Spring Cleaning - Blog Organizing and Changes

Ooooh, my 100th post! You all have been so much fun, thanks for allowing me to drone on and on about soapmaking...nobody understands this obsession more than you, and it's wonderful to have people to share the passion with!

You may have noticed that I’ve changed a few things around here. As this blog has grown, I've realized that I needed to find a way to make these older posts more accessible to me (and you!) Hopefully you will find that these changes will make it easier to navigate the blog.

I’ve created pages and categorized all of the previous posts by adding tabs under my banner. To make it easier to locate and browse all my past posts, I’ve created image galleries within those pages. You may have noticed that I also added a Pinterest mouseover button to my blog pictures to make pinning even easier. I’ve added some social media and contact buttons along the left sidebar, and I even learned how to center them! (If you click on the highlighted words, it will take you to all the tutorials that I used to learn how to do this) 

There’s a lot more to this blogging thing than just making soap! :D

Interesting Fact: Blogger uses Picasa to store your blog pictures; so if you sign into Picasa Web Albums with the same log-in you use for Blogger, you will see a gallery of all of your blog pictures (these are the images that you would use to make your image gallery)!

If you have a chance to try out the tabs, please let me know what you think...does it make things easier?

Link Of The Day (to the first blog post I ever made!):

Cupcake Soaps

This blog post isn’t so much about the soap....check this out:

Isn’t it just adorable?! It's a printable retro oven, but it gets better….look what this one does:

Isn’t that the cutest cupcake packaging you have ever seen?!

I first spied these fun printable cupcake boxes on Pinterest, and of course my mind immediately went to soap and how cute these be with cupcake soaps in them for teacher gifts! With the end of the school year approaching, I made just a small 1-pound batch of cupcake soaps using Amanda’s Palm FreeCupcake Recipe for my daughter to give to her teachers as thank-you gifts:

The butterflies are royal icing decorations :)

Cupcakes in the box:

That little oven mitt is a gift tag...how cute is that?!

The illustrator who designed these boxes suggested that you could also cut out the oven window and put a piece of cellophane behind the window, so that you could see through into the oven (and goodies) inside, I think that would be really cute too!

I purchased and downloaded this set from the artist on Etsy; the printables come with 5 different colors of ovens, cupcake tray, editable cupcake flags, and little matching oven mitt gift tags…swoon!

Super Simple Overnight Hair Treatment

Long time, no soap :(

I hope you are all keeping well! As soon as the nice weather hit here, I felt like I should be spring cleaning and organizing, so that has got the better part of me lately. Things are getting back into order now, and I’m looking forward to turning my attention back to soap again soon.

In the meantime, I thought I would make something I’ve been meaning to make for a while, which is a leave-in overnight hair treatment:

I was first interested in trying this conditioner when I read about it on Marika’s blog; it looked so quick and simple, and the only special ingredient I needed to order was the BTMS. BTMS is an excellent conditioning agent that is naturally derived from Colza oil; it’s also self-emulsifying, so it is all that’s needed to bind the oil and tea together into a thick conditioner; 3 simple ingredients...how easy is that?! 

My hair is color treated, which of course = damage :(  I really have to condition it heavily to keep it in good shape; my hair is also fine and tends to tangle super easy. So, I thought I would like to use Marika’s conditioner as a leave-in treatment on the ends of my hair overnight, here is a current picture of the back of my hair:

It’s not in bad shape, but I think using a bit of conditioner in the ends at night will definitely help keep it healthy.  

This is the recipe I used from Marika’s blog:

1.5 tbsp oil

7-8 tbsp tea

1 tbsp BTMS 

(preservative of choice)

Method: Melt the BTMS in the microwave, pour in the tea and oil; stir, stir, stir. I placed the mixture in the freezer to cool and firm up for about 10 minutes, stirring once, then added my preservative to the conditioner once it had cooled completely.  

I chose sweet almond oil because it is nice and light, but Marika suggested that avocado or jojoba oil would be nice too. I used chamomile tea for shine at Marika’s suggestion, and also because it is good for blonde hair, but you could use whatever tea would suit your color and condition of hair. 

Hope you all have a great week, and thanks for reading!

Great Cakes Soapworks Challenges #4

If I was a Little Miss character, I would definitely be Little Miss Procrastination. I had 2 weeks to do this challenge, but guess who was up late last night making her challenge soap? Nothing like leaving things until the last minute!

I used my basic soap recipe for this one, which normally sets up really quickly. I knew I would have to work fast, but I was prepared for that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how sllllooooow my recipe would move this time. I did make a couple of tiny adjustments, hoping it would give me more play time with my soap, but I can’t imagine these little things would make that much of a difference. I used a slightly lower water discount (about 20g more water in my 2lb recipe) and had my lye slightly warmer than usual, I also barely brought my soap to emulsion before splitting the batch. I didn't think those little adjustments would make such a huge difference, but I had to wait about 1 hour before I could work with the soap, and even then, the ‘spot’ colors were still too liquid, but my base soap was thickening up fast and I just went for it:

Not my best effort, but still a neat effect. And, I'm happy to have discovered that I can slow down my base recipe for the more complicated techniques.

Top shot:

I’m really looking forward to heading over and seeing how everyone else's soaps turned out, you can check out the rest of them here. Many thanks to Amy from Great Cakes Soapworks for hosting these fun challenges and encouraging us to step outside our comfort zones and grow as artists.

Have a great weekend everyone! 

Cocoa Butter Soap with Lavender & Lemon Infused Oil

For Mother’s Day this year, I wanted to formulate a soap that contained a generous amount of cocoa butter. I also thought it would be nice to try infusing the oils with lavender buds and lemon zest. Although the resulting infused oil was very fragrant, I did I ended up adding a small amount of fragrance just to make sure it did retain a lavender/herb/citrus scent after cure:

I also added rich cream at trace. It’s not completely done curing yet, but I did sneak a small piece to try and I am loving it. This 25% cocoa butter recipe produces a very hard bar with a rich, creamy, fluffy lather.

Here is the recipe:

Note: I used my divider mold for this soap, because I wasn’t sure if the high % of cocoa butter would make the soap crumbly or hard to cut.

Enjoy!

Great Cakes Soapworks Challenge #3

This week has gone by in a flash! Or is it like a flash? I'm never sure. In any case, this week is always such a busy week in our household, we celebrate 3 birthdays this week and I always say every year I’m going to be more prepared and organized for everyone’s birthday for next year. I wish I could say this year was different, but nope, I still ended up cramming everything into the last few days, but I got it done! Hubby had a Nacho Libre cake (loves that movie!), our oldest son had a birthday cake with his driver’s license on it (new driver alert!) and our other son declared his Monster Energy cake as ‘sick’…I think that's a good thing in teen speak.

Now, back to the business of Amy’s soap challenges!

I can't believe we have completed 3 weeks already! This week was the mica swirl, and I was really looking forward to trying this one. I have seen Emily (Shieh Design Studio) and Celine (Soaperstar) doing these tops, and I am crazy about this look and have wanted to try this technique for a while.  

So again for this technique, I chose a slower-tracing recipe. I really wanted to use a shimmery mica, and the only mica I have that I know stays shimmery in CP soap is my copper mica from Brambleberry. Here is the soap in the mold:

Love that shimmer!

I thought it would be a neat idea to try to drizzle the mica/oil mixture in between layers as I poured the soap to see what would happen, it made a really cool effect on the outside of the soap:

And when cut, you can see tiny little veins of mica running through the soap too:

I’m really looking forward to giving the leopard spots a try again next week, wish me luck!

Oh, and here is a bonus pick of my son’s Monster 'cake', which was actually rice krispie treats! (sorry, bad cell phone pic):

I can’t share a photo of my son’s driver’s license cake (it was an icing sheet photo of his real driver’s license), but I thought I would share with you a sushi cake that I made for him a couple of years ago:

 Totally wasn't soap related, but I thought you might enjoy those pics too :) 

Until next week...hope you all have a great weekend! 

Great Cakes Soapworks Challenge #2

I’m really enjoying Amy's GreatCakes Soapworks challenges so far. One of the unexpected bonuses is that I have been able to discover new blogs, YouTube channels and Facebook pages of talented soapers that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. You can check out all the other entries from last week’s Tiger Stripe Challenge here; everyone did such an amazing job and it’s really inspiring to see everyone’s interpretations.

This week's challenge was the Elemental Swirl; which is essentially 1 layer of warm colored in-the-pot swirls and 1 layer of cool colored in-the-pot swirls, divided by a mica vein. I really liked this particular challenge. It wasn’t something I had been planning on trying but I’m really glad I did, because it made me think about the color wheel and what constitutes ‘warm’ and ‘cool’ colors. I never pay much attention to how my colors fall on the color wheel, I always just mix what is pleasing to my eye, but it was valuable to research and learn some of the theory behind colors and how they fall on the color wheel and compliment each other.

For this challenge, I replaced my olive oil with sunflower oil, hoping it would slow down trace enough to let me mix and swirl all the colors. As you can see though, my recipe was probably a bit too thin, and so my colors ended up being muddled. I also hadn’t done a mica line before, so that was fun to try.  Although the swirls don’t stand out as much as I hoped, I’m happy with the distinction between the warm colors on top and the cool colors on the bottom. This one is fragranced with a dupe of Lush’s Karma: