Fall / Holiday Scents

Fall is my favorite time of the year.  I love that the air gets crisp and cool, I love the smell of the dying leaves, I like that we don't have to mow the lawn so frequently, and the colors we get up north are so beautiful!

I've been testing out some fall fragrances to add this year, and here are some pics!

This is a blend I made using BB's Almond Biscotti FO, some coffee EO I had at home, and a little cocoa powder to make the base of the cupcake a bit more tan.  This fragrance smells ah-mazing!  I even keep one cupcake up in the living room while it cures so I can smell it whenever I want :)  The blend with the coffee EO is so fabulous - I just wish the coffee EO wasn't so expensive.  This is definitely a limited-production blend.  (side note- I think I've finally figured out the right consistency to pipe soap designs.  I am so impatient, I never wait long enough.  I think I finally nailed it on these cupcakes).

Ok, this next one is not a traditional fall scent, but I wanted to show off this cool halo effect the woad powder gave these swirls in this Caribbean Coconut soap.  We got married in the Bahamas last year less than one week after Hurricane Sandy passed through, so these colors and swirls remind me of a Bahamas hurricane.

Last year, I tried to make some Fresh Snow soap, but I ended up forgetting to scent the soap before I poured it in the mold.  This design is just what I was going for, using BB's vertical mold.  I love the scent, I love the colors, I love it all :)

And last, but not least, is my Gingerbread Cookie soap.  This is such a delicious fragrance - it smells just like a gingerbread cookie!  It's a nice, round fragrance that is not too sugar-forward.  The soap batter was not quite thick enough to suspend the gingerbread man embeds, but I feel happy with how this soap looks and smells.  I used a vanilla stabilizer to help prevent the soap from discoloring too dark.

I am looking forward to trying a few more fall fragrances coming up.

Have a great day!

~Chrissy

Soap Challenge #3 - Mica Swirled Tops

I am a little behind on my challenges...  I'm really enjoying doing them, but as this is a pretty busy time, I haven't had as much time to play with these new techniques as I wanted.  Having said that, I was a little apprehensive about doing mica swirled tops.  I've seen blog posts by Emily at Sheih Design Studio with her amazing and creative mica tops, and I was a little intimidated to try myself.

I looked at what cool micas I had that would be good for a swirl, found that I had a beautiful gold mica from Brambleberry and built a recipe around that mica.  I had some lemongrass essential oil and wanted to try a blend with spearmint EO, and the colors that made the most sense to me were yellow and green.  I had some spearmint leaves for some texture in the soap, and I felt good to go.

I colored the bottom half yellow, used a cocoa powder pencil line, and made the top green so that I could use the super pearly white and gold micas for the swirl top.  I didn't have any pipettes, but luckily, I had given my husband a molecular mixology set for Christmas which had pipettes, so I repurposed a couple (shhh, don't tell him...)

Here's what the wet soap mica swirls looked like:

I was so pleased with how these turned out!  They kind of look like a tapestry, honestly.  I stuck them in the oven overnight to gel, and the house smelled so good.  The blend was lemongrass, spearmint, and frankincense EOs, but it smells kind of like lemon cake to me right now.

Here's what the soaps look like when cured:

Still looking good!

Some of the beauty of the swirls was lost when the bars were cut, but I really love the colors. If I had a better close up, you could see the spearmint leaves as added texture inside the bar.  Unfortunately, the light wasn't great this morning for pics.

I'm definitely doing this technique again.  I want to try it with textured tops, too.  It was easier than I thought, and it makes these soaps look so polished and fancy!

The only thing I noticed when unmolding, though, is that the mica on top was starting to rub off on my hands...  Has anyone who has tried this technique noticed the same thing? Did I use too much mica?  

~Chrissy

Soap Challenge 2013 - Elemental Swirl

For week 2 of the Soap Challenge, the technique is the Elemental Swirl.  Here is the link to her blog with the pictures of other soaper's creations as well as a little more info on the Elemental Swirl.

I really struggled with what to do with this elemental swirl.  I wasn't sure about the colors to use (I have a relatively limited selection of colorants - mainly oxides, micas, and natural colorants).  I wasn't even sure about what scent I wanted to make.

So, I looked at DesignSeeds for some inspiration:

Inspiration photo from DesignSeeds at:  http://design-seeds.com/index.php/home/entry/flora-tones20

I love these colors, and I figured I could get close enough with the colorants I have.  For scent, I have had a spearmint and ginger EO blend on my list of things to try.  To balance it out a little more, I added some coriander EO I had laying around (This is a very expensive soap - these EOs aren't cheap...)

I rolled up my sleeves, turned on the Elton John Pandora station on my computer downstairs and started creating.

Here is the soap log before and after cutting.  I really love how the colors turned out!  I didn't have very high expectations for this soap, but it was really fun to do, and I like how it turned out.  The "green" smell of the EO blends and the flower-like colors really make me wish spring was here already.

Here are some of my favorite shots of the cut soap.  The swirls turned out great, but I wish I had poured a little more forcefully to get a wavy pencil line.

One more for good measure:

The colors aren't exactly like the DesignSeeds palette above, but I am proud of how this soap turned out!

~Chrissy

New weekend soaps

I am working on a post on the new Soap Hutch mold I got recently to talk all about this amazing multi-purpose mold that Rich made for me.  He has been such a pleasure to work with and great at communicating on details of the mold.  I will get into the features of my great Christmas gift in the blog post I'm working on, but for now, just know it's awesome :)

So, since it has a 9-bar divider function, I wanted to utilize it and also play with a chopstick swirl.  One of the nice things about this mold is that it's 4" tall, so each of the 9 divided sections can hold up to 3 bars of soap, or 27 bars total in one mold!  This means that the bars that I swirled had additional layers of depth and design - I really enjoyed seeing how the middle bar of each 3" block turned out.

The blocks all looked so grey from the activated charcoal I used for one of the colors.

Check out how great the swirls inside look:

And the scent is heavenly (Black Raspberry Vanilla).  I did notice, though, that on the tops of some of the blocks, there was this strange yellow-ish color developing in the white portion.  I'm not sure what caused that, since the color didn't make it through the entire block - it was only on the top bit that was exposed to air.  I really struggled getting the soap blocks out of the mold, because the liner on the bottom of the mold was stuck to the plastic bottom of the mold - it took me forever to separate the liner from the mold.  The swirls turned out so beautifully, though, I will definitely use it again!

I also made a hot process lavender soap in my trusty old crock pot.  I have a lot of trouble getting the tops to look smooth with HP, so I poured it into BB's vertical mold to keep all the sides flat and even.  I colored it with alkanet root infused in olive oil (3 heaping teaspoons in 12 oz olive oil).  I was worried about the color, since it was red-looking when I infused the OO over heat, the color turned a pretty purple when I mixed the soap batter, and it became an ugly grey color when it was cooking in the crock pot.  I wish I had thought to take pictures of the colors.  I will make another batch soon and will take pictures to show off the weird color morphing.

The final color ended up pretty great, though - I apparently was having a purple weekend, which was fitting that the Prince station on Pandora was my soaping music :)  I love purple and the Purple One!

I love this color - you can see the change from when it was first cooked (in top left) over a few days curing.  Gorgeous, if I do say so myself!

I need to work on a few more blog posts on the Soap Hutch mold as well as a salt soap I could finally make with the divider mold.  Expect more soon!

Happy Monday - 

~Chrissy

Over 1,000 page views!

I know everyone has their own measure of success for their blogs, but I am so proud of this milestone.  I started this blog a little over 3 months ago, with the hope that I might be able to convince my mom and husband to read it occasionally, and now it has over 1,000 views!! 

So, to celebrate, I decided to finally try to make some soap cupcakes.  I found an awesome sale on cake decorating supplies at Joann Fabrics and bought a bunch of stuff earlier this week to use as "soap only" decorating.  I had some Hot Chocolate FO from Brambleberry and some green sea clay I wanted to try out.   My recipe was supposed to make 6 cupcakes, using 25 oz of oils.  

I used the FO for the base of the cupcakes, since it will discolor them to a nice dark brown.  I poured out about 18 oz of the soap batter for the base and mixed in only the FO, no additional colorants.  Already, you can see the discoloration from the FO:

 I added some peppermint EO and 1 tsp of sea clay to the portion reserved for the tops and waited... and waited... and mixed...  and got myself some breakfast and fed the dogs... and mixed again... and FINALLY the batter was at a thick enough trace to pipe the tops.  I realized now that I should have used a larger tip for the piping - the one I got was for cake decorating, not cupcake decorating.  Oh, well.  Here's how they turned out after I was done piping:

The batter I poured was enough for 7 bases, but I didn't use enough of the "frosting", so I had enough left over for an extremely ugly cupcake. 

The color was not as vibrant as I had wanted, so I found some body-safe pink glitter and sprayed the tops of this cake.  Now the cupcake is a weird patina color and looks kind of slimy.  Another soap that is definitely going into my personal stash :)

I tried poppy seeds on a couple, both for some extra exfoliation and some visual interest (read: to cover up the poor job I did on piping...)

All in all, I'm quite proud of my first foray into soap cupcake-making.  I know how I can continue to improve, and my soap area smells ah-mazing!

~Chrissy

Birthday Soaps!

Short blog post y'all - I have made some "spa" type soaps for my birthday:

Here's the one I made with a friend yesterday with pistachio and shea butters, avocado, babassu, sunflower, castor, coconut and olive oils (cleaning out the mostly-empty bottles), and silk and scented with my first essential oil blend with eucalyptus, lavender, bergamot, orange, and clove.  It smells divine, and I can't wait to see how this turned out.  I agreed to not cut it until my friend can come over again for New Years...  I hope I can wait that long :)

The one I made today for my birthday is with a FO that smells like Bath & Body Works' Coconut Lime Verbena and is made with silk, mango butter, and avocado, olive, coconut, and castor oils.  I am really excited about this one - it looks so pretty in the mold!

Well, off to continue birthday celebrations with my husband tonight - hope you all have had a great Monday!

~Chrissy