Sea Salt and Rice flower, a divine hot processed soap....

#seasaltandriceflower #hotprocesssoap #pinkandwhitesoap

August 11, 2015

This week has been a crazy one. We made lots of soap, (two of them were for Amy Warden's Great Cakes Soapworks August soap challenge), entertained guests, made airport runs, chauffeured kids & grandkids.....well you get the drift, just a normal, busy week.

One of our best selling soaps is one we first tried as a small experimental batch; it sold out immediately, as did the second batch.  So today we needed to make some more Sea Salt and Rice Flower.  We buy this fragrance from +Rustic Escentuals,  Their description says it is "a clean, fresh, and spa-like scent.  This fragrance has notes of creamy rice flower, citrus peel, cotton blossoms, night-blooming jasmine, azure sky ozone, grey sea salt, bamboo leaves, vanilla bean, and sheer musk."

We used +Rustic Escentuals colorants in this soap: the beautiful Frosty Rose Petal Mica and - to keep the base batter light and bright - Icicle Mica.

We added the Icicle Mica right into the oils before adding the lye/water.

After the addition of the Icicle Mica we stick blended it so it would mix thoroughly throughout the batter.

Since we added Tussah silk to the lye water, we strained it before it went into the soap.

The crock was set on high, and we blended it until we had a heavy trace.

After putting the lid on and letting the batter cook for 30 minutes the soap looked like this. It was a little scary, and we wondered if we hadn't checked on it if it would have volcanoed right out of the pot!

We quickly stirred it down, and let it continue to cook. We both did the zap test 

after 45 minutes and the soap was DONE!!!

We are still getting used to 45 minutes...

We love the shorter cooking time

We mixed the Frosty Rose Petal Mica (1/2 tsp.) into 1 tsp. of safflower oil.

Thankfully Alison reminded me to add the fragrance!

Heavenly!!!

We put a few scoops of batter into the Rose Petal colorant.

And this is what it looked like all mixed together; this pink mica is truly a divine color.

Several carefully placed splats of pink mica go into the white portion of the batter.

This is what the mixed batter looked like, a nice soft blended pink and "white."

Into the 18-bar mold went the batter with dividers going in next.

Then it cooled and hardened in the curing room for 24 hours.        

                                                                                                                              

On Aug. 12, we removed the soap from the mold and were happy

to see such pretty soap and to inhale its lovely fragrance.  

You can see photos of the finished soap below:

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We will let the soap harden and cure for a week, but it is safe to use right now.

August Soap Challenge - Linear Mantra Marbles Swirl

#soapchallengeclub #linearmantramarblesswirl #coldprocesssoap 

August 12, 2015


It seems like time is definitely flying by. How can it be time for us to try another technique in the Great Cakes Soap Challenge put on by +Amy Warden? Time makes no difference to us; we jumped in and tried another fun challenge!

The title on this challenge is a mouthful - linear mantra marbles swirl....lots of different techniques rolled into into one soap, or in our case two.  We created two different soaps, and then had to choose which one we liked best!  Our choice, and the one we submitted, was what we called the Beachside Swirl because we used a combination of blues (ocean) and a light brown (sand).  The soap is beautiful, but we did have a few problems with it which you can see on the video.

We have documented the making of our entry soap in the video below.

The other soap is a lovely combination of colors which we will show you here.

Pretty, isn't it?

If you just want to see the final shots of the soap, please see them below.

This soap will cure for six weeks and then it will be ready to use.

A Viewer Comment Saves Us Time

#hotprocesssoap #fallcolors #OakforMen #OakforWomen

Monday, August 10, 2015

Wow! It's been almost a month since we have posted a new blog entry. We have tons of excuses, really we do....both of us had some fun vacation travels that kept us hopping.  We had a great time at the Dillard Bluegrass and BBQ festival last weekend, then of course it was time to get ready for school again.   Boy this summer has flown by! Before you know it, we will have to have our Christmas soaps curing!

It seems like we have a (great) problem. Each time we do a festival or show, we sell a good bit of soap - no complaints there, it just leaves us with very a meager supply of soap.   Consequently we have to catch up soap making batches....i.e. 2 or 3 batches at a time and of course they are for the most part hot process.

Today was no exception, so we started off with a really nice fragrance we bought from Aztec International called Oak for Men. They describe it as "a red oak, cedar wood and musk blend." Actually it it far more interesting and complex than that. Check out the following list of scents that make this one smell terrific:

Top notes are:  Bergamot, Lemon, Clary Sage, Aldehydes*, Juniper Berry    
Mid notes are:  Geranium, Lavender, Orange Blossom, Clove, Nutmeg, Pimento (Allspice), Oak
Dry notes are:   Cedarwood, Patchouli, Sandalwood, Vetiver, Musk and Coffee
*The Fragrantica web site describes Aldenhydes as follows:  Odor profile: A vast group of components of organic origin reproduced in the lab. In perfumery parlance by "aldehydes" we mostly refer to aliphatic/"fatty" aldehydes, those used in a reference string in Chanel No.5, Chanel No.22, Lanvin Arpege, Lauder White Linen and other classics. These aldehydes provide a soapy-waxy-lemony-floral effect to the formula and are used to classify a fragrance as "aldehydic".

So there you have it, this soap is going to be a very complex scent that is sure to please both men and women. Guess we will have to name it something non gender specific!

Here are a few pictures we snapped while we made the soap.

The "BBW Type" written below the name simply means the scent originated at Bath and Body Works.

The picture above is what the soap batter looked like after 45 minutes on hi; it is referred to as the Vaseline stage.  We had been cooking right into the mashed potato stage because that is how we first learned to do HP.  Hey, it worked for us, so we stuck with it.  We happily discovered though, that our method was kind of overkill, although it never seemed to hurt the quality of our soap. 

After we combined the oils with the lye/water, we stick blended it to a heavy trace then let it cook in the crock pot on high.  We stirred it once at the 30 minute mark, then after 15 minutes more we checked the soap. It had been cooking for a total of 45 minutes on high.

You might ask, "45 minutes??  But you always cook the soap longer than that, like for 1-1/2 hours!" ...and you would be so right.  But thanks to one of our Youtube viewers, Sue Sue, who commented that more than likely the soap was "done" after 45 minutes. We experimented today and tested the soap after 45 minutes.

Both Alison and I did the zap test (stuck the hot batter on our tongues to see if we got an electrical like zap); it tasted like soap, and it didn't zap us, but it was really HOT.

So we are going with a 45 minute (give or take a few minutes) cook!  

We immediately started thinking about all the time we will save!

Boy, that was a lot of information!

We decided to do colors that would relay a fall leaf look, we used colorants from three companies.

From +Bramble Berry - Copper Sparkle Mica; from +Rustic Escentuals - 24 Karat Gold Mica and from Nurture Soap - Moss Green Mica

Here is what the colors looked like after we mixed them with a little Safflower oil.

The yummy fragrance goes in. 

The smell is so nice; we both love it!

Once the scent was thoroughly mixed in we removed about a cup and a half of batter for each color, leaving the remaining batter natural.

Once the colors were all mixed we plopped them right back into the crock so we can do a gentle ITP (in the pot) swirl.

Photo above shows all colored batter in the crock ready to be gently folded together.

Very little mixing was needed. We tried very hard to keep the batter from blending too much because we were hoping for 4 distinct colors in the soap.

After Alison folded the colors together she piled it into the mold. It looks really blended in this picture, but we were hopeful that once it cured and we cut it, it would look a bit less blended.

Once all the soap was in the mold we inserted the dividers. In 24 hours we will have 18 bars of our latest soap. Maybe we will call it Autumn Leaves, or maybe not; we'll just have to see how it turns out.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

This is what the bottom of the soap looked like when we un-molded it.

We think there is a nice blend of fall colors in this batch.

We love the lines of color, so pretty.

Great looking swirls of color!

Copper and Gold Swirl Soap

ready to use in a week