Susanne's Crafty
Corner: Cosmetics
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Bits
'n Pieces Soap (13 bars left)
This soap was
made in a recycling spree from all those odd bits and pieces that didn't
look very nice or lost their scent. The soap I chopped up was a strange
mixture of soap with coconut milk, yoghurt, tea, botanicals etc. Really
can't tell what's exactly in there!
I used a batch of orange soap to
make it a confetti soap, this batch
does smell like oranges but not very nice to me and also had a bit too
much superfatting. This soap was scented with some cinnamon, clove,
vanilla and a bit of honey, just like christmas pastry, very nice.
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Liquid Floor Soap
I
finally tried my luck with liquid soap! I'm not making a recipe for use
on the skin but a liquid floor soap made from linseed oil. My parents
have a tile floor that requires such soap but their supplier stopped his
business. So instead of having to go to France for it, they asked me to
make it. If this works out ok I might try a nice recipe for myself
Anyway, it started allright: the KOH dissolved with the soft sizzling
sound as it was supposed to do. When I measured the linseed oil I
noticed I was short on that one: bugger! So with the lye cooling down a
bit and the large pot for the double boiler warming up I ran to the
hardware store around the corner to get some more. Saved!
Then came the next part, getting the stuff to trace. It got thicker and
then grainy as I was expecting from reading the tutorials available. But
it didn't want to go to that "hardly stirrably solid mass". So I kept
mixing and mixing and pausing some to let my stickblender cool down. It
even got so worse that it just wouldn't cool down enough anymore. At
that point I fetched a bag of frozen potato cubes from my freezer (the
only pliable frozen thing I had in stock) and used that to cool it down
a bit more. Finally after 55 minutes I put away the SB and stirred some
more by hand. It still wasn't solid, more like very thick HP after cook.
I thought what the hell and just put the lid on and let it cook.
After 30 minutes
in the double boiler I decided to put the inner pot in my oven. This way
I could keep the temperature much more constant then on the stove, and
of course the added benefit that I don't have to regulate the heat.
After a cooking time of 2.5 hours I stirred the stuff again and it
didn't look at all like the pics of the process I've seen on the web:
much to liquid! I understood it should be mashed potatoes-like, but it's
more like regular HP after cook. I didn't have the stuff separate or
rise on me though, so I think I was on the right track there.
Well, I went
through with the instructions and diluted the stuff. Used 3 x the amount
of oils instead of twice because it was still very thick. Added the
neutralisation fluid (borax - water) and it's now cooling down. It was
cloudy but perhaps that's also because of the oil (linseed) used. My
parents took it with them and I'm waiting for feedback now.Really hope
it's usuable! *keeping fingers crossed*
Conclusion: I used 1000 g of oils,
200 g of KOH and ended up with about 3.8 liters soap. It took me about
an hour to get the stuff to trace and another 6 hours for cooking.
Diluting only took 20 minutes since my soap never got more solid then a
nice HP consistency. That last point was also why the cook took so damn
long, looking back it didn't change much after the first 2 -3 hours of
cooking. I think all these differences and the resulting soap not being
clear is probably because of me being new to liquid soaping and the kind
of oil used.
I'm confident that next time and with different oils I can get it
to trace & cook in about 4 hours tops. If it gets more solid then
this batch, diluting might take longer though. I also think that my pots
can take a bit bigger batch then I made this time, so 5 L of liquid soap
may well be within my reach.
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Curly Soap
This soap is CP soap with the following recipe: 45%
tallow, 20% peanut, 15% soy, 12% coconut and 8% castor oil. I used
powdered coconut milk & water to mix the lye with but somehow burned
it a bit: the soap got tan. The curls inside are from the same orange
soap as used in the bits 'n pieces soap above.
I used a cheese slicer to get small slices of soap which i rolled up
and put in the mold. Then I poured the soap over it. I let it get to a
too thick trace though, there are a few holes were the curl didn't get
completely filled. This batch was scented lemon-teatree. |
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Diagonal Anise Lavender Soap
This last soap used the same recipe as the curly
soap above, but instead of coconut milk water was used to mix the lye
with. The bottom diagonal half of the soap is filled with (again) the
orange soap that was cut julliene.To achieve this I tilted the mold on a
book. At thin trace the soap was poured over it and left till it firmed
up enough to tilt the mold back.
Then the rest of the fresh soap - mixed with poppy seeds - was poured
to fill up the mold. Bottom half was scented lavender, top half with
anise EO. Only the center of the soap gelled which is a bit of a shame.
Next time I'll either isolate or cool the mold to get the color even.
Guess I have to practise a bit more on making soap with embeds! I do
like the top of this soap very much; it's very "icing" like because of
the ash covering it and the structure caused by the thick traced soap.
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Embossed soap (4 bars left)
On the dish there was a topic about soap embossing, seen on a japanese site. It's really cool so I tried it in
my new silicon rubber half sphere molds. Aren't birthdays great?! Also
used the sample of violet ultramarine pigment I just received to color
the design.
I put some soap in a ziplock bag and cut of a tiny corner. This worked
out pretty well. I did more of a criss-cross pattern as this was easier
in the molds. The trouble was that although I had a high in olive recipe
and only brought it to very light trace it was pudding before I was
ready to pour.
I know I should
just have HP'd that one and made a fresh CP batch to pour over the
design. But nope I decided to HP it anyway, keep it as thin as possible
and pour that instead. As you could have guessed the soap didn't fill
all the holes so it doesn't look as nice as could have been. I'll
definately try
this again, though. It is really fun!
BTW you can see where a tiny bit of ash has
formed on the CP design, makes the color very vibrant . Oh and I scented
it with juniper blue from SOS: really nice!
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Supermarket challenge (6 bars left)
At HCS Violet came with the idea to make soap entirely from stuff you
can find locally. No problemo since I get most of my supplies in the
supermarket anyway! A good opportunity to try my luck with that soap
embossing thing again.
First I
made a drawing in my molds with soap colored brown with cocoa. did this
the same way as described above. I let it harden up fro a couple of
hours and then made a fresh batch with the following ingredients: pour
30% tallow (supermarket, sold as "100% beef deep frying fat")
25% olive (supermarket)
25% peanut (supermarket)
12% coconut (eastern store)
8% castor (drugstore)
Scented with cedar & lemongrass EO (drugstore)
At very thin trace I poured a layer of scented but uncolored soap over
the drawing. Colored the remaining soap brown with cocoa powder and
poured that as second layer. Worked out pretty neat, aye?!
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Transparent Glycerin Soap (5 bars left)
This is the result of my first attempt to make
transparent glycerin soap. As you can see it didn't turn out entirely
clear, but nice nontheless. I used a recipe consisting of 50% olive, 31.5% coconut, 15% castor and 3.5% stearic acid.
For more information on how I got to this recipe and how to make
glycerin soap, I refer you to the tutorial.
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Indian Cream Soap (reserved for mom)
This soap is a rebatch of odd bits and pieces. I had
some gold shimmer body lotion that I didn't use anymore so I added it to
the soap when it was in complete gel. Scented it with an "eastern"
smelling fragrance oil called "India" et voila the name "Indian Cream"
was born. This soap turns out to be my mom's favourite and she asked me
to reserve the remaining bars for her. Ok mom!
The flower imprint on the soap is from a bras doorknob.
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Oatmeal, Milk & Honey Soap (6 bars left)
This time I wanted to make an OMH soap but didn't
want it to turn brown. With HP milk soaps always turn brown so I decided
to do this soap CP. The recipe I wanted to try was 35% olive, 35%
arachide, 12% coconut, 10% palm kernel, 8% castor and 100% milk for fluid. Froze the milk in cubes, mixed with the lye, added
1T honey and 1T oatmeal at trace and everything went A-ok.
This soap was really gorgeous. But when I cut it in the morning I noticed something
strange; on the cutting edges the soap
appeared to be weeping! Tiny droplets of clear fluid and only on the
cutting planes, not on the sides that touched the mold or the top. It
turned out that there were pieces of undissolved lye in the soap. You
can see them in the first pic as the white spots.
The soap just kept weeping
and I wouldn't dare using the soap myself
so I rebatched it in the oven. With great result I might add The soap is darker then it initially was, but
given the fact that this is basically HP, with milk AND honey it's
rather pretty IMO. Scent didn't burn off! Mold used was an IKEA drawer
the bars are about 5x5x5 cm and weigh approx. 170 g / 6 oz. Still
rather pretty, aye?! |
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Powder Puff Soap (12 bars left)
This one is rebatched soap
of odd bit's and pieces. I choose the lightest pieces for this one and
added the most colorfull chuncks only when the rest was already molten,
hence the nice pastel flecks. Scented it with baby powder FO from SOS
and I'm going to call it "Powder Puff". |
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