Soap Keeps Teaching me New ThingsFebruary 25, 2009
I looked out my window and what did I see? Three baby squirrels, Two Red Robbins, lots of woodpeckers, one fat squirrel on the fence and numerous birds flying overhead. Yes folks spring is on the way. Although our backyard is full of feeding stations for both birds and squirrels, we rarely see this much wildlife at one time until winter is preparing to depart. It can't go soon enough for me. Today we start with a look back. My Janurary soaping was mostly taken up with testing oxides with milk soap. Overall they did rather well. They tend to be rather intense so you need to take care not to use too much, but they are nice for milk soaps. Click here for my detailed report. Now on to something new. I am currently working on testing mica colorants and cavity molds. So far the micas are impressing me. They are easily dispersed in both water and oil. The colors are lovely. As to the cavity molds, obviously some are going to work better than others with milk soaps. I suspect there are many factors that affect how easily the soap come out of the molds. So I am going through and testing my collection of cavity molds. It will be interesting to see how well some of them work. And of course to refine my technique. Initially although the soap was coming out of the molds easily, some detail was lost, due I think to some mineral oil filling the indentations. This is in the more detailed designs. Someone suggested turning the molds upside down and let the excess drip out. Well that didn't work so well. The soaps came out ok, but some of the smaller detail stuck and got left behind. So I'm currently using a pastry brush and looking for the happy medium. Let's take a look at some of February's batches. It's been a fun month. I love molded soap.
Yesterday I started making soaps with other milks. So far I've done whipping cream, butter milk and one batch with unsalted butter as part of the oils. I am attempting to make a butterscotch soap for the husband of a dear friend. Since it's too early for pictures seeing all this stuff will have to wait until next time. Oh I almost forgot. The soap tought me something I had never throught of before. One of my batches got too thick to pour by the time I got all the cavities filled, so I grabbed a spoon and finished filling the cavities that way. That's when I discovered that you can use a spoon to smooth out lumpy soap just like you would smooth pudding or pie filling when cooking. Fingers work too, after putting down saran wrap that is. Other lessons learned are micas are great colorants, not all silicone is created equal and if I don't log things as they happen, I'm going to be in a world of hurt when I try to remember what I did and how the soap reacted.
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This batch was made with cyprus green mica and a FO that causes accelearated trace. I pretty much had to glop the soap into the molds. Even so the soap is attractive in its own way.
I love these little guys. They were molded in wilton silicone cupcake molds. The heart molds are red and pink. I bought them at Walmart. After several uses they are not coloring the soaps in anyway. The only issue I see so far is you have to be careful not to fill them too full. This will distort the soap a little. The dark colored soap is chocolate. The light ones were made with differing amounts of bolero mica from TKB. I rather like the sublty of the coloring.
A smaller amount of cyprus green mica was used here. It makes for a nice color. The molds are celtic knots. Nothing remarkable about this batch, except that I unmolded them after 24 hours and there was very little lost of detail.
Here's another batch I am pleased with. The colorant is bronze mica. I love it. The angel was from a tray mold. I had a very difficult time removing the soap. In fact I had to run hot water over the back of the mold. The angel still came out nice. This is one I have to redo and put at least some of the soap on the "for Marge" shelf.