Well its been a while since we last posted what we've been up to, but that doesn't mean that we haven't been soaping! In fact, we've been soaping quite a bit and having lots of fun learning and trying some new things. We've found some new blogs to follow and learn from, acquired a couple new soaping books, and have been trying out some new essential oils and natural colourants. We even have a new soap mold which we kind of love.
From left to right are some of the natural colourants we've been trying. Indigo blue, Red Brazilian Clay, Annatto, Nettle, and Purple Brazilian clay in the background.
In this soap, we incorporated some cut up bits of the Annatto and Nettle soaps and used a Lemon Essential Oil. We call this soap Lemon Lime.
This soap is our second try at a Tiger Stripe. We used activated charcoal, titanium dioxide and Anise Essential Oil.
This is our first try at a Goat Milk soap. We used Alkanet infused olive oil for the purple, and tried infusing Nettle for a green hue which did not give us the green hue we were hoping for. We scented this soap with Peppermint and Lavender Essential Oils.
This is our first attempt using a round mold. We quite liked the way it turned out. We used a cardboard mailing tube lined with freezer paper. It turned out quite well. This is a Goat Milk soap with dried orange peel, and scented with 5X Orange Essential Oil.
This is Oatmeal and Honey Goat Milk soap. No added scent, but the oatmeal and honey give this soap a warm muffin kind of smell.
Another Goat Milk soap. This time we used the powdered Nettle right in the batter to get the green colour. Purple is from the Alkanet infused oil, and we scented the batch with Peppermint and Lavender Essential Oils. The white specks in this soap may be un-dissolved lye from the whole frozen goat milk and lye mixing routine which is new to us. We won't use this soap until we do a Ph test!
The soap on the left is a Carrot Ginger soap from our new book, The Natural Soap Chef by Heidi Corley Barto. On the right is her recipe for Pumpkin Spice soap. The Carrot soap is unscented, and the Pumpkin Pie soap called for Pumpkin Pie fragrance oil, but we didn't have any, so we added Cinnamon Essential Oil which was nice, if not a bit strong in combination with the Pumpkin Pie spice mix which has turned out to be rather exfoliating!
Here is our Vanilla Oak soap. We love this Fragrance oil from Voyageur. We took a little trip there a month ago or so. It was so much fun to be able to actually smell all the fragrance and essential oils. There was a class going on at the time, and there were enthusiastic soapers to talk to - it was so much fun! We now know what people mean when they say a fragrance can bleed - see how the vanilla swirl (darker colour) has spread out into the nice titanium dioxide whitened area? When we first cut this soap, the lines between the two mixtures was very distinct. We also added cranberry seeds to the darker swirl. We like this soap and even like the changes with the swirl.
This is our attempt at Calendula Sunshine from the Soap Queen, our idol. We forgot to add sodium lactate to the batter, and this soap is setting up a bit slowly; we think this is due to our soap formula which we love, but it is a bit heavy in the liquid oils such as: rice bran, avocado, grape seed, olive, and sweet almond oils.
This was our first soap in our new mold which we bought when we went to Voyageur. Up until then, we had been using a wider mold which made pouring much easier than in this long and narrow one. We've used the new mold a few time now, in fact in all of the above soaps except for the round ones and we have to declare it a winner.
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