Easter Archives - Page 3 of 3

Cut Out Soaps – Marbeling Option

February 29, 2008 Filed Under: Melt & Pour Soap

What to do with all of the excess soap from the cut outs? It’s a shame to let anything go to waste.

Make sure you have a wide, flat mold available to pour the soap into. I like to use silicone baking molds because the soap pops out easily. Hold one color in each hand and pour a little into the mold. Since the mold is so shallow, the soap will harden quickly. Pick up the third color and start alternativng colors until the pattern starts appearing.

Pour thinly enough to ensure you can easily push through the soap. These soaps end up unique and different. Each flower has a varied color pattern and look.

Check back tomorrow to learn about embedding.

Cut Out Soaps – Pouring & Injection

February 28, 2008 Filed Under: Melt & Pour Soap

Click for Day One – Set Up & Materials

After you’ve assembled your materials, it’s time to make the flower cut-outs. Remember, you can use these techniques with almost any cookie cutter – not just cute daisies.

Making the Flowers

Step One: Melt the white melt and pour in the microwave on short bursts to ensure a thorough melt without boiling. Since this soap is such a small part of the final bar, there’s no need to scent it. But, if you’re using these soaps on their own (perhaps a cute little spring hostess gift when packaged nicely in an organza bag?), be sure to fragrance them.

Step Two: Color the soap. In 8 ounces of white soap, I used 4 drops of Non-Bleeding Blue. The Yellow took 4 drops of Liquid Yellow and the Pink took 10 drops of Liquid Pink. Non-Bleeding Liquid Colors are nice because what you see is what you get. There’s no bleeding and little fading in the sunlight. Add one drop of color at a time until you achieve a color you love.

Step Three: Pour into a shallow pan. I love silicone brownie baking pans because the soap pops out easily but you can use anything that is flexible (this means no glass baking pans).

Step Four: When soap is hardened (about 15 minutes), pop the soap out and immediately start to make your cut-out soaps. If the soap is fresh, it will cut easier. Old melt and pour soap tends to evaporate its excess liquid to the air, leaving a hard, “chewy” soap that won’t easily slide a cutter through.

Step Five: Freshly made soap is very moist. It will glue itself to saran wrap and create a self-sealing lock. Before laying your buds down, push out the final cut-out (little flower cuts into the center of big flowers).

Step Six: Make a small batch of white pastel soap with a contrasting color. This time, it’s okay to heat the base a little warmer than usual. You want the soap to be a little hot to ensure good adhesion to surrounding soap. Draw up the contrasting color into the dropper, double check that your daisies are sealed tightly on the saran wrap and gently fill the centers of your daisy with hot, contrasting colored melt and pour.

Step Seven: Wait until the centers are set. Gently peel off the flowers. Bonus round: exclaim, repeatedly, to anyone within earshot, “Oh my goodness! Look how cute these are! Are they not the cutest little soaps you’ve ever seen?!”

Tomorrow, we’ll cover embedding the soap.

Using Labcolors to dye Easter Eggs

April 9, 2007 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News

We dyed Easter Eggs this weekend with Labcolors.

For the uninitiated, Labcolors are a colorant system for making cool, consistent colors in soaps, lotions and water based toiletries. Since they are essentially FD&C colors, I figured that they would work swimmingly for dying Easter Eggs.

And, I was right…

The basic egg dying was like this:

3 oz. water
1 Tbsp Apple Cider Vinegar
15 drops Labcolor

Drop the hard-boiled egg in, let it sit for 1 to 3 minutes and voila, dyed Easter Egg.

Of course, this wasn’t enough for the adventurous in our house, so we proceeded to make a huge mess dying Easter eggs using Wesson Olive Oil and Fresca soda. Photos of that and instructions for how to use Fresca (calorie free!) soda for making your Easter eggs look very fizzily cool.

Easter is here. Make soap instead of dyeing eggs!

March 29, 2007 Filed Under: Bramble Berry News

Easter is almost here and I know your family is probably descending upon your house (not that I’m not thrilled and excited to see them!). For a fun afternoon activity, after all the children are in a post-sugar-induced-blank-stare-state and the adults are just thrilled that the furniture has lived to see another year sans chocolate hand prints, Bramble Berry has the most adorable kit for making Easter Soap.

For $30, you’ll have enough materials to make, package and label 8 – 10 bars of adorable Easter themed soap – and memories of fun creative family fun to last a lifetime.