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.
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.
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! 
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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.
In celebration of the release of Soap Crafting, we’re continuing our special series of cold process tutorials inspired by the book. If you missed it, check out yesterday’s awesome beer soap (yes, we said beer) and then get ready for today’s recipe filled with another fun additive.
Sweet, juicy and perfect for a picnic, strawberries are one fantastic fruit to eat. They also happen to be wonderful in soap as well. This recipe includes fresh strawberry puree, real cream and strawberry seeds. If you haven’t experimented with additives in cold process soap yet, this is an excellent place to start. One thing to keep in mind: because this soap has so many natural additives, it has a shelf life of about 6 months.
What You’ll Need:
1. 05 oz. Cocoa Butter
8.75 oz. Coconut Oil
17.5 oz. Olive Oil
3.5 oz. Palm Oil
1.75 oz. Palm Kernel Flakes
2.45 oz. Sweet Almond Oil
4.9 oz. Sodium Hydroxide
10.4 oz. distilled water
1 tablespoon Strawberry Seeds
1.2 oz. cream
3 oz. strawberry puree
Fragrance blend of:
.8 oz. Strawberry Fragrance Oil
.8 oz. Sun Ripened Raspberry Fragrance Oil
.5 oz. Summer Fling Fragrance Oil
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If you have never made cold process soap before, I highly recommend you get a couple of basic recipes under your belt. This is not a recipe to make on your first try at soapmaking. Check out this (free!) 4-part series on cold process soap making, especially the episode on lye safety. Bramble Berry carries quite a few books on the topic as well, including this downloadable book on making cold process soap.
COLOR PREP: Disperse 1 teaspoon of the Fired Up Fuchsia into 1 tablespoon of Sunflower or Sweet Almond Oil (or any other liquid oil) and 2 teaspoons Titanium Dioxide into 2 tablespoon of liquid oil. Use a mini mixer to get clumps worked out smoothly.
ADDITIVE PREP: Using a food processor, grind up about a dozen fresh strawberries to yield 3 oz of puree. Then, portion out 1.2 oz. cream into a second container. Set both containers aside.
FRAGRANCE PREP: Create the fragrance blend by combining the Strawberry, Sun Ripened Raspberry and Summer Fling Fragrance Oils in a glass bowl. Mix well and then set aside.
SAFETY FIRST: Suit up for safe handling practices! That means goggles, gloves and long sleeves. Make sure kids, pets, and other distractions and tripping hazards are out of the house or don’t have access to your soaping space. Always soap in a well-ventilated area.
ONE: Once the oils and lye water mixture are under 120 degrees F (and ideally within 10 degrees of each other), slowly and carefully add the lye water mixture to the oils and stick blend to light trace. Set aside to cool. If you’d like a harder bar of soap that lasts longer in the shower and releases faster from the mold, you can add Sodium Lactate to the cooled lye water. Use 1 teaspoon of Sodium Lactate per pound of oils in the recipe.
TWO: After the lye and oils have been thoroughly stick blended together (think thin trace – not thick), split the batter into two cups: one with about 1.5 cups of batter and the second with about 2 cups of batter.
THREE: In the original container, add the strawberry puree and 1 tsp. of the dispersed Fired Up Fuchsia Colorant.
FOUR: In the second 2-cup container, add 2 teaspoons of dispersed Fired Up Fuchsia.
FIVE: In the remaining 1.5 cup container, add the Strawberry Seeds.
SIX: Add 1 tablespoon of Titanium Dioxide to the cup with the Strawberry Seed batter. Add another tablespoon of Titanium Dioxide to the cup with the strawberry puree to lighten this color up. It’s quite a dark, almost brown color, without it. Using a wire whisk, thoroughly mix the colorants and additives into each cup of soap batter.
SEVEN: When the batter has reached a thin trace, pour about half the container of cream (.6 oz.) in the container with the Strawberry Seeds. Pour the remaining half (.6 oz.) into the container with the strawberry puree. Using a wire whisk or a stick blender, mix the cream into the batters.
EIGHT: Split the fragrance blend in thirds, pouring approximately .7 oz. of the oil into each cup of batter.
NINE: Pour approximately one-third of the strawberry puree batter into the silicone mold.
TEN: Starting at one end of the mold, pour about half of the pink-colored batter in a wave pattern until you reach the other end of the mold. Do the same with half of the white-colored batter.
ELEVEN: Pour almost all of the remaining puree soap into the mold. Save about a half cup to complete the final top design.
TWELVE: While pouring over a spatula, pour two-thirds of the remaining pink soap over the top of puree soap. Tamp the mold on the table to release bubbles and smooth out the surface, and then use the same spatula technique to pour two-thirds of the remaining white soap. Tamp the mold again to release bubbles.
THIRTEEN: Pour the remaining puree soap on top of the mold in a loop-de-loop pattern, from one end of the mold to the other (far right). Then, pour the remaining white soap over it, making a stretched out, horizontal zig-zag from right to left (center). Finally, pour the pink soap in an opposite zig-zag to fill in the space left by the white soap (far right).
FOURTEEN: Insert a chopstick of dowel about 1/4 of an inch into the soap. Start in the bottom left-hand corner and drag the tool up and down through the soap, slowly making your way to the far end of the mold.
Spray the entire top with 91% – 99% Isopropyl Alcohol to reduce soda ash. Cover and insulate for 24 hours and unmold after 3-4 days. Allow to cure for 4-6 weeks and enjoy!
AKA: Everything but the kitchen sink soap! When we were shooting the photos for my upcoming book Soap Crafting, the artistic director for Storey Publishing wanted a great shot of some soap batter with multiple additives. Of course I obliged, splitting a batch into 5 oddly-sized parts and adding anything I happened to have on hand. The result was a crazy herbed-up super exfoliating soap worthy of cleaning the Hulk himself, but not being one to keep a recipe to myself I just had to share. I was too happy with the scrubby results not to!
