day! As we make this soap we will dream of the sandy beaches and tropical temperatures.  Maybe the balmy blues of the ocean are attractive to us because it's a "warm" 25 degrees outside and snow and sleet are forecast for later this week!  

This will be our last batch of DNA helix design soap. Although the design itself is fairly simple, we don't want to go overboard like we did on the butterfly swirl.  The following pictures and video will show you how we created this soap.  

Our "blues" came from both +Bramble Berry  (Aqua Pearl, 1982 Blue, Antique Blue and for accent (tops of waves) TD)  and +Rustic Escentuals (Denim Strut).

The FO today is one of our favorites, from +Natures Garden.

Sage and Citrus is described as having "top notes of mandarin, tangerine, ruby red grapefruit, and lemon rinds, with base notes of fresh sage leaves."

The colors are mixed, TD in the center with (from L -R) 

Aqua Pearl, Denim Strut, 1982 Blue, Antique Blue

Our DNA practice sheet, provided by Amy Warden who organizes the Great Cakes Soapworks Challenge. 

As you can see, we certainly used it to practice!

We mixed the oils and lye/silk/water until we were definitely emulsified. We didn't want trace, but as you can see from the picture we had a little.  In the video, you hear us discuss how much we mixed.  Guess we remembered wrong! This is thicker than the "Fresh Outdoors" batch.

The delicious Sage and Citrus FO is added to the batter.

Batter divided into squirt bottles. 

Note the nice wide new bottles. These will be so much easier to clean!

Remaining batter goes into the log mold.

Double squirting, no rhyme or reason as we are going to hanger swirl the body of the soap.  Yep.  That's Kathy using both hands at once.  Can you say talented?!

Here goes the hanger swirl, we found that with this design the top of the soap is gorgeous, however the body is rather plain.  Since we love designs and swirls we decided to swirl this batch to add some pizzazz.

Now on to the design for the top.

Rather than squirting across L - R we decided to go top to bottom.

Adding all the colors in no random pattern, basically just getting all the colors on the top.

Once we had each color down one time in squiggly lines, we started the specific individual straight lines (well, straight compared to the previous photo) of color, again going from top to bottom.

This video shows Kathy swirling the soap and our ongoing "discussion" about the process.

Here is a view of the finished swirl.

Here is what it looked like from the end of the mold.

Here is a close up

We love the colors and as the wind is howling outside are try to transport our brains to a warm beach.

Different view of design.

Every view is different.

Once we cut the soap we realized the hanger swirl didn't quite swirl as much as we had hoped, but it certainly added interest to the body of the bar.

This batch of Sage and CItrus will be ready March 30, 2015