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!
"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?!
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.
