soap challenge

September brings fall in all its glory and the soap challenge has returned. This month the technique we’re going for is the mini drop swirl or the advanced mini suspended drops swirl.

To allow for play time with the required squeeze bottles I knew I had to change up my recipe with larger amount of soft oils. The batter needed to stay fluid longer to lay the strips of soap just beneath the surface and gently on top of the soap batter.

Here in photos shows my try at the advanced mini drop swirl technique.

My recipe was 37.50% olive, 31.25% sunflower, 18.75% coconut and 12.50% Shea butter. I use the full amount of water suggested for this batch and scented with burbon geranium and rosemary essential oils.

This soap took 2 days to saponify and slid out of the mold like a greased egg!

Here are some of he cut bars.

The colors remind me of fire balls raining from dark skies. So I’ve named this soap Fiery Night Skies.

This was my first try at the mini drop swirl. My 2nd try was a mini drop fail but a nice swirly soap nonetheless.

The second batch turned to soap stone practically, right before my eyes. I did the best I could using a spoon and chopstick to move and mix the thick colorful soap batter around in the mold.

Here is the end result.

This batch over heated as is evident. Notice the bars with cracks in the top. The recipe was different allowing for larger percentage of hard oils, plus I added sodium lactate to help the batter stay loose longer. I think the culprit might have been the kaolin clay I added to the lye water in effort to achieve a lighter color soap base. This batch is scented with bourbon geranium, basil and grapefruit essential oils.

Good soap crafting time was well spent!

Let me know what you think and Thank you for reading my blog.

The Qrafty Qomic

And…boy howdy if I didn’t find myself doing some fancy footwork in effort to keep up during this challenge. There is no shuffle off to buffalo time when trying to get this soap in the mold using squeeze bottles. It was more stick and move, stick and move, shake shake shake, HURRRRRRYYYYYY!

I decided to go the natural route as I drew my outline for this soap challenge picking oils and colorants. My base oils I went with Sunflower, Grapeseed, Sweet Almond oil, Coconut oil and some lemon butter as a super fat. I knew I was using lemongrass essential oil as my major scent for this challenge and the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea of doing my soapy impression of a busy bee. Here is what I imagined as sketched and colored in my idea book.

My notebook played a part in deciding how to go about brining this funnel pour technique to life.

My Saffon trial. On the right saffron in olive oil for over a week. Did not pull color. On the right saffron in water for 10 minutes…

colorants used tumeric, kaolin and activated charcoal

scent used lemongrass, 5X orange essential oil, ylang ylang essential oil and tumeric essential oil.

My base oils percentage wise were about 25% hard oils to 75% soft oils. I factored this equation to allow as much funnel pour time as possible.

I decided to harness sun power to heat my base oils while waiting for my lye water to cool.

Squeeze bottles filled and ready to rock n roll.

The middle squeeze bottle contains soap batter colored with tumeric essential oil as well as saffron and ground tumeric. The dark bottle is colored with activated charcoal. The white, kaolin clay.

Busy Bee Funnel Pour ready for a sun sapononap!

This the end result after all the squeezing was done. Well actually I ran out of black just in the nic of time.I had lots of orange and a bit of white batter left over which was poured into a small log mold.

I sat the slab out in the sun covered with saran wrap and was pleasantly surprised to see that the sun had done what a 170 degree oven would do…for FREE! Yeah baby!!! I have sun cpopped before but forgot how fun it can be. The soap was cooled and solid by nightfall. Both slab and log released easily from the molds. Of course the ole school soaper that I am had to tongue test for zap, just because and was rewarded with the no zap but the lovely taste of lemongrass, yeck! The ole soaper in me also decided to lather test and was rewarded with amazing lather. The bars will be shelved for the appropriate cure time but it super nice to know I GOTS SUDS!

I sliced the slab into four healthy sized bars that smell incredible. I am hoping with fingers crossed that the kaolin clay does it’s job in anchoring all the citrus EO’s I used in this batch.

Here is how my batch turned out. My friend and soap pal extraordinaire Durty Gurl Flare just whipped up her own rendition of a soap beveler planer. I plan to sneak over and spiffy these bars with said planer. It’s good to have talented friends in crafty places! Thanks for reading my try at eco friendly Sun Cpopped Dancing Funnel Busy Bee Soap!

mylifewithpieces

Mini Drop Swirl Soap Challenge Sept 2018

I Can Dance If I Want To