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*