Soooo purple!!

I'm back with the very last purple trial. After this soap batch, I decided to call myself a pro, coz I now know how to exactly work with alkanet. How much root, how much powder, what oils to infuse in, for how long, how much infused oil to use to always get a consistent purple that is just right for a lavender soap. Did you fall for all that?? I lied!! :P

After making the easy batch by adding alkanet powder directly to soap, I realized it was too scratchy to shower with. The next time around I infused alkanet powder in olive oil and used that in soap. I got too light a purple and after curing it faded some more and turned somewhat grey. Actually I can't describe the color. In some angles it appears grey and in some angles it appears purplish. Or it is just my mind playing games with my eyes.

So for this batch I infused the alkanet root in olive oil and used 10% of that oil along with the base oils.
Result:

Quite a dark purple there. Next time a little less
infused oil. 

I almost forgot to mention, there was a soap volcano again. I might just become a volcano soap specialist one of these days. For now I will stop the lavender soaps, as I still have to try out some pinks.

Ta ta!!

Lavender again

Last time the lavender soap was made with Alkanet powder added directly to the soap at trace. I did get a purple, but not one I liked. Plus the soap is speckled quite a bit. 

This time around the alkanet powder was infused in castor oil for some days. This castor oil I used along with the base oils (about 3%). Outcome:

I whipped up some air into the soap

I like it a lot more than the previous lavender soap, but I'll try again. After a few weeks of curing, the color is more greyish than purple and there is a layer of soda ash. Grrr!! I cling wrap the soap after pouring it into the mold and when it is time to cut, there is absolutely no ash at all. But a few days later it magically forms on the top. I wish there is some way to avoid it altogether.

Have a great day everyone!!

Going for lavender and wheatgrass soap update

I love soap with natural colors. Granted, I can't get all colors with natural stuff and not to forget how fickle they are to play around with, but still, there is something that I just so totally love about them. This time around the quest was for a lavender colored soap. 

I read so much about alkanet and have been wanting to try it out for a really long time. The nudge to actually look for a supplier and order it, came from the very lovely Claudia from alegriamediterranea soaps. :)
Thank you Claudia, I'm going for lavender this time because of you!!

Outcome when alkanet powder was added directly at trace:

Immediately after pouring soap into the mold. A light cement grey

The soap gelled and darkened

Final outcome. 

Not happy with this lavender color. I remember reading that the color lightens while curing, but I still have to see that happen. Vegetable oils used: Coconut, palm and olive. High percentage of coconut oil. 

I will need to go for that lavender again. Just made another batch. This time the alkanet was infused in castor oil for a week. Fingers crossed! 

A few weeks back I made a soap with my cousin with Tea tree and peppermint EO and used wheatgrass powder to color it green. Here is how it changed over time. 

Taken right after it was cut

Taken right after it was cut

A month later

Slight fading

There has been a slight bit of fading, but I usually see that happen with all natural colors. Jennifer I hope you try out wheatgrass in soap. :)

Here comes the artist

I finally tried my hand at making flowers in soap and here's the outcome:

Turmeric soap meets cocoa flowers

Here's how they came out of the mold:

My art skills surprised me ;)

I love this mold. It is actually used to sort and store jewellery. It make great guest size soaps. And yes, I still see a soap mold in every container. :)

Scented with Orange EO and Lavender FO and colored with turmeric and cocoa powder. A vegetable soap with coconut, palm, sunflower and wheatgerm oils.

Couldn't escape the soda ash even with a cling wrap cover

More soaps in my next post...adios!! 

Going green again

Here's yet another soap colored with wheatgrass as I couldn't get enough of it in the castile soap, which by the way has still not set. Wheatgrass imparts a very elegant green to soap and me loves a green soap. So here I combined tea tree and mint essential oils to help a pimply teenager (my cousin). She wanted to see how soap is made and we had a blast that evening with a lot of weighing, stirring and giggling. The partly liquid coconut oil refused to come out of the bottle with a micro mini opening and we both had to squeeze it out with all our might. And when the stubborn thing actually came out, it was all over my clothes.
Here's a tip I found on the internet: rub shampoo into the oil stain without wetting the cloth and then put it in the washing machine with other laundry. Worked like magic. :)

Brown and green layers 

The brown swirls on top didn't work out like how
I wanted and since it was a very small batch,
a lot of air bubbles got whipped in

Coffee beans on top was my cousin's idea

Have a great bubbly week!!

Three soaps with one stone...err mould!!

People have already hit two birds with one stone, so that would be boring to try again. Plus why would I want to hit a bird??

All the pent up soaping energy had to put somewhere, so many ideas swirling in my head and many more scribbled into many books. If I had to try one new idea at a time, I would be dead long before all the ideas get exhausted (exaggerating here). And what happens to all the new ones that keep popping up all the time?? So I decided to put three new ideas into one cauldron.

- Wheatgrass powder to get that green
- Room temperature method
- In the pot swirl

The stone was thrown right back at me. Ouch!! I could hardly seen any swirls, so decided to mix the whole thing up to get a homogeneous extremely light, barely there green (almost cream) color. A castile soap that refused to harden after more than 24 hours. No gel due to the room temperature method. Did I forget anything else...ah yes, some oils were slowly seeping out. I wanted to wait it out and see what happens. Patience is a virtue, which is definitely not mine. So.....

I threw the whole thing into a big pot and set it on fire. Not really! I hot processed it and added some more wheatgrass with a little water for a darker green. The beautiful scent of Mint and Tea tree was replaced with a grass smell. Yuck!! But luckily it sobered down and the nice scent surfaced out again. The soap is still resting in the moulds. I might have to leave it there for a couple of days.

Let me share some before and after pics:

Not much of a color contrast there,
so I stirred the whole thing up. It turned
a lighter green the next morning.

Post HP with added wheatgrass. Still very gooey to
unmould.

Patience is definitely not my virtue but 'repentance in hindsight' for sure is!! All the joys of soap making!!
Will share pictures of cut soap as soon as it sets up...maybe in a year or two. LOL!!

Hanging up those invisible shoes

I finally hung up those invisible shoes that kept creeping onto my feet so often. Here I am back in India, in the city where I was born, grew up, went to college and got married. It feels great to be back after leaving this lovely city almost 9 years ago, right after I got married.

The past month was exciting and chaotic and I barely had enough time to breathe. After our tenants moved out, the house had to be painted and cleaned and furnished, well partly-furnished...I still have a ton of things to buy. I hated and loved every minute of the past month though. Hated that I had to get all the things done by myself in the fantastic heat and humidity, but loved laboring to get the house my husband and I so dearly dreamt of, in order.

Now that I have time to breathe and a little more to spare, things are going to get soapy again. :)

Before going back to Austria in January I made a couple of batches of soap so they would be cured and ready to greet me on my return to India. I tried my hand at the spoon swirl and let's just leave it at that. The color contrasts were very subtle, almost too subtle to notice any swirls. Plus I just wanted to finish using up the Lemon-Eucalyptus EO.

Another one was a coffee soap, made with brewed filter coffee. I love the scent and surprisingly after 3 months of curing it still smells like coffee. Maybe it is due to the 20-30% chicory added to the coffee beans in India. The soaps got generously showered with coffee beans for decoration, which have been falling off with every fondle.

Some of these coffee soaps I gave as Mother's Day gifts to my aunts and a cousin, all wonderful mothers who spend so many hours in the kitchen.

I leave you with a picture and promise to be back soon with more soap pictures of new creations.

Please don't notice the ribbon edges...again no time to breath
applies plus couldn't locate the scissors.

Soda ash on the top.... not too bad.
Missing coffee beans....no comments!! :D

I'm alive!!

After the disappearing act from the blog world I am back again!! Life was hectic but also a lot of fun the past couple of weeks...so hectic I couldn't even share pictures of the last soap I made. And when I want to share, I realize I have just one not so great picture. Will talk more about the soap in a bit, but let me first tell you about the fun I had with my family. We (hubby, his parents and I) went on a road trip to a lovely private beach, an old temple constructed by my husband's great grandpa, a man-made dam and a boat ride in the reservoir to reach a partly submerged hill that now has a museum with pre-historic artifacts and also relics from a Buddhist stupa and monastery that once adorned the hill. While driving, we passed through some of the most lush green paddy fields. It was the most beautiful green carpet with coconut trees, small ponds, gurgling streams and happy birds as far as the eye could see. Paradise for me!! We have my dear father-in-law to thank who drove all the way and for this wonderful trip I will forever cherish. 

Another thing that happened while I was at my parents...I was interviewed by a magazine called Yo Vizag (Vizag is the city where I was born and grew up) and they wrote an article on handmade soaps, which will feature in this month's or the next month's publication. I was pretty nervous as that was the first time I was showing my soaps to anyone other than family or friends. And while the two young and very talented guys from Yo Vizag admired the soaps, scents and packaging, I relaxed a little and got through the interview in one piece (though I can ramble on for pages while writing, sitting face to face with someone has my tongue in knots). I read the final edit and now have to wait for the article to be published.  

Moving on to even more soapy stuff, here is the last batch of soap I made. Scented with Lavender and Orange essential oils and swirled with turmeric. Base oils: Coconut, Palm, Olive and Sesame. The color from the turmeric is quite different from what I expected but I decided to name it Orange twist anyway. 

Will post about the new packing later. 

Have a great week people!!

Soaps for my aunt!!

Here are the cut pics of the two batches of soaps ordered by my aunt for her husband's 60th birthday. Thankfully I could make the soaps she ordered for in two batches instead of three. 

First batch of soap: Scented with Orange, Grapefruit and Rosemary

These soaps didn't gel, which was quite strange
considering the daytime temperatures here

Soaps from the first batch

Second batch of soap: Scented with Bergamot, Lemon, Peppermint and Rosemary

These soaps didn't gel completely,
but came out a little darker

A flower shaped soap...one from each batch

Soaps on top: Batch 2
Soaps below: Batch 1

I like the soaps which didn't gel, coz they have a creamier white color. They were a lot more crumblier while cutting though. The soaps from my first order are curing and will be ready in about 4-5 weeks from now. I hope the guests at the party like them!! 

Sunshine soap

These days nothing gets thrown away before careful consideration...you never know what can be used to make soap. I held onto a broken umbrella handle for a few months too, while my husband wondered if I lost my marbles. So we got two cans of Pringles (thankfully the small size) that travelled with us to Slovenia and came back with us empty. The chips flew lightly out of the can and settled heavily in the butt. I am at a loss to understand how a few grams of snack can turn into a few kilos the second they hit the mouth.

I am one of those green soap lovers and have been wanting to make one for sometime now. The contents of a bag of nettle tea leaf had been soaking in olive oil for more than two weeks now. Molds were ready. Something was missing...what could it be? Has to be something to make me break into a panic sweat in the last minute of soaping. Well this time it was the cardboard tube around which aluminium foil is rolled. Now that is exciting enough. The grand plan was to do a soap embed with fresh soap in a different color. See this was supposed to be a morning soap, with the sun rising from the center. I can be imaginative too people!!

The outcome wasn't too bad actually. The cardboard pulled up a little too much soap with it. I shouldn't have waited so long before taking it out from the mold. Wish the green was a little greener and the yellow (from turmeric)  a little yellower/orange. I couldn't give the sweats a miss though....it was really hot here yesterday.

Hoping the sun doesn't set on me, by fading away

Scented with Mint, Tea tree and a tick of Lime essential oils. The mint masks the green smell really well. Thanks for the mint tip Amy W from Soapy Stories. About 11% Shea butter and 10% superfat. I drastically cut down the Coconut oil too this time.  A little bit of the end piece lathered very well. Not big bubbles, but nice small and creamy ones. :) 

Why do I even try to cut with a knife???
Had to make corrections later.

Little heart samples.
Funnily they turned green with turmeric??

This soap is fully natural, including the colors. I feel pretty good about it!! :)

Creamy Castile Mithai

Made on: 17.03.2011

I wanted to make a pure olive oil castile soap, but was dilly-dallying coz I love a good smelling soap. Another thing was that olive oil soaps don't lather much (but it gets better after a long cure process). Hmmm! It was too big a decision to make so I held back for a few days. Then I thought and re-thought and finally decided to make a small batch. Depending on how I felt at the moment, I would leave it pure or add fragrance or color or both or something more. 

I got all the ingredients together and kept the EO's and also some olive oil infused with turmeric right next to me....just in case. The mold was also ready. I opened the fridge to take a swig of apple juice and found a bottle of cream staring at me. So, I picked it up.

Did I make a pure castile soap you ask? NOPE! I whipped it up with whipping cream, rosemary, palmarosa and lemon grass EO's and a colored (turmeric) top layer.

The mold was a gift from my dear hubby <3, who thought of me when he saw a sweet box brought to office by a colleague from India. They all ate the sweets....I got the empty box. :)

The soaps are still curing, but the color of the top layer has faded completely. About 3 weeks into curing, I tried one and observed it did lather. Not a lot, but quite enough to be called soap. Me is happy!!

Turmeric top layer pattern made with a whisk

Out of the mold and ready to be cut 

Cut up