Fremdseifen

Two soaps my friend E. made last year. The multicoloured one above was made with liquid soap colours. It was a very nice soap, though I don't remember what ingredients she used. The soap is already gone, even though I made two bars out of the large chunk she gave me.


This yellowish-beige soap is an olive oil soap which I unfortunately kept on a metal rack for some time, which the soap obviously did not like too much.

Sporty Spice

Booty

Just a quick picture of the booty I brought from a recent raid to a renaissance fair. The lady I bought this lovely little phial from (it's filled with patchouli essential oil, which has seeped through the cork and is all over my hands and fingers now) also sold soaps. I always have to keep myself from buying soap at fairs and markets because I'm not using up all my own supplies as it is, so I really shouldn't. What about you other soapmakers?

Newsflash: Recovering soapholic relapses!

Hi there! I was very busy those last couple of months and I was shocked to find that the last soap I made is dated from September 2009 (the posts are always lagging behind the real soapmaking, so you haven't even seen the soap from last September). From time to time, I helped out at other soapmakers', but I had no leisure to create my own. But now that I have loads of spare time on my hands, I'm back to my old soapmaking tricks. You won't be able to see the fruits of my most recent endeavours until I've caught up on posting all the other soaps though.

So in order to quickly catch up, here's a soap from last summer which I made with my friend E.



Apart from the usual basic oils, we put cocoa butter and apricot kernel oil in and scented the base with a sea buckthorn perfume oil which made the fluid base harden very fast. We had dyed it a lovely orangey yellow, poured it into E's new moulds and optimistically named it "Little Miss Sunshine". Well, the soap completely absorbed the yellow oxide and turned a lame beige.

Initially, we were a little disappointed, BUT! this soap turned out so well! Even though there are no dairy products in it, it still makes the softest, creamiest lather you could wish for. Must be the apricot kernel oil?! It's such a nicens little soapie, and though I usually willingly give away my best soaps so that others may be converted to soapism, I cannot part with the last bars of this soap. All mine! MWA! MWAHAHA! *Making off with bars firmly clutched to chest, laughing dementedly*

Soap packaging

One of the pleasures of soapmaking is not only looking at the finished soaps, but also gift-wrapping them. Whenever I'm out of ideas, I like to look at the Flickr soap packaging foto pool or simply browse photos tagged with "soap packaging".

Some professional soapmakers like MacSoapy and El Sapone offer some of their label designs for noncommercial use on their blogs (I also love to look at El Sapones product labels, mostly in art nouveau style). I have downloaded loads of them and cannot make enough soap for all the labels I'd like to try... There was another website which offered labels for noncommercial use (vivaidee or something), but I can't find it anymore :(.

Here's a label I made with one of El Sapone's designs:

I'd love to make my own designs, but I'm no photoshop wizard plus I don't even have photoshop. Tried to make labels with Gimp, which is a free graphics software. I found a "pizza slice" add-on which allows you to automatically mirror pictures to make tiles. The results were okayish, but I haven't found a more powerful mirroring add-on which allows me to determine which angle should be mirrored etc. (If somebody knows one, please tell me!) Here is one of my tiles and its pattern:

Peppermintsoaps again

I've had very little time to make soaps these past months. If I don't start making new soaps soon, this blog will feature more soap made by others than my own creations, and I'll be paying royalties soon. I had better invest the money into soap ingredients.

These are some of the gems Peppermintpatty gave me the last time I went over to her place for tea and a soapchat. Link to her fotostream

This one was made with leftover bits from other soaps and a black soap base which smells wonderful (have to ask Peppermintpatty which perfume oil she used). Love the petal bits on top. Haven't had the heart to use this one yet.


Nüsslein had this light, lovely, warm smell of nuts. Didn't make lots of lather, but was very good to my skin. I'm always creeped out when cosmetics are called "nourishing", but I felt this soap really was nourishing my skin.

This one is calld All Sorts. It was made with lard and is scented with a clean, fresh perfume oil. Haven't tried it yet, but I am told that lard makes good lather...


As you can see from the little bags above, Peppermintpatty gave me more soaps than these three. I'll show the others in one of my next posts.

Cuppa Coffee

Kaffey! is my first coffee soap, scented with Neroli essential oil. I had heard that coffee soaps take away the smells you get on your fingers from cutting onions etc. - my soap unfortunately doesn't. But the ground coffee I threw in makes for a mildly exfoliating kitchen soap even though it doesn't kill smells. Soap stamp made with polymer clay.

Kaffey! on the curing shelf: