10 inch silicone loaf mold Archives

Crescent Moon Cold Process Soap Tutorial

September 27, 2016 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

Fall officially started last week, which means it’s time for Halloween projects! Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. It’s an excuse to embrace dark colors, moody fragrances and spooky themes. For this Crescent Moon Cold Process Soap, I wanted to create a bar of soap that would be appropriate for Halloween and beyond.

These bars are a sophisticated take on Halloween with a striking yet simple design. Black Oxide gives the bars a dark gray hue. If you want a darker color, feel free to add more colorant. Just keep in mind the more you add, the darker the lather will be. The crescent moon shape is created with melt and pour soap and the Mini Moon Silicone Column Mold. Gold Sparkle Mica on top really pops against the dark gray. The bars are scented with Tobacco & Bay Leaf Fragrance Oil, which is a wonderfully smoky and complex fragrance. It’s great for both men and women.

This project is appropriate for both beginning and intermediate soapers. It requires a medium to thick trace, so you don’t need to worry about over blending with the stick blender. But, keep temperatures in mind. Melt and pour soap begins to melt around 120-130 ° F. If this soap gets too hot, the moon embed could melt. I recommend soaping around 100-110 ° F and not insulating the soap to keep temperatures cool.

[Read more…]

Cedar & Amber Cold Process Soap Tutorial

September 15, 2016 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

Washington state is known as “The Evergreen State” for the abundance of trees in the area. They have a fresh scent and vivid green color throughout the year. These Cedar & Amber Cold Process Soaps were inspired by the evergreen scenery of the Pacific Northwest. Classic fall colors are layered upon each other using the “spoon-plop” technique. The spoon plop technique is perfect for beginners. All you have to do is spoon in random colors of soap. It creates a unique look in every bar.

The new Cedar and Amber Fragrance Oil gives these bars an earthy, rustic scent. It’s a great unisex fragrance oil with notes of pine, cedar, clove and amber. It’s the perfect complement to the earthy colors in this bar. The soap feels great as well, thanks to moisturizing oils like meadowfoam, olive and sweet almond.

[Read more…]

Simple Castile Cold Process Soap Tutorial

August 30, 2016 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

Cold process soap made with 100% olive oil is known as “Castile” soap. It is thought to originate in the Castile region of Spain – thus the name, Castile soap! Olive oil is a staple soaping oil that can be found in many cold process recipes. Olive oil contributes moisturizing properties to soap. It also gives the bars a gentle and creamy (read: small, lotion-like) lather, making it a great choice for dry or sensitive skin.

When you create soap with only olive oil (Castile soap), the batter takes quite a while to come to trace. Castile soap also takes longer to harden in the mold than most cold process recipes that contain hard oils like palm or coconut. In fact, Castile soap can require up to two weeks in the mold before it can be removed! But, there are a few tricks to help Castile soap harden more quickly. This recipe has a 20% water discount, which helps the soap harden much faster. To learn more about how and when to water discount recipes, click here.

Another trick for hardening Castile soap more quickly is sodium lactate. Sodium lactate is the sodium salt of lactic acid. It’s commonly used as a food preservative, and is also used in lotion recipes for its humectant properties. When added to lye water, sodium lactate helps cold process soap harden faster. I use it in almost all my cold process batches, especially when using a silicone mold. The usage rate is 1 teaspoon sodium lactate per pound of oils in the recipe. It’s an optional step but I highly recommend it, especially for this recipe! Learn more about sodium lactate here.

The final trick to helping this soap harden in the mold faster is gel phase. ‘Gelling’ and ‘gel phasing’ in cold process soap refers to a part of the saponification (soapmaking) process where the soap gets warm and gelatinous – up to 180 degrees. Heat speeds up the saponification process. Hot process soap, for example, can be cut usually within one day, and can be used right away. Soaping on the warmer side (about 130 ° F) and insulating the soap for 24 hours helps promote gel phase. If your room is cold, you may want to place the soap on a heating pad to keep it warm. Learn more about gel phase here. With a 20% water discount, sodium lactate and gelling, I was able to unmold and cut this soap in 2 days.

This soap is simple with no colorants or design elements. To give the soap a little interest, I stamped each bar with the Savon Soap Stamp. Savon de Marseille (aka: Marseille soap) is traditional soap made from vegetable oil and olive oil in Marseille, France. I thought it was very fitting for this recipe! For tips on stamping soap, check out this video. I scented this batch with Tomato Leaf Fragrance Oil, which is a wonderfully herby, green and fresh fragrance.

[Read more…]

Neon Geometric Melt & Pour Soap Tutorial

March 22, 2016 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Melt & Pour Soap

If you’re ready to celebrate spring, it may be time to break out a little neon! These Neon Geometric Melt and Pour Bars incorporate bright shades of green, pink, purple and yellow to create a complex design. The geometric shapes are created by pouring the soap while the 10″ Silicone Loaf Mold is propped at an angle. It’s scented with the Yuzu Cybilla Fragrance Oil, which smells fresh, bright and citrusy. These bars would be perfect for Easter, without being “too Easter-y.”

This melt and pour project requires some patience, but the results are well worth it. Before pouring each layer, the bottom layer needs to be cool and firm enough to support the layer on top. This project also requires a solid understanding of melt and pour temperature. It’s crucial to pour the layers while the soap is hot enough that it’s fluid, but not too hot that it melts the layers below. Make sure you have a spray bottle full of 99% isopropyl alcohol nearby to ensure the layers stick together.

This soap is a little tricky, and more suited for advanced melt and pour soapmakers. If you’ve never made melt and pour soap before, the Basic Melt and Pour Layers video on Soap Queen TV is a great place to start. I would then recommend attempting a simpler layered project to get the hang of it. Both the Ginger Patchouli Melt and Pour Bars and the Pumpkin Pie Melt and Pour Soap projects are great places to start.

[Read more…]

Pantone 2016 Spin Swirl Cold Process Soap (Two Ways!)

January 14, 2016 Filed Under: Bath & Body Tutorials, Cold Process Soap

Keeping up with trends is fun, but it can also be difficult. They are constantly changing! One of my favorite ways to keep up with color trends is with the Pantone Color of the Year. This year, Pantone announced two colors for 2016, Rose Quartz and Serenity. When I first saw the color combination I immediately thought of a baby shower or cotton candy. But with time, I have started to see this color combination in more sophisticated applications and they have really grown on me. What do you think of them?

For this project, I was inspired by this photo to create a spin swirl cold process project using Rose Quartz and Serenity hues. I also added a deep purple for contrast. The spin swirl technique was made popular by Amy of Great Cakes Soapworks during a recent Soap Challenge Club. It’s a very difficult design; it requires layering multiple colors of thin trace soap, then spinning the mold to create a unique swirl effect. The key is to use a slow-moving recipe and fragrance oils that don’t accelerate.

Even with these precautions, the soap can still thicken before you’re done pouring. This is exactly what happened during this soaping session. I got about halfway through pouring the soap when it became too thick to swirl properly. Rather than calling it a loss, I decided to stop pouring and swirl the soap already poured into the mold. Then I used the leftover thick soap to create a spoon plop design in the 10″ Silicone Loaf Mold. I’m so pleased with how both batches turned out!

The recipe and tutorial below is enough soap to create both batches. If you prefer to only make one or the other, you can resize the recipe below to fit the mold. The Lye Calculator makes this process easy; just add each oil amount into the calculator, select 5% superfat and hit “Calculate.” Then, enter a new oil weight and click “Resize Batch.” Continue this process until you achieve a total yield that fits into the mold. Learn more in the How to Resize Cold Process Soap Recipes post.

[Read more…]

Rainbow Hearts Melt & Pour on Soap Queen TV

February 17, 2015 Filed Under: Melt & Pour Soap

This Rainbow Heart Melt and Pour soap will make you smile with plenty of sparkle, color and hearts. Inspired by a previous Soap Queen tutorial of the same name, the design has been updated to include more hearts and color in each bar. Pink Grapefruit Fragrance Oil gives the project a bright and happy scent.

This melt and pour soap includes six vibrantly colored heart embeds created with the Mini Heart Silicone Column Mold. Color blocks are used to give each heart a different rainbow hue. To help the layers and embeds adhere, having a bottle of 99% isopropyl alcohol nearby is crucial. Spraying rubbing alcohol in between and after pouring layers helps the soap stick together, and disperses any bubbles on top.

[Read more…]

Queen of Hearts Cold Process

December 4, 2014 Filed Under: Cold Process Soap

Inspired by the regal character from Alice in Wonderland, this Queen of Hearts Cold Process soap is full of eye-catching contrast. Created with melt and pour embeds, a cold process base and soap frosting, this sophisticated soap will make a fantastic Valentine’s gift (it will be here sooner than you think!). LoveSpell and Baby Rose fragrance oils create a rosy, warm and slightly juicy scent blend that is wonderfully feminine.

[Read more…]