Frosted Peppermint Glycerin Swirl

There are many ways to design soap and infinite decorating options.  That is part of the never-ending fun of soapmaking!  I always want to try new things. This time I took an old family favorite, our Peppermint Ice soap that I have been making for over a decade, and gave it just a little bit of a new twist.  I made the bar like normal, but this time I mixed some glycerin with some shimmery mica to swirl on the top.   When you mix the mica with glycerin, and leave it on the surface of the soap, something cool happens.  As the soap cures, the glycerin is absorbed into the soap, leaving shimmering mica lined craters and ravines on the soap surface.  It looks really cool.  For this batch, I kept the mica swirl fairly simple.  I used just one color of mica and used only glycerin.  Another time I will do more experimenting with using more colors of mica, and exploring with texture when swirling with both glycerin and oil.

I liked how the swirls in this soap turned out.  The tops are frosted with pearly swirls and divots.  I like how the drop swirl in the base of the bar turned out too.  The flowing swirls of blue and white combine with the shimmering glycerin swirls to make a very pretty bar.  I'm calling this soap Frosted Peppermint.

If you would like to try this bar, they are ready for purchase at Sego Lily Soap.

Lilacs in Bloom

I recently joined a bunch of other soapmakers from around the world to learn something new.  I joined a Flower Power soapmaking challenge hosted by Amy Warden of Great Cakes Soapworks.  This challenge was to make a new type of floral soap with Cold Process soap.  I love floral soaps!  So I thought that would be fun.  We could do anything we wanted to do.  But were encouraged to try something new.  I have always wanted to learn to pipe raw soap with cake decorating tips.  But to me it was a bit scary to pipe raw soap.  But I will never learn it if I don't just jump in and try.  I am not ready to do roses yet.  But maybe lilacs...

My makeshift slab mold. 
It is a freezer paper lined Kirkland Maranara Sauce box from my last Costco trip. 

I'm afraid the whole process was just a bit overwhelming to me.  So I didn't get any pictures during the process.  I will try it again sometime soon and get pictures.  But for now you will have to be satisfied with my description and with finished pictures. 

I used my normal soap recipe.  It is a good recipe and usually moves slow enough, as long as I don't add a fast moving fragrance oil.  Floral fragrance oils are notorious for moving fast and seizing.  So I decided to make a solid colored slab and to fragrance it with a nice Lilac fragrance oil.  I soaped cool, with only a slight water discount, and I poured at thin trace.  It only barely starting ricing, and stayed pretty smooth.  I used Lilacs in Bloom from WSP.  It smells soooo good!!  I love lilacs!  And it is pretty realistic fragrance oil, at least out of the bottle it is.  We will see if it holds in soap.  So far, now three days old, the soap still smells amazing!

I left the soap unscented for the blossoms and leaves.  I didn't want to risk it seizing on me.  The base slab has enough fragrance to make the blossoms smell really nice.  For the blossoms, I used a large condiment bottle, and just did a bunch of dots in two different colors of purple.  I was hoping the two colors would add a bit more dimension to the flowers.  For the leaves I used a leaf tip in the corner of a large Ziploc bag.  Making leaves was actually pretty fun!  I got better as I went along.  So some of my leaves were better than others.   But all together I think they look nice. 

I am very happy with how these turned out.  They do need to cure for at least a month, and these will be for sale then.  But if you would like me to reserve one for you, message me, or email me. 

What's the Big Deal About Handmade Soap?

Aqua Lime Soap

Soap is soap isn’t it?  Not so!   Many years ago, I thought I couldn't use soap or body washes.  They made my skin tight, dry and itchy.  It aggravated my psoriasis, and I’d often have little bumps on my skin.  Then one day I learned that what I thought was “soap” was not really soap at all!  The bars at the grocery store that I used to buy are actually full of synthetic detergents, not soap.  I had never really even tried a true soap.  A real soap is very gentle and much healthier for your skin than detergents. 

Next time you are in the soap isle of the grocery store, look at the labels.  Most of the soaps on the shelf don't say soap on their labels.  They call themselves Beauty Bars, moisturising bars, or body bars. These bars are not actually soap and can't legally claim to be soap.  They are detergents. No wonder they aggravated my sensitive skin! 

Some of the soaps in the grocery store are actually soaps, and can list Soap on their label.  But there is still a big difference between those soaps and a true handmade soap.  One major brand of soap advertises that it is very pure.  This brand is soap.  But with a handmade soap, the oils, lye, and water are combined to make soap.  Natural glycerin is also created in the process.  It is a natural by-product of the saponification process.  Glycerin is very beneficial for your skin.  But instead of leaving it in the soap for your skin's benefit, the commercial soap companies strip it off and sell it to be used in other cosmetic or pharmaceutical products.  A handmade soap retains all the skin loving glycerin from the soapmaking process.

Commercially made soaps and body washes are usually made with synthetic detergents, fillers, chemicals, petroleum, and irritants like SLS or SLES (sulfates). That’s not to say that detergents don’t have their place.  They do.  I like them for doing dishes, and I use them for laundry too.   Detergents are good for cutting grease.  But but not so good on your skin.  Have you ever used soap and gotten that tight, dry, itchy feeling?  Chances are that was because it was actually a detergent and not a true soap.  Read the labels.  If they call themselves a Beauty Bar, or a Bath Bar, then it is a detergent.  If they are detergents, then they can’t legally call themselves soap.

Here are the ingredients of a leading bar made for sensitive skin:

Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (Synthetic detergent), Stearic Acid (fatty acid), Sodium Tallowate (soap) , Water, Sodium Isethionate(Synthetic detergent) , Coconut Acid, Sodium Stearate (Synthetic detergent), Cocamidopropyl Betaine (Synthetic detergent), Sodium Cocoate (Soap)  or Sodium Palm Kernelate (soap), Sodium Chloride (table salt), Titanium Dioxide (natural whitener), Sweet Almond Oil, Rosewood Oil (essential oil), Tetrasodium EDTA (water softener), Trisodium Etidronate(preservative), BHT (preservative), Cedarwood Oil (essential oil), Rose Oil (essential oil), Disodium Cocamido-MEA-Sulfosuccinate (synthetic detergent), Cetyl Alcohol (alcohol derived from fats), Tocopheryl Acetate (vitamin E).

Cran-Raspberry Spritzer Soap

Compare that list of ingredients to the simple ingredients that are in a handmade soap, and you can see why handmade soaps are so much better for your skin than the commercial bars. 

Your skin is porous and absorbent.  Why not be careful what you put onto it.  Handmade soaps are a little bit of luxury that your skin will love. 

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Awakening

 I thought it would be fun to try a different swirl technique.  Normally the molds I use are nice log molds.  And I think I make some very pretty soaps with them.  But I wanted to try a very colorful  "Column Swirl" technique.  And I couldn't do them in my regular log molds.

For a Column Swirl you need a slab mold.  I don't own a slab mold yet.  So I found a sturdy box and lined it with plastic.  I put a small jar in the center of the box

I made my soap as normal and scented it with a blend of essential oils and fragrance oils.  Then I divided the soaps into 4 parts.  I colored  three of the parts in bright colors, and left the fourth portion white.
 

I alternated pouring the colors straight onto the center of the jar.  The colors stayed in rings!  And as the next color was poured, the colors were pushed out in nice clean circles.  It was somehow very satisfying to pour colors on the jar, have the raw soap go smoothly down the side of the jar, and make nice neat even(ish) circles.

 I tried to keep a pattern to how I poured the colors.  But I often messed up and poured the wrong color at the wrong time.  I don't think it hurt the design at all. I kept pouring till I had the box as deep as I wanted the soaps to be.  Luckily I had figured the size of the batch just perfectly for this box, and had just enough soap to have a perfectly sized large bars.

After all the soap was poured, I carefully pulled the jar out of the box. I then drizzled in the little bits of the color that was left in my color bowls into the center, trying to keep the colors as unmixed as possible.  

 Now for the fun part!  I took a chopstick and ran it through the soap in lines from the center, and then from the outside going to the center.  It was really cool to see the soap turn into such a pretty star-burst design as I did this.




I could look at this design in this box all day.

The final product was beautiful.  I love how the star-burst design goes all the way through the soap. The fragrance is a blend of White Tea fragrance oil, with essential oils of Bergamont, Lavender Mandarin, Thyme, Orange and Ylang Ylang.  It's like a watching a sunrise from your garden .  These are available right now at Sego Lily Soap.  These bars are big and beautiful!  Even bigger than my normal bars, which are already big to begin with.  I think I love these soaps!

Sea Salt Soaps

Sea Salt soaps are different than regular soaps.  They include a healthy portion of sea salts right in with the soap.  It's almost 50% salt and 50% soap.  It's kind of like showering with bath salts!  Sea salts are healthy for your skin.  It is said they add moisture, draw away toxins and exfoliate your skin.  You will be smooth and refreshed after using a salt bar.

Sea salt bars are made differently than regular soaps.  Since salts inhibit lather, these bars are formulated with a high percentage of coconut oil.  Coconut oil is a staple of almost all handmade soaps.  Coconut oil is the oil that adds the fluffy lather to soaps.   Coconut oil soap will even lather even in sea water.  Since coconut oil cleans so well, that it can be a little drying if used at a high rate.  To counteract the possible drying, these soaps also have a very high percentage of Shea Butter, much higher than any other bar I make.  Also, these bars are superfatted at a higher rate.  This means that there is more free coconut oil and shea butter that has not been turned into soap.  These free oils act as moisturizers to your skin.  

I think my favorite part of our salt bars is that we use mineral rich salts left over from Ancient Lake Bonneville!  Our Great Salt Lake, similar to the Dead Sea in Isreal, is also an inbound sea.  It was formed at the end of the ice age when the waters of Ancient Lake Bonneville began to recede.  This massive prehistoric sea covered 2/3 of Utah, and was 1000 feet deep where our salt flats are now.  As it receded  it left us mineral rich salts to enjoy!

A sea salt bar is a very hard bar.  It will last longer than other soaps.  The bumpy texture our salt bars have is from the medium crystals we use.  The bars will seem a bit crumbly with the first use, but will smooth out.  The bar is not scratchy to use.  Salt bars get smooth with use.  I love to use my salt bars with a nylon mesh pouf to get maximum bubbles.  The bubbles are creamy and luxurious.  But my husband prefers to use his straight off the bar with no pouf.  Either way it does lather and will smooth and refresh your skin.  I recommend using a salt bar about once a week to refresh and exfoliate your skin.  But even with my super sensitive skin, I can use them a few times a week.  I love salt bars! 

New Use for Log Molds

Yes, this is not soap related, but it does use my awesome soap molds!  These are the beautiful log molds my husband made for me this summer.  They are very handy, and get lots of use, since I make soap with them once or twice a week.  My stepson Drew found a new use for them that I would have never thought of.

This year my husband's family decided to draw names and do handmade gifts for each other.  Drew is a wiz in the kitchen.  He can cook and he can bake. So he decided to make his big brother a giant Kit Kat candy bar for Christmas.  He melted chocolate in a double boiler, and used my cleaned soap mold as the mold.  First he lined it with lots of freezer paper.

Drew and his dad, making giant chocolate bars in my soap mold.  

A few of us thought that Drew had an overabundance of chocolate bars.  That was clever planning on his part.  He wanted extra bars for Christmas gifts for his friends.

                                                                                    Notice the Kit Kat logo.  It was printed off and then traced onto one of my plastic cutting sheet.  He cut it out, and had the plastic logo shape on the bottom of the mold in the center.  It was so the giant bar would have the logo embossed in the top, just like a real candy bar.  It was a pretty cool touch.  And looked pretty impressive when the bar was unmolded.

The wafer cookies and chocolate were alternated till the mold was full, then a final layer of chocolate was put on top.

Drew made two of these huge bars, wrapped each in foil, and then packaged it in a red paper wrapper with the Kit Kat logo on top.

This is the finished product on Christmas day.  Drew had the two bars, side by side in a very realistic looking red paper wrapper.  I wish my picture did it justice.  But I was using a cell phone, since my camera got lost just before Christmas.  (Terrible timing.)  But it looked amazing!  

We were lucky enough to get half of the chocolate bars.  So now we have enough chocolate and cookie wafer to choke a horse.  So if anyone wants some, drop on by.  We've got enough for the whole neighborhood!

Seeing Pink (Peppermint)

Have you ever seen so many beautiful pink soaps?  This was a special order for a Relief Society church group.  They are Peppermint Sticks soaps for Christmas!  It was very fun to make so many pretty little soaps.  In all it was about 3 of the largest batches I have ever made.  We graduated from making soap in a big pot, to making soap in a huge bucket.  The whole kitchen smelled like sweet peppermint.  

They make great building blocks for teens to make fortresses with.  

They are also handy for making portraits.

But usually, we keep them neatly in bins.  

I loved how they turned out with the customized labels.  And I liked how the swirls came out on these also.  The recipe we used is a favorite that turns out a smooth bar that produces lots of fluffy bubbles.  And of course they are super gentle for all skin types.  We made these at a very special price.  So if you know of a church group, or other non-profit group that could use some nice soaps as Christmas or Mother's Day gifts, give us a call.  We can make a few batches customized just for you!