Fireburst Soap

If you've been following this blog for a while, you may remember some Candy Cane soaps that I made for the holidays using the Impressionist Swirl technique. To do the Impressionist Swirl, you divide your soap into as many colors as you'd like and then use squeeze bottles to drizzle the soap into the mold.

Typically, the soap is drizzled horizontally into the mold, along the long sides, to create the Impressionist Swirl. A while back, I saw a post by the Otion Soap Blog where they did something similar to an Impressionist Swirl, but instead of squirting the soap horizontally, they squirted it vertically, making S-shapes along the short sides of the mold.

I thought I'd give that a try for this batch.

For a project like this one, you want to pick a well-behaved soap recipe and fragrance oil. For the recipe, I chose David's palm-free recipe using vegetable shortening, olive oil, coconut oil, and castor oil. (Make sure you check the label carefully on the vegetable shortening if you want a palm-free recipe. Some shortenings contain palm oil. The one I used was a blend of soybean and cottonseed oils.) To calculate the recipe, I headed over to SoapCalc to figure out the lye and water amounts. For the vegetable shortening, I selected "Crisco, old" from the Oils, Fats, and Waxes list. (For tips on which shortening to select from SoapCalc's list, see FAQ #9 on their website.)

I have been experimenting with palm-free recipes lately. I haven't settled on a favorite yet, although I have tried many that I enjoyed. I have used David's recipe once before and knew from my notes that the batter stayed nice and loose for me, which is exactly what a project like this one requires.

For the scent, I chose Bramble Berry's Energy fragrance oil. It is one of my favorites, and it has always behaved well for me.

To do the swirls (or whatever you want to call them), I used squirt bottles that I found in the baking/candymaking aisle of the craft store. After I brought the soap to a light trace - the soap needs to be emulsified, but still fluid and loose - and scented it, I divided the soap evenly among four plastic measuring cups prepped with colorant. For my colorants, I chose Bramble Berry's brick red oxide, yellow oxide, titanium dioxide, and orange mica. (BB no longer carries the orange mica, which gives me sad face.) To avoid clumping, I mixed each colorant with some liquid glycerin before adding the soap to it. After I added the soap to the measuring cups, I whisked it to mix the colors in well, and then gave it a quick buzz with the stickblender to make sure that the colors were fully incorporated, being careful not to blend too much in order to keep the soap at a very light trace.

Once the soap was colored, I poured each color into a squeeze bottle. (Tip: Be sure you snip the tips of your bottles to create a bigger opening so the soap flows more easily.)

Then, instead of squirting the soap along the long sides of the mold, I squirted the soap in a S-pattern along the short sides, alternating colors as I went. I tried to hit different spots while drizzling, going in between one color with another and covering different parts of the mold.

After a few sweeps, it's good to rotate the mold so that the colors are more evenly distributed throughout the loaf. Tap it against the countertop, too, to get rid of air bubbles. And if the soap starts to thicken in the bottle, just put your finger over the top (very important!) and give it a good shake.

When squirting the soap, I try to drizzle the same amount each time I sweep through. A good thing to do is to count to three or whatever each time so that roughly the same amount of soap is being used with each squirt.

Even though I try to evenly split the soap, it seems that I somehow always end up with more of some colors than others. And it also seems that no matter how hard I try to drizzle the same amount each time, I end up running out of one or two colors before I'm done with the batch. This time, I ran out of yellow and orange before I was completely finished. Fortunately, I was almost done, and I was able to finish off with the red and white without compromising the effect too much. Once I was done drizzling all of the soap, I took a toothpick and did a sort of herringbone swirl on the tops, dragging the toothpick just below the surface in alternating directions.

Here is a video showing how I made this batch:


I love this effect, and I really like how this batch turned out. Because the scent and colors are so lively, I decided to call this soap "Fireburst." I'm not sure if the soap gelled, as it was still very soft a week later when I cut it even with the sodium lactate that I added to the lye solution at 1.5%. I may experiment with adding some cocoa butter or something like that to the recipe to make a harder batch.

Squirting the soap vertically along the short sides of the mold creates wavy lines in the cut bars, while squirting the soap along the long sides horizontally creates more of a teardrop effect. Here is how the two compare:

Right: Impressionist Swirl (horizontally); Left: Twist on Impressionist Swirl (vertically)

Oh, and here's another tip - after I was done with the squirt bottles, I got as much soap out of them as I could and then added a couple drops of dishwashing detergent to the bottles along with some warm water. I gave each bottle a few shakes, emptied and rinsed it, and repeated until clean.

I've already tried an end piece from this batch, and it is very nice soap with lots of bubbly lather. I can't wait until it fully cures!

Have you used squirt bottles in soapmaking? What are some of your favorite ways to use them?

Gumball Soap

So, a few months ago I picked up a bunch of one-ounce sampler fragrance oils from Nature's Garden. One of the scents I bought was their Bubble Luscious FO. Out of the bottle, it smells to me just like pink bubble gum, and the scent stays true in soap, too.

Sometimes you can smell a scent and know right away how you want to soap it. Other times, you have to think on the design for a bit. And sometimes you know what you want your soap to look like and you have to find a scent to go along with your plan.

With this fragrance, I saw colorful gumballs embedded in a white soap. A few years ago, I picked up this ice cube mold at a kitchen store and had yet to use it. This mold makes cylinders of ice for water bottles, but it's great for soap, too! I figured I would use it to make cylinders of melt-and-pour soap and embed them in my cold process soap. When cut, the soap tubes will look round, like gumballs!

Soap balls would have also worked great for this project, but I didn't have the energy to make a batch of CP soap and roll it into soap balls. I thought about using my silicone ball molds (Bramble Berry carries them in small, medium, and large sizes), but since I had only two of them I decided to use the ice cube mold instead.

Melt-and-pour embeds

I confess that I am lazy when it comes to making CP embeds. Oftentimes I don't feel like making a batch just for embeds, requiring two days of soaping to complete one project. And other times I just fail to plan ahead. I tell myself that one day I should just make an extra pound of soap when I'm already soaping, separate it out, color and scent it, and make some embeds for a future project and also gee whiz was that so hard? Trouble is that I never remember to do that, or I don't have enough time, or I don't know what kind of embeds I want for what kind of project, blah, blah, blah. So CP embeds just never seem to happen for me. At least, not so far.

But melt-and-pour soap offers flexibility, and embeds can be made quickly and easily with it. So, M&P was my go-to for embeds once I planned this gumball soap out in my head.

For my embeds, I chose clear M&P base and Fizzy Lemonade, Tangerine Wow, and Electric Bubble Gum neon colorants from Bramble Berry. (Tip: These pigments are best mixed with glycerin to work out the clumps before adding them to the soap. Don't disperse them in rubbing alcohol - it doesn't work.)

I chopped up the M&P, covered my container with plastic wrap to prevent the moisture from evaporating, and nuked it in the microwave for 30-second bursts until melted. Then I added my colorant and poured the soap into the ice cube mold. Because I had only one ounce of the fragrance oil, I didn't scent my M&P embeds. But I totally would have if I had had more FO. (Another tip: There is one cylinder in the center of the mold that does not have an open bottom. It's got this crisscross design instead, making it impossible to get the soap out. Avoid that particular cylinder. I had to soak my mold in water for, like, an entire day before the soap disintegrated enough for me to remove it. I don't know why it's like that or what it contributes to the mold - stability, maybe? - but there must be a reason for it. Just wanted to give you a heads-up.)

Ideally, I would have made my embeds the day before and allowed the soap to cool overnight. Of course, I didn't do that, so I was pressed for time. After pouring the M&P, I put the mold in the freezer for about 30 minutes or so to make the soap harden faster.

After I put the M&P in the freezer, I made my CP soap. I opted for a one-pound batch using a palm-free recipe from The Nova Studio Blog. I used the first recipe listed, which uses 40% vegetable shortening, 30% olive oil, 28% coconut oil, and 2% castor oil. If you give this recipe a go, make sure you read the vegetable shortening label carefully! Some shortening contains palm oil, which would totally defeat the purpose if you're trying to go palm-free. Look for a soybean/cottonseed blend. (SoapCalc has "Crisco, old" on their list of oils, and I used that to run the recipe using soybean/cottonseed shortening through their lye calculator.)

I added the FO to the cooled base oils, along with some titanium dioxide dispersed in glycerin to whiten the soap.

By the time my CP soap was ready, the M&P was due to come out of the freezer. Once the soap was hard, I partially pushed it out with my thumb and gripped it with a paper towel to pull it the rest of the way out. I also used said paper towel to dab away the condensation on the surface of the soap.

When the CP and M&P soaps were both ready to go, I poured enough CP soap into my loaf mold to create a base to nestle a few cylinders of M&P end-to-end. I covered the embeds with more CP, and then laid some more embeds. I did three layers of embeds total, and topped the loaf off with the end pieces I had trimmed from the M&P cylinders.

Here is a video of the process:


I placed the soap in the freezer overnight to avoid gel phase because I feared that the M&P soap might melt if it gelled. I also soaped cool - around 95 degrees F.

The fragrance oil and the recipe behaved beautifully. The trace was nice and slow, and the scent is strong. And I'm happy to report that this FO does not discolor. Sweet scents often contain vanilla, which can cause the soap to discolor brown. But this FO has a 0% vanillin content, and it stayed nice and white!

And I love Bramble Berry's neon colorants! The colors are so bold and bright, and they really pop against the white.

The soap held up fairly well in the shower. I worried that skipping gel phase might cause the embeds to not adhere as well. Once the soap got worn down and became thinner and more pliable, a couple of embeds came loose near the end of the bar's life. No biggie for me, though.

Have you combined melt-and-pour with cold process soap before? How did you like it?

Geranium Patchouli Soap

Patchouli. Some people love it, some people hate it. I am a big fan. One of these days, I need to make a straight patchouli soap. A while back, though, someone suggested that I try a geranium/patchouli essential oil blend, and I decided to give that a try since I had both on my fragrance shelf.

Since patchouli is so strong - and not everyone loves it - I decided to go with a blend that was 30% patchouli and 70% geranium. The geranium is not pure grade because, gawd, have you seen how much that stuff costs?! The scent is mostly rose with a nice earthy base. Kinda like a rose garden after a ground-soaking rain.

Not that I've ever been in a rose garden after a ground-soaking rain. But it's how I imagine a rose garden would smell after a ground-soaking rain.

I recently got some Red Moroccan Clay and figured it would make a deep rosy pink color. I used about one Tablespoon of clay per pound of oils, and once I mixed it with some glycerin to work out the clumps, I was afraid that it was going to turn out rather brown. As you can see in the finished soap, the color ended up being a dusty rose, so, yay!

I hear so many wonderful things about clays, and I want to experiment with them some more in soap. I'm thinking that this should make a lovely facial soap because of the clay.

Another concern was the tint of the essential oil blend. In the middle photo of the collage to the right, you'll see a bowl of orangish liquid toward the rear. That's the EO blend, and I worried that the patchouli would impart an orange tinge to the soap. All was well, though. The portion I colored white stayed white, and the pink stayed true, too.

For the oils, I tried a palm-free recipe from Amanda at Lovin' Soap. (I went with the first recipe listed: olive oil, coconut oil, castor oil, cocoa butter, and rice bran oil.) This is my first time using rice bran oil. I see a lot of palm-free recipes calling for it, and it's supposed to have great moisturizing qualities. I tested an end piece from this batch, and although it has been curing for only about two weeks, it is very nice! (Thanks for sharing your recipe, Amanda!)

To make the soap, I added the essential oil blend to my cooled oils. I soaped at around 105 degrees F, but I probably could have gone a bit cooler. Then I added my lye solution and stickblended to trace. The soap traced quickly - I poured about half of the batch into a separate measuring cup, and by the time I whisked the Red Moroccan clay into one half and the titanium dioxide into the other half, the batter was thick like cake frosting.

I had read that geranium could be tricky to work with, so I planned my batch accordingly. The plan was to do a layered soap, so the trace acceleration actually worked in my favor. It's important to bring the soap to a thick trace when doing layers so that each layer sits on top of the previous one instead of sinking. The thick trace also helped me to achieve pretty textured tops, which is often my Achilles heel! After layering the pink and white soap, I drizzled some reserved pink soap on top and then swirled it and pushed it around with the back of a spoon.

This should be such a lovely soap! It seems wonderful already, but it will be even better after it cures for a few more weeks.

And the scent combo is fantastic. I'll bet that even my mom - who is a patchouli-hater - will love this one!

What are some of your favorite blends with patchouli? Do you like patchouli, or do you straight up hate it? How about geranium? Have you tried them together? Did you like it? Do you want me to stop asking so many questions?

Orange Basil Swirled Hearts Soap

This project included a few firsts for me: a new technique, a new recipe genre, and a new butter.

I decided to try out the Swirled Heart technique. This method has been on my must-do list for a while, and I finally got around to it. (My must-do list is about as long as my arm and it just keeps growing. It is going to take a while to get through it, methinks.) I remember seeing Anne-Marie and Kristy demonstrate the Swirled Heart technique quite a while back, but you know how it goes. You see a new thing and think, "Oh, cool, I'm totally gonna get right on that!" Maybe you even print out the tutorial and file it away in your soaping folder. And then you get distracted with other projects and maybe forget about it for a while. And then one day you're going through your bookmarks or your folder and think, "Whatever happened to ...?" And then you commit to the project and wonder why you didn't do it sooner. The Swirled Heart technique is a fun method, and I definitely plan to utilize it again. (It would be especially great for Valentine's Day!)

Something else that was new for me was not using palm oil. With the exception of my Castile soap and salt bars, my recipes have usually included it. I'm nearly out of palm oil now, so I decided to seek out some palm-free recipes to see if I could do without it. I went poking around the interwebs and found a few that I liked the looks of. The Nova Studio shared three palm-free recipes on their blog. One of the recipes calls for mango butter, which appealed to me because I recently bought some mango butter and was looking for a reason to use it. I've never used mango butter before, but I've heard so many wonderful things about it. Mango butter reportedly has natural emollient and moisturizing properties. Sounds like it should make a pretty luxurious soap!

 Here is the recipe I used, from the Nova Studio's blog post:

~ Olive Oil - 41% ~

~ Coconut Oil - 25% ~

~ Mango Butter - 25% ~

~ Avocado Oil - 6% ~

~ Shea Butter - 3% ~

I was a little bit worried that such a high percentage of mango butter might accelerate trace, but this recipe had a nice, slow trace for me. (A slow trace is important for this type of project, so choose a well-behaved recipe and fragrance oil.) I soaped at around 104 degrees F and had plenty of time to work with the batter. The soap is about a week and a half old now. I tested a bar and the lather is wonderfully soft and fluffy. The soap performs well already, but after about five more weeks of curing time it should be even more amazing!

Orange Basil Swirled Hearts soap

For the fragrance, I chose a 10x Orange and Sweet Basil essential oil blend. (The 10x Orange is nice because it is more concentrated than regular orange EO and therefore sticks better in CP soap.) Choosing a scent is sometimes difficult when I'm gazing into a drawer full of a bajillion fragrance and essential oils. I was trying to decide on both a fragrance and color scheme. I remembered that I had some orange mica from Bramble Berry. I really love the carrot-orange color of this mica, but it appears that Bramble Berry no longer carries it, which gives me a sad. Once I settled on the orange mica, I started thinking about the scent. Orange essential oil is an obvious choice. It turns the soap a light orange, though, and I wanted to do a white layer for my hearts. So, what would go well with orange and not discolor? Basil essential oil. Which means green. Funny how sometimes the fragrance dictates the colors, and other times the colors dictate the fragrance.

Dotting the surface

The bottom layer is an orange and green in-the-pot swirl. I thought about just doing straight-up orange for the bottom layer, but decided that a swirl would be more interesting. After the swirly layer had set up a bit, I drizzled some white soap on top to check it. Then I spooned the white layer on to prevent break-through into the previous layer. The Swirled Heart technique requires plastic squeeze bottles, which I found at my local craft store in the baking/candymaking aisle. I snipped the tips of the squeeze bottles so the soap would come out easier and give me good dime-sized dollops. To make the swirled hearts, I filled one squeeze bottle with about 2-3 ounces of orange soap, and filled another bottle with green soap. I dotted the surface with alternating rows of green and orange, and then dragged a toothpick through the dots to make hearts. 

(Tip: To clean out the bottles, I filled them with warm water right after I was done soaping, gave each one a good shake, and then squeezed the soapy water out. I had to fill and shake the bottles a few times to get all of the soap and residue out.)

The orange soap is scented with the Orange 10x essential oil, and the white is scented with the basil essential oil. For simplicity's sake, I left the small amount of green soap unscented.

Here's a video of the process:

I'm super happy with how this soap turned out! Orange and basil is a fantastic scent combo, and the hearts are so cute. The recipe and the essential oils behaved exceptionally well. 

I'll be trying some more palm-free recipes in the future, but I think that this one is definitely a keeper!

What do you think of the Swirled Heart technique? Have you tried it yourself?