Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
For everyone in the throes of the winter cold snap, today’s cold process recipe offers a little taste of spring. I made this Dandelion Zebra Swirl for a Great Cakes Soapworks Challenge. The colors are reminiscent of warm days, green grass and freshly sprouted tulips. The key to this technique is having a recipe that moves slowly and stays at a thin trace to get a beautiful layered swirl in the middle.
Celebrate the new year with a little berry bubbly — but not the kind served in a champagne glass! This ombre-inspired soap features a fabulous fragrance blend of Blackberry Cybilla and Champagne Fragrance Oil, which proved to be a sweet and invigorating combo. We used varying amounts of Red Lab Color for each layer separated by lines of one of my favorite micas, Aqua Pearl.
I started my soaping adventures when I was young (ah, sweet 16), and have learned that not everything turns out perfectly the first time. Sometimes despite your best efforts during a soaping session, you’ll get batches that just don’t quite turn out right. It’s just an inherent (and disappointing!) part of soaping. I’m a firm believer in ‘practice makes perfect,’ and being persistent in mastering your technique will help you achieve what you want in your soap, consistently. While there are hundreds of soaping variables that can cause problems, one huge factor that can determine the success of your soaping session is the fragrance or essential oil you use.
All Bramble Berry Fragrance and Essential oils go through a thorough testing process to ensure they perform well in cold process soap.
This is quick and easy cold process recipe doubles as a way to recycle scrap cold process bars. Simply shred bars with a cheese grater and you’ve got a great way to embellish freshly made cold process soap. This soap was fragranced with Cherry Blossom Fragrance Oil, which moves quickly (totally worth it); it smells fantastic in finished soap. If you finish with a little glitter, you’ve got one beautiful bar of soap!
This project combines the beautiful swirls you can achieve easily with cold process soap and the ability to layer designs in melt & pour. You can print out these cute holiday creatures from this template on water soluble paper and layer them on your soap to give your finished soaps some whimsical character.
This is a very simple swirl technique comes to us from our friends and Otion, and it yields dramatic end results. This is a great beginner cold process recipe, but it is important to keep the batter nice and thin during the entire process. That’s the key to getting nice rings of color and making the end swirl really pop.
For this sensuous soap, we may or may not have been inspired by a certain best-selling book that references multiple (or 50) shades of grey in its name. This Smoky Bay soap features clean, straight layers colored with four perfect gradients of grey. The orange in the middle provides the perfect burst of color!
This soap is scented with Indian Sandalwood Cybilla Fragrance Oil, which is remarkably strong in cold process soap. It does not discolor or accelerate trace and keeps its scent brilliantly. For a robust scent on the masculine side, this is a go-to stand by.
Pants! I was excited to do a fun sewing project that the kids could actually wear. I’ve been trying to learn how to sew all year and sharing those projects with you as I (slowly) learn (see: A Givember Sewing Project, Soothing Eye Pillow Sewing Tutorial, Handmade Pin Cushion with Walnut Seeds).
Pants seemed intimidating, but your basic pant for the littles actually come together pretty quickly when you have a good pattern and a few hours. A great (and free!) pattern for newborn pants can be found here and a pattern for older kids can be found here. Etsy also has a good selection of pants patterns that are available both pre-printed and as digital downloads that you print yourself.
Typically the patterns will come with their own instructions, but here’s a (very!) basic pant-making tutorial from a beginner’s perspective. I made pants for both Lily and Jamisen, so you’ll see two different colors of fabric in the pictures.
This soap ended up being a happy accident. We were originally going for a marbled scarf look (very similar to this pattern) but ended up with something quite different though equally as beautiful. We combined several dispersed micas to achieve soft pastel colors, and fragranced this soap with a blend featuring our brand new Palmerosa Essential Oil, giving it a gentle floral scent. The pouring pattern leads to an exquisite and interesting inside pattern during the cutting process. Here’s to happy accidents!
If the frost on car windshields this morning was any indication, we’re in for a long, cold winter. With temperatures dropping in the 20s this week (brrr!), we decided to embrace chilly December by making this winter weather-inspired soap.
The walnut shells in this tutorial not only make for realistic looking sand, but they’re also one of our favorite gentle exfoliants. This tutorial also uses our brand new Round Mini Silicone Column Mold to create a milky white moon above a stormy ocean (p.s. looking for more cold process embed molds? Check out the Mini Heart Silicone Mold and the Mini Square Mold too!).
Shout out to the Lathered Pony Soap Co., our Facebook Photo of the Week winner back in October, for inspiring this soap. It definitely makes winter feel a little less dreary! 
Click here to add everything you need for the embeds and the loaf to your Bramble Berry shopping cart!
We hope that everyone had a fantastic holiday yesterday — we sure did, and today we’ve got a very special cold process recipe for you. If Instagram ‘likes’ equal popularity, this Rainbow Squirty Swirls soap may be our most popular soap yet (see for yourself — more than 120 ‘likes,’ wow)! This tutorial uses the same technique as the Squirty Swirls recipe in the Soap Crafting book, and it’s an easy process that results in beautiful soap every time.
One thing to note about this recipe is that it can take 10 – 15 minutes to squirt all the soap into the mold, so it’s important to use a slow-moving recipe and a fragrance you know won’t accelerate trace. In this case, we used our new Amazon Lily & Rain Fragrance Oil, which performed beautifully and gave our rainbow soap a little tropical flair.
Ever since Tanya Rasley included some adorable samples of her lip balm in her April Soap Swap package, we’ve been hooked on her beautiful soaps and high-quality products. Tanya owns and operates Baby Duck Soap Co., and she offers a wide variety of cold process soaps, body butters, lip balms and sugar scrubs. Since then, I found her on Instagram and love to see her happy soap and family photos frequently. Read on to learn more about one inspirational small businesswoman.
If you plan on giving soapy presents for the holidays, we highly recommend ordering all your supplies now to ensure you get everything on time! To help you brainstorm fun holiday crafts, we gave our Valentine’s Day Embedded Hearts tutorial a jolly little twist. The technique is similar, but for this project we’re giving you a free PDF template so you can create your own tree and snowflake embeds from scratch. Not only that, this project uses two fantastic fragrances — Woodland Elves and Sleigh Ride – for a quintessential holiday scent.
Anne-Marie note: Elham sent me a baby care package months ago with a wonderful bar of beer soap. I couldn’t get over how nice it was in the shower with luxurious, soft lather that felt silky on the skin and rinsed away cleanly. She has graciously agreed to do a tutorial on this wonderful soap. Thank you Elham!
Hi, I’m Elham from SkinChakra® and I am so excited to be here for a guest post.
I have been a cosmetic chemist for almost half of my life, and I’ve had my own line of hand-crafted soap and skin care products for the past two years (in addition to my consulting activities in the cosmetic industry). I live in Bavaria in Germany, and so I have had the opportunity to experiment with countless beer soap variations. I am surrounded by small, handcrafted breweries, and I consider myself a specialist in beer soap. Not surprisingly, beer soap is one of my best selling products!
