Category: soap

Rainbows, Finally

At long last I finally made honest-to-goodness rainbow soap. I layered yellow, orange, and “red” (the color blocks were called “Santa Claus Red” but as you’ll see they only managed pink) in one of the containers my melt-and-pour soap came in, tilting it one way and then the other for the first two layers. Once that was solid I sliced it up and embedded it in purple, blue, and green layers of soap in my 12-bar mold.

rainbow soap before the last layer is poured finished bars of rainbow soap

The warm colors were “Ultra White” soap and the cool colors were mango butter soap. To use up more of my years-old soapmaking supplies I made a second dozen bars simply by swirling oatmeal and cocoa butter soaps together in the mold. That went less than smoothly, though – the cocoa butter soap had a low melting point, and after ten or fifteen minutes I went to put the mold in the freezer and instead splashed liquid soap across the rainbow bars (the three pictured are the only ones that were unscathed) and kitchen floor. Grr.

The bars aren’t too diminished in size, though. And at least what I got on the rainbow soap was just more soap.

Incidentally I had a problem with my caching plugin setup that likely kept everyone from seeing the new pattern and tutorial catalog onsite when I posted about it. I’ve fixed it, so please check it out and let me know what you think!

FYDP Final Roundup

The first quarter of 2014 has drawn to a close, and with it Finish Yer Dang Projects, our challenge to do or dump all those partially completed crafts that have aged to perfection. You can see all of my weekly updates as well as posts about FYDP projects under the tag FYDP.

rainbow soap

I have one last FYDP accomplishment.

  • Made rainbow soap. It may be weird colors that look more like an unappetizing jello mold than soap, but it’s rainbow soap.

We trimmed the edges off after I took this picture, which helped a bit.

Total accomplished projects:

  1. Mending: 7
  2. Non-mend sewing: 5
  3. Elimination: 11
  4. Website updates: 6
  5. Crochet: 3
  6. Other crafts: 1

Continue reading FYDP Final Roundup

Soapdate

Hello all!
My current projects seem all to be longer-term, without so much to blog about at this point. However, I do owe an update on the soapmaking work, and on how the strange foamy soaps have worn.

First off, I made an order with Wholesale Supplies Plus for a bunch of soap-related things: a mold, two sampler kits, and a set of coloring blocks (which I admit I ordered mostly to get above $100 and get a free gift, which was my choice of one of 10 or 12 fragrance oils). Full marks for that experience: the website is good, the shipping was fast, and they even wrapped electrical tape around the lid of the fragrance bottle to keep it from leaking. Here’s my soapbox:

my soapbox, hee hee

That photo was taken after making a set of soaps with the new materials, as well as with some of my TJ Maxx soaps – I chopped up and melted some very strongly scented floral soap along with some lavender-vanilla guest soaps, some water, and some unscented shower gel, and then pressed the mixture flat in an old take-out box.

kind of looks like split pea soup makings cooling

Then I used some heart-shaped cookie cutters to punch out pieces to embed in glycerin soap. I used up the last of my original block, plus a pound each of honey, olive oil, and high lather glycerin soaps from my sampler packs. I embedded in four or five steps, trying to get the bars with multiple pieces to embed at different levels. I would have has more success with slightly more patience, but it worked out pretty well.

one dozen bars of soap

I’ve been using a bar in the shower and although it started out a little big for my hands it makes great shave gel. It also smells amazing – I was kind of tempted to taste the honey soap because it smelled so good (I refrained).

Finally, as promised, an update on the foamy soaps. As expected, the soap with more non-glycerin both lathers better and is getting worn down faster. In the picture below, you can see that. It’s also been used more but not as much more as it appears. The embedded shapes are not appearing as nicely as I might have hoped; I think the bat is going to be missing half of one wing and the tip of the other before his body comes fully into view. The star looks pretty nice, though. Recall I made a double layer of those embedded shapes, one clear and one purple.

soap update soap update

We call this LEARNING.