Testing colorants

There was a thread on the Teach Soap forums last week from a soaper wanting to know how the heck so many other soapers were able to achieve such bright colors in their cold process soaps.

So, do you guys prefer liquid colorants, or pigments? So far, I've only used pigment, but I can never seem to get the color that I want (at least, not without using A LOT of pigment). I see so many bright and bold soaps, and I'm never sure what they use, but mine never come out that bright. I'm trying to keep my soaps as natural as possible, and I just hate the idea of using the lab colors from BB.

I volunteered a photo of a soap I'd made using a few different pigment colors from TKB Trading , a website that offers a ton of pigments, micas, and other soap and cosmetic supplies. (Careful, that link may cause hours of color browsing and/or money spending!) I'd just made another order when this forum thread was posted, and had already planned to test the new colorants out before using them in a huge batch, so I decided to take some photos too to share both here and in the aforementioned forum thread. 

Some of my new colorants from TKB Trading

Measuring out the colorants, adding oil or water and mixing.

I tested 12 different pigments, micas, and natural colorants (not pictured), as well as a fragrance oil I want to use later on to see what the discoloration would be like. I used a new palm kernel oil recipe to test with, and I did get a pretty fast and slightly thick trace with it, so I didn't worry too much about making the soap pretty in each cavity of the mold. It was colors I wanted to see! I was so panicky about how quickly my batter was moving, that I didn't think to write down my usage rates for each colorant, which turned more into pouring from the cup than anything exact anyway, if you must know the truth!

Some made me squeal with delight, others just made me sigh sadly. I think the gold mica (top, row three) was the most disappointing to me, as it was just completely lost. Having been a melt and pour soaper before I was a CP soaper, it's always sad to lose that beautiful shimmer from micas when added. The blue-violet from TKB also mixed to a dull blue-gray, which I knew was a possibility with purples, but.... did you see how bright it was in the baggie?? (It also looked much bluer to me on arrival than it did on their website....) I am still in search of a nice strong purple, without using bleeding LabColors, and I do have a couple of pigment blends in mind, so I'll let you know when I find it. ;) 

Another observation, the Chromium Green Oxide from TKB is actually a much lighter green than the Chromium Green Oxide from Bramble Berry when used in equal parts in the soap. I have used both. The red from TKB turned out very orange also.

I was most pleased with the Neon Blue pigment from TKB, followed by the Flourescent Strong Pink, and then the Coral Reef Mica because it is such a nice teal color, even if it didn't turn out as beautiful as it was just lying in the baggie. 

So here they are, with a little lime wedge to show uncolored from the same batch. (I've got some pretty dark olive oil right now....) I haven't tested the lather for color on any of these yet as I have been using them to practice making soap curls.

Do you have any tips for making micas pop better in cold process? Any favorite pigments or micas, or even suppliers? Tell me tell me! :)

Thanks for reading!

Bye bye shoe box!

Just a quick post to let everyone know I am officially more organized! Not only have I been cleaning out my closet and cleaning up my bookshelf in the kitchen, I've also made myself promise...myself to keep better notes on my soap batches, and to get my current notes and recipes organized. Hmph!

Can you believe I had all this (and more!) in a shoe box on my kitchen table? 

Photobomb by Junocat. And wow I need to vacuum....

My favorite basic recipe has seen a lot of love.... and colorants.

Eww.

Me and my honey made a trip to Office Depot. Now I not only have a pretty
pink binder (squee!), but also plastic sleeves to protect my recipes, and
highly precisely positioned tabs. I even threw in some new Palm Kernel
Oil recipes I've been wanting to try, close to the front so I won't forget
about them! 

Now it rests in it's own proper place.... a stack of soaping books on the floor by my desk. 

How do you store your notes and recipes? What details do you include in your notes that you think would be valuable to look back on? I cherish good soaping advice!

Thanks for reading!! 

Follow me!

I started a Facebook page for my soaping. Partly because I thought maybe my friends were getting tired of me always posting pictures of soap, and my own personal Facebook was starting to look like it wasn't even about me, and because it's nice to have a way to connect with other soapers and spread the word about handmade soaps while still being able to maintain your own personal privacy. I guess the blog is nice for that, too, but.... darnit, Facebook is just fun! Mostly I just invited all my friends and family to "like" my page if they are interested in seeing all that I do, and I will be posting under Glad Heart Soaps on other soap-related Facebook pages.

Follow Glad Heart Soaps on Facebook!

So many of my friends encouraged me to start selling my soaps initially. Sometimes it felt more like nagging than encouragement. Please please open an Etsy shop etc etc. Which I did do eventually. But where were those friends who wanted to purchase soap from me after I opened this shop? *crickets* It cost me so much to build up a little bit of a product line and packaging, plus listing fees and such, not to mention the stress that comes with trying to make sure your listings are worded well, your stuff is labeled according to regulations or maybe you just want to keep it minimal, but wait no this person says this but I like how this looks and omg my photos are terrible..... It was just overwhelming. It's hard to be inspired and enjoy your hobby when you worry constantly about the sales potential of what you are making. In the end I found that it makes me way happier to gift my finished products to people I love. 

That being said, it doesn't mean I don't occasionally have sales at work or a local market, or list items on Etsy here and there still. It just means I am not going to let selling soaps suck all the fun out of making soaps (although making back a small teeny tiny fraction of the cash I spend on my hobby sure feels nice sometimes haha!). 

I do still have friends ask if I have such and such thing available to buy, or ask why am I not trying to sell this or that. So with my Glad Heart Soaps facebook page I also made a free-to-me online store. I haven't decided yet what to do with it, I just put a couple of things up. Not sure if I will use it to avoid Etsy fees or to coincide with my Etsy shop. But I do know that I won't let it take the fun out my soaping! 

Too long didn't read version:

Follow me on Facebook to see what I am up to in the soaping world. I plan to post photos pretty often. :)

Thanks!

The cheese slicer that didn't exist

I've been thinking about buying a nice big soap slicer for a while now, one with tension wires that will cut a whole loaf of soap with one swoop. *drool* All the soapmakers who have them speak so highly of them, and the demo videos make cutting look so quick and effortless. *sigh* 


The least expensive I've found are actually handcrafted with a wooden structure, on Etsy, for around $135. Compared to the famous "tank" soap cutter at $267, I guess that's a pretty great deal. A soaper I follow on Facebook has the wooden one from Etsy, and I did chat with her a bit about it. She praised the craftsmanship and assured me it was well worth the money. *jealous*


So I decided to start small at first, give the ol' miter box and cutter set a much-needed vacation, and go out looking for a cheese slicer, aka cheeseboard. You know, the little boards with a notch, handle and wire. I wanted to test the smoothness of cutting with a wire and this would be cheaper and easier to find locally.

Or so I thought. My honey and I spent the better part of this afternoon scouring my tiny town for what seems to have become an ancient appliance. Granted, there aren't a lot of stores here, but I swear we must have went to every single one! Wal-Mart, Dollar General, Fred's Dollar Store, Family Dollar, the department store my mom manages, a candle and floral gift shop, an artsy gift shop cafe. And did I mention it's 91 degrees here today (with 55% humidity)? Ugh. There was one last place I wanted to look, a pharmacy only two blocks from my apartment, but by the end of all that shop hopping I was frustrated and just wanted to give up, go home, and hit up Amazon. But since we were driving by there anyway, and they always have such cute window displays, we parked and the honey left the car running. We wouldn't be long, I told him, it only takes a couple of minutes to ask and be told no.

Imagine my surprise when the friendly sales lady was leading me to a shelf before I'd even gotten the whole question out of my mouth! Not one, but two pretty bamboo cheeseboards. At a pharmacy! And so many other cutesie things! But alas, the only cheese slicer board thingie in Winnfield, LA, came at a premium sort of price, so I reigned in my shopping desires and just went home with what I went looking for to begin with. (....and some penguin-printed packing tape....)

Now for the bad news. I unmolded my sparkly-topped loaf of soap to try out this new cutter today, and to my horror it had stuck to the mold a bit on the bottom at each end, even though I'd used plenty of sodium lactate and discounted my water amount by 10% to help it harden up! Sad Laura. I guess I should've let it sit in the mold a while longer, I just was too excited!

Being the sweetheart that he is, my honey still showered the soap with praise: "Oh, the colors are really pretty! It smells great! And look (scoop scoop squish), we can make soap balls for you to embed in another loaf!" ..... I have created a soaping monster. Soap balls?! How did he know about those?! And why did he think of that before me?! Haha. Oh well! It did help me feel a bit better, which is what he was aiming for I'm sure, and provided him ample opportunities for making balls jokes. Pfft.

His balls actually looked better than my balls..... shut up!!

In the end we only ended up with five full-size bars of soap, and my crazy random attempts at making some kind of highly untechnical color swoops didn't turn out all that bad. I guess we'll just call this a limited edition!

I may have gotten a little heavy handed with the glitter....

Thanks for reading!!

Oh the anticipation!

Look what I've got in the mold! This was a fragrance my mom bought and was excited to try, Passionfruit Papaya from Bramble Berry. It smells pretty great, really fresh, fruity and summery, and it soaped like a dream (as us soapmakers tend to say about a fragrance oil that behaves itself while mixing in colors and such). I used BB's neon pigments Electric Bubblegum and Tangerine Wow, and hydrated green oxide, topped with iridescent pink glitter and some pearlized sprinkle thingies from the cake-decorating isle at Wal-Mart. Sooo not looking forward to trying to wash all that glitter off the mold, haha.

My mom is still learning, but I think she had a lot of fun measuring things and listening to me drone on and on about things to do and not do. (She almost stuck her hand in my bucket of lye water while randomly grabbing things, agh!)

Still playing around with new design techniques and colors, so I was a nervous wreck all the way through (even without my mom grabbing at lye haha)! No idea how this is gonna turn out on the inside, guess we'll see in a day or two!

Wish it luck!

Soapmaking tunes?

Does anyone besides me absolutely require music to soap by? Honestly, I think I require music to do everything by, and I tend to associate experiences with what I was listening to at the time I was....experiencing them. It's just how my brain works. It's like a big (little?) ol' jukebox!

It's always interesting too when watching soaping videos on YouTube to see what music they've chosen for them, if they aren't speaking. Usually it's just a soft and unoffensive instrumental piece, but still speaks for the poster's  personality a bit too I think. 

Here's what I've been jamming to in the background while soaping for the last few weeks, mostly really fun, quirky, and upbeat stuff that puts me in the creative mood and keeps me dancing while I wait for lye water to cool. ;)

The Alabama Shakes:

I'd heard a lot about them before vacationing in Austin this year for SXSW, but hadn't really listened to them at all until I saw them play one night on Conan (or was it Letterman?), and then they kept popping up in a friends Facebook feed. I think they are really fun and have a style that is sort of universally appealing. Also a breath of fresh air from all the scary skinny greasy hipsters (I can give you some soap, people!) that seem to dominate the music scene these days. Check out their album Boys and Girls. 

Here's a taste of awesome: You Ain't Alone , Hold On

Beirut:

These guys are so similar to one of my other favorite bands, Fanfarlo, but American made. :) Such great unique vocals, and I love their horns! Just the right equal amounts of odd and catchy, with a fun Mexican influence. (They're from Arizona.) I've been wearing out their album The Ripe Tide.

Enjoy: Sante Fe , Elephant Gun

We Were Promised Jetpacks:

How could you not love a band with a name like that? Maybe a little louder than some might have the taste for, but man can they rock a Scottish accent! I've fallen in love with all of their albums, wish I would have discovered them long before I did, oh man! And as my friend Matt pointed out, they seem to love aphorism song titles. (Don't worry, I had to google it too.)

Rock on: It's Thunder And It's Lightning , Quiet Little Voices (so much fun!!)

So what do you guys listen to while soaping? Any creations inspired by favorite musicians or songs? 

I should have an order from Wholesale Supplies Plus arriving today, and I am way excited, so I'll probably have some photos to share soon. :)

Thanks for reading! 

The bold and the beautiful (soaps!)

This past couple of weeks for me have been pretty inspired as far as soapmaking goes. I think it comes from my hunny's new found interest in making soap with me. He is so much more daring than me when it comes to colors and designs. (Maybe because he didn't buy the materials!) But it's a good thing! He's really pushed me to try designs and techniques that I was afraid to try before for fear of messing it all up, resulting in a huge waste of time and material$.

One of the things I have been most excited about is my new vertical (yes, vertical!) wooden mold that I bought from Bramble Berry. This was my most anticipated soaping order to date, and waiting on it to finally arrive at my doorstep was filled with both anguish and anticipation! Now that it's been here for about three weeks..... I've only used  it twice! BUT, that's because I really have to leave the soap in the mold longer with this mold than with my others, more like 3-5 days versus usually only one day. Not only am I making bigger batches in this mold, I guess there is something about the gravity and/or single small opening to air that just makes it all take longer to set up. I have been adding sodium lactate (a liquid salt that helps to produce harder bars of soap, pretty key when using silicone molds in cold process soap) to these batches though so it won't be quite as soft when we unmold.

Photo from BrambleBerry.com

(You can get a good look at the mold here at BB's website.)

We haven't used the divider down the middle yet, just been experimenting with a faux funnel pour on our first two batches, but we're due to have a soapy fun day today, so we'll see what we end up deciding to make!

Some things I love about the new vertical mold:

• No ash! Only one short end of the loaf of soap is exposed at the open top of the mold, so it's easier to protect the surfaces of the soap!
• All the bars are perfectly square (err rectangle!) and uniform in size/weight when cut.
• I don't have to line the mold with freezer paper! 
• Great insulation from all that wood!
• Since it's a straight up and down mold, it doesn't take up as much space while sitting up on my table or counter.
• The design possibilities are endless!

Here's the two faux funnel pour batches we've made using the vertical mold. 

On our first batch (the pink), I poured at a fairly thin trace, and I absolutely LOVE the swirls we got from it! For the second batch, after mixing in the colorants and fragrance oil, I stick-blended each color to a medium trace, aiming for the mod look achieved in the blog post that finally convinced me to buy the mold in the first place. Still though, I didn't get it all the way through the loaf. We noticed that as we first started to fill the mold, gravity seemed to be working against us, pouring from so high up to so far down into the mold just made the colors sink into each other instead of layering on top of each other. The closer to the top of the mold we got, the better it worked for us. Not sure there is really anything we can do to fix that, gravity is gravity. I am too afraid to try a much thicker trace! Either way, I still love every single bar we ended up with, because we made them and they are colorful and smell great!

And speaking of bold new designs, we actually pulled a couple off in our oldie but goodie molds too! Check out our faux funnel pour in my silicone loaf mold, and a two color block soap too. We're loving swirls. :)

Thanks for reading!!

Cleaning out my closet!

(From my post on Teach Soap forums)

I did a quick clean-up-and-out of my soap making supplies closet today (not counting the bookshelf in my kitchen just for oils, butters, and loaf molds), and I have a few things I'd like to get rid of but don't want to just throw them away. It's all pretty nice stuff, most of it never even used. I'd like to do some swapping of goodies if anyone is interested, but if I leave this up for long enough with no bites, I would probably even be willing to give it away so that it doesn't go to waste. What I am interested in swapping for is pigments and/or clays for CP, fragrance oils, ylang ylang EO. First come first serve!

You can comment here, email me at group5gal@gmail.com or respond to my forum post here.

So here is what I have up for grabs:

Two full, still taped 7.5oz bottles of Eucalyptus EO from Bramble Berry. Three 8oz bottles of BB Wake Up Rosemary FO. Two have not been used but the tape has been removed, one has about an ounce or so used. I would of course retape these and package them very carefully and securely for shipping.

One "flying pig" mold from BB, clear plastic with three 5oz cavities.

An assortment of fondant/cookie cutters. Most of these have never been used and are all clean and rust-free, and include one of each of the following: tulip, butterfly, heart with wings, round flower, high heel shoe, castle, princess crown, three-square set, three-circle set, four-star set, and scalloped square. 

................

And here is the new clean closet! (Yeah, clean is probably a relative term here, haha!) My house is sooo dark, I have some "pop lights" and adhesive backing I'll be putting up on the inside walls of the closet sometime today, woo!

I know I've been MIA on the blog for a bit, but I have a ton of pictures waiting to share about all I've been up to in my absence, just been a tad busy (read: Diablo 3 was released). Hopefully I'll have some real posts up soon!

Thanks for reading!