Dudu Osun

My colleague C. gave me this Dudu Osun soap a while ago. It "bleeds" dark brown suds. I always think that I must have had really dirty hands when I'm using Dudu Osun. It has a lovely fresh scent though, I wish I could identify the individual fragrances and mix that scent. Anybody any ideas?

Blog candy bei El Sapone

I'm not a big blog candy enthusiast, but I love Sannyas' floral-inspired earrings: Click. Have to find out how much they weigh though (I'm afraid of buddhalike earlobes, though I dearly love chandelier earrings).

Foto via El Sapones Blog

Good things come to those who wait...

...and I'll have to wait a little longer to cut and stamp this scrumptious new batch of the "Große Ereignisse" soap (it's five days old and still very soft). Doesn't it look absolutely gorgeous?! The gold vein is much stronger in this batch. I hope that there is a little swirl inside, in the upper part of the soap.

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.

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*