Soaping with Amber Resin

I will start this post off saying I am an amber lover. Amber resin and fossilized amber, scent or jewellery, I love it all. A few months ago, before I got back into making soap, I purchased a small amount of dark amber and celestial amber resins to infuse for perfuming. Instead of making perfume, the better part of these infusions have gone towards today's batch. I infused one part each resin into five parts each jojoba oil. A nice trick about infusing resin is that you can replace the oils you've used (strain the infusion before adding it to soap) with more oil so you can get more bang out of your resin. I found the dark amber strained infused easier but the celestial amber left more resin behind to infuse again. It should be noted that the way I love this stuff, if I was smart, I'd buy several ounces at a time to infuse in large bottles... Hmm. I think I'm going to do that this fall. Sixteen ounces of amber infused jojoba stashed away seems like an excellent idea.

Amber resin is not to be mistaken for fossilized amber. Amber resins are manufactured with special recipes of styrax or benzoin resins, vanilla, beeswax and secret editions that will very from manufacturer to manufacturer. You can actually buy fossilized amber oil from Eden Botanicals, something I'd like to try at some point but given the cost, for soap purposes, Amber resin is frankly less cost prohibitive for this hobbiest. That said, I imagine the scent would be quite different too.

My celestial amber is smokier and spicier, where my dark amber is sweeter and somehow deeper... I'm not great at explaining it. I've mixed them with patchouli to make a rich, mysterious scent that I will not be sharing. Each and every bar is mine. MINE. I used a lot more amber resin infusion than patchouli, that said, patchouli is a powerful sucker and it may end up being for of a sweet patchouli than a spicy amber soap. That said, I like patchouli so this really wouldn't upset me.

As it happens, I've made this soap, or at least a similar one, before so I know this soap will be brown, or at least a deep tan and no amount of titanium dioxide is going to make it white. Beige? Yes that's manageable but not something I've gone with for this soap. This a mica party. Brown, russet, red, purple, gold and black in thin layers with a swirl on top. Here's the trick to pouring super thin soap, don't over swirl or screw with it. You can't mix it into brown sludge if you use a light touch. Or in this case, let the pour do the swirling.

I keep forgetting to mention this but I am still using maple water as my liquid. It is still behaving beautiful and the bubbles from the bars I made a few weeks ago are delightful. For the last few batches I've also been adding tussah silk. Because I've been using frozen maple sap, the silk is not able to dissolve in the lye solution, it doesn't get hot enough. So I've been heating a little bit of the maple water separately, and adding my silk to that. It works pretty well.

Yes that is my laptop in the background; I was in a heavy metal mood today. There's always something playing in the background when I make soap since I love me my background noise. I didn't want to do a precise tiger swirl so I'm not sure how to describe my swirl choice, tiger turned drop swirl? Who knows.

The top. The scent isn't as strong as I'd like, I was a bit stingy but that's alright. It's amber and I'm happy. I found a wholesaler where I can get 250g for an excellent price and will be purchasing it in a few months. Then I'll probably make a whole series of amber soaps... Maybe then I'll share.

Taking on the Soap Challenge and Embracing Opposites

I decided to jump right in and to join the Soap Challenge Club hosted by Amy Warden at Greatcake Soapworks. The challenge of this month is Embracing Opposites and I hemmed and hawed over what I could do that would suit this theme and kept coming back to this one thought... Balance. To make a long story short I have GAD and SAD and have struggled through the years to find to come to... a sort of sweet spot within myself.

For this soap I went with a scent blend of sweet orange, spearmint and a titch of vanilla. I am all out of anchors so I hope the fragrance oil can hold the sweet orange... Maybe. For the colours I wanted a pop so I went with black for the base and shades of blue for water and yellow, red and orange for fire. My black did not prove black enough at I had to stick blend it too much to even get it deep grey so that batter was thick than my swirl colours. It also resulted in air bubbles. Hmmf. It's my hope that the titch of vanilla in the “black” layer will darken it eventually. This was a good reminder than I need activated charcoal. It always was my favourite black. In any case, I added the spearmint to my blue segments and the sweet orange to my yellow segments since I did not especially want the yellow discolouration of the sweet orange to play tricks with my blues.

I put a piece of cardboard in the centre of my mold after I poured the grey/black sludge. With each passing squeeze of the thin colours, some at least seemed to penetrate. After all the colours were poured I did a hanger swirl, hope to bring the two sides into each other and back again.

The swirl on the top more or less worked to bring the opposites sides together... Though the black blots I could have done without but I trimmed them away so it's alright. I unmolded the soap a little early but since I trim any bars from this mold (aka Red) no really issues can of it. I'll say this much... I NEED a wooden mold. I'm eyeing the molds at Nuture Soap... Tall and skinny with silicone liners? Yes, please! I think I want to get one tall/skinny mold and one wide/short mold so I have a choice from batch to batch. I've a big holiday coming up at the end of August/ beginning of September so I'll wait until after that to buy molds. For now I'll make soap balls from the scraps. Tomorrow I'll be getting a wire cheese cutter; I cannot for the life of me cut 

in a straight line.

So here's our cut pics. It worked! The warm colours and cool colours are curling against each other. The soap gelled, but did not overheat, thank you soap gremlins for leaving me alone. I should add that I used Maple Water again. The bubbles are amazing in the little bit I sampled of this soaps scraps. I also added silk for the first time. We'll see how it affects the overall soap. I'd be happier if the grey was black but I'll survive. That said I am seeing some bloom from the cocoa butter in this recipe. The projects of the evening, it would seem, will be tempering my cocoa butter so I don't have an on going issue.


So there you have it. Fire and water, calm and exuberance, drop swirls tangling together in a fluid embrace.

A Soapy Experiment and a Discolouration Update

I work at a grocery store that likes to carry some of the more unusual sorts of foods and drinks. It also loves to follow trends. One of the latest drink trends, apparently, is maple water aka maple sap. Being a great lover of maple syrup, and a curious soaper, I bought a litre carton, for around $5.00 and brought it home with me. My soapmaking supplies is sitting at Canada Post as I missed the delivery today so I left this batch unscented. The fragrance oils I have at the moment are movers and I wanted my soap to remain the consistency of water for my design. Unless playing with a design like jaguar spots, or layers I near always like to keep my soap batter ultra thin... It seems to work for me so why not?

Knowing that maple sap is full of sugar, I frozen a portion of the carton to use in today's soap. I popped the necessary number of maple sap cubes into my lye pitcher and slowly added my lye. The mixture turned a pale cream. There was a faint tire (maple syrup taffy) scent as the lye cooled. When my lye and oils felt about room temp, I mixed them together. My temperatures might have been higher than I tend to favour; we're having a freakish heatwave here in the Fraser Valley... my poor rainforest is bone dry, so room temp is higher than normal. In any case, my soap batter behaved as normal, no discolouration so far as I could see and I managed to do an eight colour swirl.

Now I had had a different vision for the swirl but I screwed up the order of my pour and didn't use enough white. Still, rainbow soap is rainbow and it has a faint sweet smell from the maple water, though I have my doubts that it'll survive the cure. This soap did overheat, unsurprisely given all the sugar in the sap. If I had insulated my soap, I never do as I prefer to let the soap do what it wants, I'd likely have had a big crack in my soap. Instead, it just as a dusty bubbly surface. Next batch with this additive will be tossed into the freezer for an hour to nip that in the bud.

So here are the bars! I can't seem to cut in a straight line, and I cut it a little/ a lot soft, so there are defects, blah blah. You should see what I do to a watermelon... Oiy.

Now  it's been a couple of weeks since I made Sugar Mint and the discolouration from the vanilla has deepened and spread. It's so strong it's made a gradient affect within the white. The deep green is more ore less brown now and the original tan is a deep brown. It makes the white and the mint swirls all the more impressive. You can use vanilla stabilizer to slow the discolouration, or bleeding like you see in these bars, but it doesn't hold off discolouration for all that long and I choose to accept the discolouration as it comes... Brown soap is still pretty... right?

The Gremlins have Awoken

I had visions of the beach when I planned for today's soap. Since I was still waiting on supplies, I grabbed a couple of essential oils from my local grocery store and mixed up a pricey blend of bergamot, lemon, pink grapefruit, lemongrass, rosewood and ylang ylang. For the colours I prepped a few shades of tan, teal and blue and planned a series of layered in the pot swirls. The first sign of gremins was I mixed my colours, I ended up with black instead of dark teal and blue! Then I miss divided my batch and didn't have enough batter set aside for the sky layer, oops. It poured fine but there was trouble as soon as I unmolded it... Lye pockets! Fragglerock. If it had been a cheaper scent, I might've just tossed the pockmarked mess but this rich scent cost me around $30.00 so into the crockpot it went. If you are wondering, chunks of blue, teal, and tan look like mixed together, the answer is gray with bits of blue and orange... Charming. A member of the Soapmakingforum suggested I felt the soap, to make it pretty and I thought that is a brilliant idea. I need to get some roving either from my yarn-aficionado sister or from a store so that part will wait for now.

They kind of look like lumpy moons or asteroids. Oddly enough, I do have a use for such a thing. Now I just need some yellow ones and I'll have the basis for yet another batch. Hey, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And when life gives you soap moons, make a stellar soap.

Vanilla Mint aka Sugar Mint - Cut!

Sugar Mint, as my vanilla and peppermint soap has been dubbed, was ready to cut within six hours. Since I no longer have a wire cutter I wasn't about to test the strength of my knives buying letting the soap get especially hard. Thankfully, it cut nicely. By nicely I mean I'm falling all over myself with soapy happiness. For a soap that took around a minute to swirl, the results are really quite fancy. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a hard swirling method, actually the Chopstick swirl is one of the easiest, I think, that produces some of the prettiest results.

The bars took a lot of trimming on the sides because the mold bowed, as not to mention the sides weren't straight to begin with. It's not like the scraps are going to waste. They will be going into my bathroom, once they've cured. I got seven bars out of this batch, of random thicknesses as I eye-balled it. Two for sure will go to my friend who loves the scent. The rest will go to whomever lays claim within my circle. One bar, I think will remain with me... I need something for when I use up the scraps!

Plotting my next batch for next week. I've got to decide if I want to have more swirling fun or if I want to risk acceleration. Sweet pea is calling my name.

Another Week Another Soap - Vanilla Mint Log

Today is soap day. It was supposed to be yesterday but my little niece was over later than expected so I saved it for this passed morning. I did get a silicone loaf pan for today's soaping fun so today's batch is also bigger than the baby batches I've been making. The scent, vanilla and peppermint, is a favourite of a friend and I decided to make it with her in mind. In bath bombs, one of the things I've still made for her during my soap hiatus, I use vanilla essential and peppermint essential oils. However, vanilla essential oil is extracted using alcohol as the solvent and this means it is a right off for soap. Though I make a vanilla infusion with jojoba oil for perfume, it's scent throw isn't strong enough to survive saponification either. Fragrance oils are my friends and not my enemies in general as it is but this is a rime example of the place for synthetic perfumes in the soaping process. Random lecture over, on to the soap.

Freshly poured

I divided my batter into one third white base, coloured with TD, the other two thirds I divided into black oxide, TD, and a green and an aqua mica. The TD and black oxide are from Voyageur, the green and aqua are from the Soft series by TKB. This particular vanilla fragrance oil, French Vanilla by Voyageur was almost black it was so dark and knowing what we know about vanilla fragrance oils and soap, I poured the vanilla into the the black, the green and some TD that immediately turned tan from the fragrance oil. I poured the vanilla into the aqua and the white base so when the vanilla finishes discolouring the other segments, these should stay light.

Did you want the recipe?

Olive Oil 28.5%
Coconut Oil 25%
Cocoa Butter 16.5%
High Oleic Sunflower Oil 15%
Camellia Seed Oil 10%
Cherry Kernel Oil: 5%

33.3% Lye Solution and a 7% Superfat. I used a told of 1.50oz fragrance for my 32oz of oils.

Each batch of soap I've made, this one being number four, has used a slightly different recipe as I work out what I like best now. I remember my go to recipe from pre-hiatus times and while it made good soap, I want to see if I like what I am doing now better. I also have a love affair with camellia seed oil so I need to see what it brings to soap for me.

So there you go. I'm pretty sure the summer heat will gel this soap and I am inclined to let the soap do what it wants. If it gives me a partial gel, the soap and I will have to have a long talk about our feelings. Namely, my feelings that it needs to  behave.

Can't wait for tomorrow and the cut pics!

Just a Cut Shot

I cut my coconut/melon/tropical treat last night but waited for daylight hours to take a shot. Forgive the junk in the background. The coconut mellowed during saponification, just as I hoped and the result is sweet and a little sophisticated, without smelling like suntan lotion. The Pearly micas worked great, with the bonus of a soft shimmer coming through the swirls. Micas often lose their shimmer in cold process soap so this was an unexpected surprise.

So here they are; three bars of "Dreams of Paradise"

Funny enough, all three bars have been claimed by friends who actually missed my soap while I was on my hiatus! If I want a bar myself, I'll have to make more. I did save a bit of the blend for scrubs, but that's another project.