Belle of Belfast

This soap was named Belle of Belfast because - like the belle in the folk song Tell Me Ma - she's as nice as apple pie:

I reckoned that if I put the apple perfume oil into the yellow part of the soap base and the vanilla perfume oil into the green part, it would make one perfect yellow-and-green apple-pie-like soap. However, vanilla doesn't only turn light colours into brown, it also trumps green dye (at least in the quantities I used). The green parts you can see in the first picture turned rapidly brown after exposure to air. Which would have happened to any green apple. So actually this soap is like a little vanitas.

What a sad, scary thought! Let's quickly skip to the soap again and perhaps listen to the song once more. It was a very nice soap, made mostly of the usual suspects (palm, coconut, canola, olive oil as well as a little bit of cocoa butter and macadamia oil). I only had a small test bottle of apple perfume oil (10ml), so the scent was drowned by the vanilla, which I used liberally. I cut most of the pieces with the wave-cutter and I still love the feeling of wavy soaps when I use them, but then you don't get to stamp those soaps. Well, you can't have your apple pie and eat it...

Soap stamps

At some point last winter, I received one of the Wandering Soap Stamp Parcels from a soapmakers' forum. It was packed with polymer clay stamps in all shapes and sizes, which other soapmakers had cast from their own, self-made stamps. It was really hard to limit myself to only about a hundred stamps and not to cast a copy from each and every one of them.

Unfortunately, I had to redo some of them because I spoiled the first batch. As I was putting the stamps in the oven, I must have subconsciously thought of cake and not of polymer clay: I turned the temperature up to 175°C - eewww, what a NASTY smell! Couldn't get it out of the kitchen for several days. That's what my lovely little stamps looked like after the cake treatment:

Große Ereignisse werfen ihre Schatten voraus

Happy New Year everyone! I know I have probably lost my last two or three readers because I haven't updated regularly, but this year will be better. Come summer, I will have more time on my hands.

What's new in Soapaholic's world?

I'm offically giving up on posting chronologically because I'm still so much behind (Plus, my extensive readership could probably not care less which soap was made when as long as I include nice pictures of the soaps along with the posts). Also, I couldn't wait to show you these little gems I made last weekend with my friend C. (I borrowed her wooden mould. Someday we will both splurge on machine-washeable plastic block moulds and our life will become so much easier).



The recipe was taken from Claudia Kasper's book (note to self: need new tag "book review"), it's called "Reines Gewissen"/Clear Conscience. We wanted to make a thick gold vein/swirl, but it did not turn out as richly golden as I hoped it would, even though I put approx. 40g of gold mica into a bit of the soap base. 40g may sound little, but the mica is nearly weightless, so it's a LOT of powder. Perhaps I'll try a gold vein with just the mica and a little oil next time. I stamped it with the remaining gold mica, using the little Tchibo cookie stamps they always sell around Christmas. At the moment, the soap is sitting on my curing shelf, waiting for the grand day to come... Now I only need to order new ingredients and make at least another block of this soap. Wait and see!

What else is new? I've tried some essential oils.

(+)

* the soap base doesn't heat up too much
* the soap base doesn't thicken too quickly
* the scent pretty much stays the same and doesn't change in the process of saponification

(-)

* Oh no! You have to be creative and mix your own fragrance?!
* Ouch! Essential oils really are expensive!
* Therefore, my range of possible fragrances is rather limited at the moment.