Sept 2016 Soap Challenge - Wood Grain Technique

I am impressed by all of the entries so far for the wood grain soap challenge! I love seeing people's creativity come through when the guidelines are flexible. I am really wanting a wood grain impression mat now. :D

I had actually attempted the wood grain technique before. The resulting soap is currently listed on my Etsy shop (https://www.etsy.com/listing/466843083/lumberjack-soap-cold-process-mens-soap?ref=shop_home_active_8) and is called Lumberjack soap. Here's a photo - doesn't look too bad, right?

I learned a few things from that first attempt:

1) The uncolored batter that I used ended up providing too much contrast against other bolder colors. It still looks cool, but not super realistic. 

2) I used a mold that required me cutting the soap horizontally. That was a bad idea! It took FOREVER to fill the mold, and a lot of soap ended up getting too thick to squeeze out of squeeze bottles. 

After how long it took to make that other batch of soap, I was not anxious to try this technique again anytime soon, hahah. Fortunately, though, I took what I learned from last time and applied it to this next attempt. :)

My pouring technique is a little different than Amy's - instead of going back and forth down the mold with a squeeze bottle, I only squeeze one line down the middle at a time. I had found a Youtube video from Haocheng Hou (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXzNY7WjGIc) a while back that shows this technique.

As you can imagine, it can take a LONG time. I hand stirred my batter this time to make sure it stayed fluid as long as possible. I also used five colors (last time I used four) and added ground walnut powder for some texture. Finally, I used the same FO as the last batch - Tobacco & Bay Leaf FO from Brambleberry. This FO behaves very nicely, supposedly discolors to a light tan (which I have not noticed but would not hurt in this case), and pairs well with the wood grain pattern,

Colors from left to right: 1) uncolored, 2) brown oxide mixed with titanium oxide, 3) activated charcoal, 4) copper mica, 5) cappuccino mica

I added less colorant this time, hoping to achieve more of a natural look. In real life, wood grains are rarely bright colors.

I used a loaf/log mold and poured one layer deep. Here's a picture of the pouring, soon after getting started.

...Half an hour or so later, after all the soap has been poured, before any swirling. It already looked pretty cool just like that.

I forgot to take a picture of the wet soap after swirling - I guess I was in a rush to get it in the oven! This is what it looked like the next morning.

The colors mellowed out quite a bit and continued to get a little lighter after sitting out. After cutting and cleaning the bars, I think they turned out quite good! I like this technique of pouring one line at a time, because you end up with a layered ring-like pattern on the sides. :)

It looks pretty similar to this picture of worn ash wood, don't you think??

Finally, a few more close ups. 

I enjoyed this attempt much better overall. Now I just need to come up with a name for this soap - suggestions are welcome!!

August 2016 Soap Challenge - Coral & Sea Glass Soap

I wasn't sure if I was going to sign up for the soap challenge this month, since I didn't think I'd have time, but I really wanted to learn this technique. I managed to find a free afternoon to try this - I only had one shot, so here goes!

I was ambitious and decided to try multiple colors for the fill portions. I had a teal and coral color palette in mind, similar to the images below.  

Rather than use Tatsiana's formula, I used Veronica Foale's recipe from her diagonal ombre tutorial. Although this recipe stays soft for a long time (due to the minimal butters and hard oils), I've found it to be very slow moving. For my fragrance, I used Brambleberry's White Tea and Ginger FO - again, I have found this FO to be slow moving. Since I don't have a smaller slab mold than the Brambleberry 9 bar mold, I definitely did not want my soap to move fast!

I had never tried hand stirring the soap batter before, so was a bit wary. It seemed to emulsify after 10 minutes of stirring with a whisk, but I stirred it for 15 minutes just in case.

I was going for an ombre/gradient effect for the fill portions. The outline color is a mixture of copper and hot pink mica, and I added various amounts of turquoise mica to what would be the fill portions.

Squeeze bottles all ready to go. The color gradient is easier to see in the bottles, don't they look pretty all lined up?

Sorry I didn't take any pictures/videos while filling up the mold. Time was of the essence! Originally I wanted to have my circles be somewhat lined up...but clearly that didn't happen. :) The coral soap batter seemed extra runny and would spread out sometimes - I'm not sure if perhaps I added too much colorant? It was manageable but caused some outlines to be more smeared than crisp. Here's a picture of the filled mold:

I put the soap into the oven (preheated at 170 degrees) and left the oven on for about 40 minutes. I have actually never gelled my soap in the oven before, so I was nervous. I was imagining horrible cracks or volcano soap hahaha. After I turned off the oven, I left the soap in there for about 3 more hours before taking it out. I am AWFUL about leaving my soap alone and keeping it covered for a day, I always want to peak. I peaked several times with this soap, which I think caused a bit of soda ash. Has anyone else ever gotten deep soda ash throughout the soap? It's happened before using this FO - I'm not sure if the culprit is the FO, the colorant, or the soaping temperature, but I suspect some FOs are more susceptible to soda ash than others. I had soaped at ~95 degrees, which I do frequently, so I don't think it was necessarily temperature...

Anyway, here's a picture of the soap after 24 hours:

The fill portions reminded me of sea glass, hence the name "Coral & Sea Glass Soap" :) Doesn't it look similar to the pictures of sea glass below??

The final colors also kind of remind me of robin eggs. Even though I gelled the soaps, the colors did not come out quite as dark as I had envisioned. I think next time I will add a little more teal mica so that the gradient is more obvious. 

After cleaning up the soaps and planing off most of the soda ash, I think the soaps look pretty neat! Here are some of the final results. :)

July 2016 Soap Challenge - Dazzling Sunrays Soap

It took long enough, but I finally signed up for the Great Cakes Soapworks monthly soap challenge! It's been an embarrassingly long time since my last blog post (smh), but don't worry, I've been making soap this whole time.

Anyway, this month's challenge was the pipe divider swirl. Since the PVC pipes are round, I thought I could take advantage of their shapes and make them look like suns.

I only ended up needing 5 PVC couplings, but bought way too many at the hardware store. For some reason I miscounted how many of the 2'' couplings I needed, so I had to use a 2.5'' one.

Here's a picture of the pipes in the mold - I used melted cocoa butter as suggested to get them to stick to the paper.

I had placed the pipes such that each bar would have a portion of "sun" after they are all cut. I had actually lined the mold and set up the pipes the night before I was planning to make the soap, just to make sure the cocoa butter had enough time to firm up.

For my colors, I decided to do yellow and orange inside the pipes and sky blue and a darker blue outside the pipes. I did all the math to figure out how much oil I needed, how much needed to be separated for the pipes, etc. Ok, I was good to go!

Planning everything doesn't always translate into successful execution, though. For some reason, after I do all my calculations, weighing, etc., I always seem to come up slightly short when I have to separate soap batter at trace. I made the mistake of separate the amounts for the pipes last, so I had a little less set aside for the orange than originally planned. Note to self - break out the smaller amounts of batter first!

I also used a fragrance oil that I had never used before, which was pretty risky. I used Sunny Herb Garden FO by Brambleberry. It supposedly behaves well, and I didn't experience much acceleration with it, fortunately. I should have, however, definitely used a slower tracing recipe. While my recipe had a good amount of liquid oils in it, it also had butters, which made things move quicker than I would've liked. Now I know, this technique needs a very thin trace and slow moving recipe, similar to the spin swirl. 

Now, I managed to get the soap into the mold and the PVC pipes out. I was definitely nervous about pulling out the couplings - the smaller ones are shorter, and so the soap level got very close to the tops. I thought for sure my fingers would mess up the design as I struggled to pull the pipes out. But, surprisingly, they came out very easily! 

However, I didn't quite get the effect I was looking for. Here's a picture with the pipes out, after I had started swirling: 

You can see that I didn't quite have enough batter to fill the pipes, and the yellow/orange parts didn't stay very circular after I pulled at the pipes. Next time, I would also try to get some more contrast between the lighter/darker blues. 

For my free-handed swirl, I did squiggly lines starting from the centers of the "suns" and going outwards. I was hoping to making it look like sun rays were coming out of the suns, but they turned out kind of funky, since the "suns" didn't stay circular.

Here's another picture after everything was swirled (please excuse the poor lighting).

Fortunately, I didn't get too much ash (since I sprayed the soap with rubbing alcohol and kept it covered), but I knew I'd have to plane off quite a bit off the top. Here's the soap unmolded before cutting.

And here's a picture of the bottom. (Again, excuse the poor lighting - this is why you don't take pictures of soap with your iPhone when it's dark.)

Surprisingly the pipe portions stayed pretty round at the bottoms! The bottoms of these soaps actually look really nice (normally I dislike the bottoms), I think they look more like suns. :)

Cutting and planing the soaps was a pain, but I was much happier with the results. Just for fun, here are some more pictures of the soap bottoms, in natural lighting.

Those are pretty enough without the fancy swirled tops!

And without further ado, here are some photos of the final soaps (taken with a real camera). I call this soap "Dazzling Sunrays Soap."

I definitely learned a lot through this technique and am excited to use my PVC couplings again. I was wary of how this soap would turn out but am pretty pleased with the results. :)

New Brambleberry Birchwood Mold

Sorry for the hiatus (again)! I've still been making soaps the last nine months, I just haven't had time to post about them.

I recently caved and bought the 9 bar birchwood mold from Brambleberry. I have to say, it's much higher quality than I expected. It comes with a wooden lid and plastic dividers. I'm excited to be able to try a bunch of new techniques that I haven't been able to with my log mold. Here are some pictures of my first time breaking in the mold!

Before inserting dividers:

After inserting the dividers:

I essentially did a funnel pour, just without the funnel. Since the recipe I used had 50% olive oil, I waited 3 days before unmolding. Unfortunately, it was difficult to separate the soap from the dividers. I had to slowly push the soap bars out so as to not mess up the sides. However, the soap stuck to the dividers pretty well, so there are now a lot of fingerprints all over the tops and bottoms of my bars. I still really like this mold, it is just critical that you wait until the soap is firm enough before attempting to unmold!!

Soap surprises

One of the most fun and frustrating parts of soap crafting is not having any clue what your soap bars will end up looking like. Sure, you can guess based on your colors and swirling techniques that you're planning to use. But when you're trying a new method for the first time, or you're testing a fragrance oil that ends up seizing horribly, you just have to hope for the best. Then you get to wait 24 hours before you can cut the bars to see if they look surprisingly gorgeous, filled with air bubbles, or completely different from what you were expecting.

Recently, I made a watermelon cold process soap. I blended three shades of red/pink pigments in order to get the watermelon flesh color that I wanted. I was planning to include some drizzles of black horizontally across the loaf, so that it would look like seeds. However, I had not anticipated how much the black drizzles would spread. Instead of little black seeds, I ended up with black lines going through my bars. As I saw the black batter spreading as I was putting it into the mold, I knew it wasn't going to look the way I wanted it to. I still think the soap looks nice overall, but I will probably skip the black next time. Maybe poppy seeds would work better instead?

Regardless of how my soaps end up, peeling the paper off of my loafs and then cutting that first bar off makes all the work worth it. It's like opening a present that you worked really hard for. And most of the time, I am pleasantly surprised. :)

Dandelion Zebra Swirl

Sorry for the hiatus in posts! With my new job and my husband deploying, things have been busy around here. I just wanted to share my first attempt at the dandelion zebra swirl. I would say that it was a success!

I'm glad that the swirl was more centered than I thought it'd be. After watching some Youtube videos (haha) and looking at other people's results, I noticed that a lot of people's soap resulted in the swirl being off to one side. I think how centered it is just depends on the angle of the insert, how you remove the insert, and how much you are swirling. I just used a piece of cardboard and it worked out fine. The Youtube videos were very helpful :) I was dying in anticipation to cut this loaf, so I'm glad it turned out better than I was expecting.

Here are the mentioned Youtube videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDuGer63C9Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YphXlXxcY-Q

Soap Ricing

So I've probably made close to 30 batches of soap by now, but I have now just experienced the problem of ricing. Typically, I make soap in 1-1.5 lb batches, mainly to test FOs, colors, and techniques. Because I wanted to make some ombre tall soaps, I had to use my mold that holds 2-3 lbs. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of not testing this FO beforehand. I added the FO at light medium trace, and the soap immediately started ricing. Although I had never seen ricing, I immediately assumed it was ricing because of the quick reaction to the FO. The consistency reminded me a bit of tapioca pudding.

Not knowing what to do (and unsure if my soap would even be usable), I tried mixing the batter by hand. I didn't use the stick blender because I didn't want to thicken up trace even more. I was planning to do an ombre design with 9 layers, so I couldn't afford to have the batter be too thick. It ended up being pretty thick by the time I got to the last few layers anyway, so there are some air bubbles in the soap.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed that this happened. I used the Lettuce fragrance oil from Brambleberry, and there was no mention of ricing online. I soaped at about 105/110 degrees, so I don't think it was too hot. I guess you can't really depend on other people's reviews for your own soaping experience, you just have to test the ingredients yourself.

I was dreading what the bars would look like after cutting. They don't look completely terrible, but there are obviously spots that I didn't break up and are therefore uncolored. From what I've read online, the soap is still usable. I'm just not sure how well these bars would sell. I'm probably just going to end up giving them away. :(

Here's what the cut bars look like:

What a bummer!