Happy New Year

Here's to a Happy New Year 2010!

Lovely pomegranate soap; Christmas present my boyfriend's cousin brought from her trip to Thailand. At the moment it is displayed on my curing shelf, but I will soon try it. Perhaps I should also use the pomegranate perfume oil I bought a while ago and make my own pomegranate soap...? So many ideas, so little time.

Snowflakes are dancing

Outside, snowflakes are whirling and dancing.



Inside, soapaholic is sitting snugly on her sofa with a nice, warm, lovely, steaming cup of tea, felting soapsballs lest they feel cold without their little felt jackets.

Peppermintsoaps

Here are two lovely soaps Peppermintpatty gave me some time ago (and which are, unfortunately, long gone by now). The first one was made with lavender and goat milk. Love the birdie stamp!

The other one is called Hafersahne. Made with cream, scented with "Oatmeal, Milk and Honey" perfume oil, a couple of lavender seeds in the middle. I loved the smell, but most of all I liked the colours - the soap looked nice and creamy like Fürst Pückler ice-cream. Link to Pattys Fotostream

Seelengebunden / Binds on pickup

This soap is called Seelengebunden ("Binds on pickup", named after a certain kind of item in a certain mmorpg I used to play). It was a collaborative effort of Peppermintpatty, E. (another friend who is now hooked on soapmaking), and me.






Ingredients: water, palm oil, coconut oil, olive oil, rapeseed oil, avocado oil, NaOH, yogurt, perfume oils (Blackberry Sage and Almond, both by Brambleberry) and a special kind of clay which dyed the soap base a pretty shade of light pastel pink. Unfortunately, after we added the yogurt, the soap base turned beige. We dusted the moulds with gold and silver mica so that the soaps didn't look too bland.

Soap Recipes - Omnibus Edition

This wonderful little collection of soap recipes was a joint effort of some members of the Naturseifenforum who contributed their favourite recipes and fotos. It was Montylee who organised and edited the book with a loving eye for detail, and who had it printed. When the first book proved a bestseller, she even published a second volume. In the pictures you can see the omnibus edition.

When I don't have the time to make soaps myself, I love to pick up this little book and to be inspired by all those wonderful creations. Just look at the soaps in the picture below (and note the professional design by Montylee)!

Seifenblüten

The first soaps I felted without breaking a single needle. Yay!

Lemongrass-Wiese

This gorgeous soap was made by Peppermintpatty from the Naturseifenforum. It is called Lemongrass-Wiese (Lemongrass Meadow) and has little beige blossoms strewn on top of it, which you cannot see because my photo sucks. Haven't tried it yet - it smells wonderfully fresh, but it looks too good on my soap shelf to use it.

WahWah

WahWah is my first successful try at marbled/swirled soap. In the picture, you can see that I also tried to make layers with the soap base. However, the vanilla perfume oil later darkened it so much that you can no longer see the layers. I also cut the edges of the soaps later on, but essentially, that's what the soap looks like.

Besides the vanilla perfume oil, I also used woodruff perfume oil which in German is called Waldmeister, so instead of calling it Vanille-Waldmeister, I shortened it to WahWah.

As I knew that the vanilla perfume oil would make the soap a lot darker later on, I took lots and lots of titanium dioxide for the white part on top. If you click to enlarge the photo, you can see that the surface of the soap is not as smooth as it should be, but looks a little porose because of all the TiO2. The swirl looks really nice, though, even if I say so myself.

Fremdseife

Went to a meeting with other soapmakers last winter. We had lots of fun sitting at a long table laden with soaps, creams, perfume oils and other soapmaking paraphernalia.

I had only recently started soapmaking, so I did not have much to show or give away, but the others gave me soaps like the one above, by "A und O Seifen". Jill from the Naturseifenforum also gave me a soap, a little hemispherical soapball dyed with lumigreen and named Dragon's Eye or something of the sort. Used it up pretty quickly because it smelled so good and stupidly forgot to take a picture first.

Other little presents included a lime shower gel with hemp made by Katharina (yummeeeee!), mango butter made by Hoedlgut, and Taralein gave me a nifty little soap bag which she made out of a shower puff and which is really neat and handy! No soapdropping, ever again. Have to try and make some of those myself some time.

Although I couldn't make it to the meeting this year, perhaps next time I will go and give away some of my soap for a change.

Felted Soap

Another one of my felted soaps. Forgot to mention that I had initially tried wet felting and had only gotten... let's say okayish results (and by okayish, I mean lumpysoggydreadful). Then I found a really good tutorial on dry felting on El Sapone's blog. It has lots of helpful pictures in it, so if you would like to try dry felting but don't know how to start, have a look at her tutorial!

Cherry Blossom

Cherry Blossom is made of coconut oil, palm oil, olive oil and rapeseed/canola oil (can anyone tell poor little English-as-a-second-language me what's the difference between rapeseed and canola?!), almond oil and castor oil. I added liquid silk protein and a cherry perfume oil which has a lovely bottom note of almonds. The soap is dyed with Acid Red and titanium dioxide.

The perfume oil made the soap heat up so much that it instantly went all cherry crumble on me. Had to chip away quite a bit of the soap's crumbly surface to make it look nice. The soap itself is really good, though, and its lather gets better with time.

It really seems there are only three options when it comes to soap scents:

• essential oil (in which case you have to pay a fortune)
  
• warm-smelling perfume oils (which invariably make brownish-beige soap)
  
• artificial flowery or fruity scents (which will heat up and/or harden the soap base in no time - "Blitzbeton", as we say).

*Sigh*

Fliederbällchen

My mum, who's working as a freelancer, sometimes takes me to this huge supermarket which is not open to the general public but to commercial customers only. When we went there last Christmas, I found an empty plastic tray on which the XL chocolate Santas had been displayed. The indentations for their oval bases should make wonderful soap moulds, I thought.

It was a rather sturdy plastic tray, but apparently it wasn't sturdy enough: when I poured the (cold processed) lilac soap into the moulds, they were completely warped by the heat, the tray nearly melted. Also, the wonderful lilac colour I had hoped for was completely gone when the soap had cooled down. Somehow the soap base must have swallowed the pigments...

When the soap had cooled down, I had to scrape it out of the warped moulds and turned it into little greyish soap balls. There is no foto of this soap au naturel because it looks really pathetic. However, its bland grey colour gave me the idea to try and felt soaps. You can hide even the worst soapmaking sins under a layer of dyed wool (I might consider felting some of the lapis lazuli soaps I showed you the other day). More fotos of my felted soaps are coming soon!

My offline soap calculator

When I started making soap, my internet connection was somewhat unstable at times. I was afraid that I might be stranded offline without a soap calculator the next time I planned a new soap. So I made my own offline Excel soap calculator with the saponification values gathered from different free online calculators.

In the picture below you can see how the amount of sodium hydroxide is calculated for a given percentage of superfatting (oh well, I guess it's too small, you'll have to click on the picture to enlarge it).






The offline soap calculator has the added advantage of acting as a file for my recipes:

Riecht wie Lapislazuli

"Riecht wie Lapislazuli" ("Smells like lapis lazuli" - don't ask, it's an insider) is the first in a long line of colouring experiments gone wrong. I had bought a huge bottle of Nag Champa fragrance oil because the scent of these incense sticks brings back lots of memories from high school. The plan was to make a dark blue and white soap with a silver vein to make it look like lapis lazuli (I had seen pictures by some very lucky soapaholic who had managed to make a soap wich looked exactly like lumps of lapis lazuli). What can I say? Instead of blue-and-white, the soap turned out dark green and ochre. To make things worse, the silver vein - which was supposed to be the icing on the lapis lazuli cake - had somehow vanished.

However, true beauty lies within. The soap is made of olive oil, palm oil, rapeseed oil, coconut oil, almond oil, shea butter and castor oil. When you look at the picture, please try not to laught and keep in mind that this soap is really, really nice to use - it makes wonderful lather AND smells like lapis lazuli, okay?!

Grashüpfer

My fourth soap is called Grashüpfer (grasshopper). It consists of nearly two thirds of olive oil, but I also used coconut oil, castor oil, avocado oil, walnut oil and I tried some drops of silk protein for the first time. The green part is dyed with green pigment, the light green part is the original soap base, lightened up with titanium dioxide. I wanted the soap to smell green, too, so I had chosen Brambleberry fragrance oils "Lettuce" and "White Tea & Ginger" as well as some Lemongrass essential oil.

I had poured the superfatting oil into a small plastic cup. In went the fragrance oils and the essential oil as well. What I didn't know at that point was that the plastic cups we had were a leftover from some picnic and were rather old and brittle. The cup quietly started to leak scented oil onto the shelf where I had put it while getting all the other stuff ready. When I noticed, I couldn't even replace the leaked avocado oil because I had used it all, so I had to substitute it with a generous helping of walnut oil (that's why I can't tell the exact percentage of superfatting oils in this soap, but it is a very mild soap). The shelf smelled of grass for a looong time, and quite intensely, too.

At first, I was a little unhappy with this soap. I didn't like the way the colours had turned out because I had hoped for a more pronounced contrast. I had expected a green-and-white soap instead of the two shades of green I got. I had intended a more pronounced swirl as well. But, as sometimes happens, I liked this soap better every time I looked at it and when I first tried it, it made a really wonderful lather with small creamy bubbles and it is one of my favourite soaps now :). I am still not too keen on the scent because I generally prefer floral and fruity scents and the grassy smell still reminds me of all the scrubbing necessary to clean the shelf. But sometimes a clean, pure scent like Grashüpfer's is exactly what's needed.

My block soap mould

I had found an online tutorial on how to build a block soap mould (it's in German, courtesy of a German soapaholic called Hanna), so I emailed it to my father and asked: Can you help me make one of these? He said we coulud build the mould together next Saturday.

However, when I went over to my parents' house on Saturday, there was a finished block mould waiting for me and my father said: "Well, I thought I'd trim the boards so we wouldn't have to do this when you come over. And then I thought I might also drill the holes in. I had already bought the screws and bolts, so I though I might as well assemble the mould...".

Awww, thanks dad! :)

Sweetie Pie

My third soap was supposed to smell like and have the colour of strawberry milkshake. I used basic oils as well as some cocoa butter and walnut oil. I had planned to dye part of the soap base white and add the strawberry fragrance oil to this part. The other half I dyed red and added vanilla fragrance oil (This combination of colour/fragrance might seem a bit odd, but then I had heard that most vanilla fragrances make beige or even brown soap, so I thought red might be the better choice for the vanilla-smelling part).

I had lots of trouble with this soap: first, the strawberry fragrance made the soap warm up so much that it started to clot - it looked like semolina pudding. It probably is a fragrance better suited for hot processed soap. I had already poured the red part into the block mould, but I didn't want to put the clotted mess on top of it, so I put the white part back into the pot, let it gel in the oven and then added it to the red soap in the mould. When I tested the soap later on, I noticed that I had taken a little too much of the Acid Red pigment which now makes nice pink lather and "bleeds" little pink rivulets when you put it back onto the sink. However, it looks nice when it's dry, especially after I stamped it with gold mica.

Fleur des Temples

Finally, the perfume oils, moulds and everything had arrived and I made my first scented soap: Fleur des Temples. Again, it is a cold processed soap with basic oils. To superfat the soap, I chose almond oil (I know that the process of saponification goes on even when the soap is in the mould, but I still superstitiously hope that superfatting oil added after the soap base has reached trace will somehow survive).

The fragrance oil I chose is called Frangipani, or: Plumeria, but I liked the French name Fleur des Temples (Temple flower) better. The fragrance made the soap heat up quite a bit, but it didn't gel all the way through. The titanium dioxide became a little flaky, as you can see in the second picture. The soap looked very nice though, and it smelled fantastic and made a good lather. I gave most of the them away to family and friends, but I used some and I have of course kept one.

Looking through my folder of soap fotos, I have noticed that I didn't take any pictures of this soap once they were out of the moulds, neither is there a foto of the wrapped and labelled soaps (I used to create elaborate labels for my first couple of soaps, haven't done this in a while. Perhaps I should take that up again).

Edit: This is the label. Again, the artwork is courtesy of Julia Galster. Love the floral pattern.

Anfängerglück

This is my first soap. I called it Anfängerglück (beginner's luck) because I was so thrilled that all the greasy mess had actually turned into soap without any lye being spilled.

Buying sodium hydroxide was really hard. The first chemist looked at me as if I had asked for bomb-making instructions to go with the sodium hydroxide. Aren't there people who clean their drains or strip paint off garden furniture with this stuff? Well, I finally found a chemist who sold me some, but I have since preferred to buy the stuff online, it's much less of a hassle.


I had bought basic ingredients like coconut oil, olive oil, palm oil and rapeseed oil at the supermarket because I wanted to try the beginner's recipe recommended at Naturseife.com. Also, I had ordered lots of (perfume) oils, pigments and moulds online, but I couldn't wait for it all to arrive, so I used a Pringles box and an ice-cream tub as moulds and used food colouring instead of pigments. When the ordered soap making ingredients finally arrived, the soap was already removed from the moulds so I could try the new fleur-de-lis stamp right away, as you can see in the photo above. Unfortunately, I forgot to use distilled water and I am not sure whether our local tap water is 100% free of any sapophagic germs. Hopefully, Anfängerglück will not spoil too soon. I'll keep at least one bar and see how long it will keep fresh.

Above you can see my label for Anfängerglück.
The artwork is courtesy of Julia Galster, who
kindly put some of her designs online for non-commercial use.

First things first.

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon a wikibook about the venerable art of soap-making and I was instantly fascinated by the idea of making soap from scratch (don't know whether Lush even existed at that point, but Body Shop sure did - for those who can afford it). However, the wikibook was a very sober affair, and all this talk of dangerous chemicals effectively put me off soapmaking for a while. It was only when, coincidentally again, I stumbled upon another website about soapmaking - a website with lots of pictures this time - that I felt brushing up my knowledge of chemistry would be worth the trouble.

So I read a lot, looked at countless pictures to whet my appetite and started looking for a big pot and safety goggles. Took me quite some time to get all the equipment necessary for my first foray into rocket sc..., er, soapmaking. But finally I had everything I needed...