Tutorials on soapmaking, bath fizzies, lotions and more
This is the last soap carving post for a while – unless there is a massive amount of interest in this long-lost craft (?).
The soap artist-e says:
“Carving soap is stupid hard, but smells neat.”
It is apparent to me that’s it’s a clear vote for soap over sandstone in a carver’s repitoire.
Blogger has accidentally decided that this blog is a Spam Blog. Whoops. So, they are in the process of okaying me again to post but for the meantime, the last final installment of the 3-D soap series is stuck in their system. Hopefully it will be freed up soon! =)
Anne-Marie
I already have my soaping project for next week! I just got this note from Elsa in Germany:
I hope everything is doing fine over there. Oh! I saw your picture with your husband today at the web page; you make a very nice couple. Congratulations!
I would like to know if if the cold cream soap can be made with the melt and pour process, that is the one I do. I have not seeing the cold cream among the products you offer on the page, and I wonder if it is not one of your preference. Do you have any good recipe on this? Should it be crafted with an specific soap base?
I suspect that making a melt and pour “cream soap” would take either the addition of 10 – 25% oil or maybe 10 – 25% actual cream. I’m going to experiment this week and share next week. If anyone has any hints, feel free to post them for me and shorten my learning curve!
Writing a business plan is like flossing or forcing yourself to exercise daily. It’s good for you. You know it’s good for you. It’s just not very much fun and has no immediate pay off.
The banks like business plans. Investors demand business plans. Supportive families feel better when you have a business plan. But, writing them is painful, long, tedious and just plain good ol’ fashioned hard work.
In my experience, the first step to writing a business plan is summarize the business. What will you sell? How will you sell it? Who will you sell to? In essence, this is an elevator pitch so if someone doesn’t make it into the details, your first page will tell them most of what they need to know about your company. This is like a cover letter introducing your company so include details like start-up costs, why customers will buy from you, why they will pay what you are asking and what you expect your profit to be.
If the bank or the potential investor is interested in your company, they can turn the page for the micro details of your operation.
The page should look like this:
Name of company
Principals involved in company (names/titles)
2 to 3 paragraph summary of company, including general financials, market size, and business model including products/services being sold and customer demographics
The first page is meant to be short and sweet, similar to the hypothesis page for research studies.
Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks for details on the rest of the business plan road-map.
I made Alphabet Soap last week and have already posted a bit about my forays into the project. Here is the final result of the first bars. This idea would be wonderful for a children’s birthday party (thank you Michelle from Blissful Creativity for the suggestion!) or as favors to give away at any celebration.
The “J” is what happens when you pour soap that is still steaming. A general rule for soap shapes is that if the soap is steaming or is too hot to stick your finger in, it will most likely melt your embedding soap item. The effect is quite unique and pretty but if it’s not the look you originally wanted, it can be disappointing. For clean-cut soap lines, make sure the soap is not steaming when you pour the overpour.
I arranged all the mini soap bars in a cookie pan. Then, I poured lightly scented (Pink Grapefruit and Spearmint Eucalyptus Fragrance Oils blended) and barely colored (Blue Mix LabColor), Aloe Vera Melt and Pour base gently over the entire batch. It took about 4 pounds to fill the cookie sheet.
In my haste to shove the soap word bar in place, I flipped the “R.” By the time I noticed, the soap had already formed a skin and the “R” had adhered to the bottom, making it immovable.
Check back tomorrow to see the final results of the entire cookie-sheet project.
Have a question about this blog post? Come join us at Bramble Berry’s Facebook page and we can help you out with any of your soapy questions!
These glorious frothy white peaks showed great promise. I was borderline euphoric with glee. It was not my original hope of non-Royal Icing but at least I had something to show for my hours of toiling over citric acid. The happiness lasted overnight.
Upon waking, I eagerly stole out into the kitchen, happier than a child on Christmas morning. I was not rewarded for my premature glee. The phrase about chickens, eggs and hatching springs to mind.
My glorious bath cupcakes had flattened out overnight. Sad. Disappointing. And also, foul smelling. In addition to being flat, they smelled vaguely like wet dogs.
I went to work, deflated myself.
None of my staff were the least bit sympathetic.
This email is copied below in all its glory, grammatical errors included. This was the only thing in the email. Nothing else. It’s a bit cryptic. I did my best to answer it in a professional and courteous manner. My expanded answer is below her note.
can i just put these items in the oven the cocoa butter ,canola and olive
oil to make the soap
No, you cannot put the three ingredients into the oven to make soap. There are a variety of steps and major safety considerations to take into account. I would highly recommend getting the DVD Learn to Make Cold Process Soap (https://www.brambleberry.com/books.html) or the book The Soapmaker’s Companion by Susan Mill Cavitch before you go any further in trying to make soap.
It’s a complex process that is easily learned, just like cooking, but it does take some time and research to learn it and ensure the safety of you and the people that use your soap.
Please let me know if you have any other questions.
I’ve posted a few times (here, here and here) about my inability to focus on one thing at a time for longer than about 10 seconds. The short recap is that supposedly I lose 2.1 hours a day in productivity because of my propensity to do 15 things at once. Check out my desk today – piles, mounds, and dead flowers abound; and that’s an improvement from yesterday. But, to be fair, I just got back from 2 weeks away and my mail stack was literally 6 feet tall (that’s not an exaggeration). I still have about a foot of it left to go through.
Well, it turns out that maybe I will be vindicated for my desk-piling ways! There’s a new article out from Inc. magazine that says
Focusing on one task to the exclusion of others isn’t even an option anymore.
Ha! Take that productivity experts! My messy desk, my 20 open emails, my 5 different Mozilla screens open are a necessary evil in today’s fast paced busy world. I feel like starting a new task just to celebrate!
That doesn’t mean that I’m not going to take some of my lessons from last month’s experiment of working on my Top 5 things every day and integrate them into my work life. I really liked having a clean desk for a change. And, I did make it through emails faster when I worked on them in one-hour increments, rather than flitting back and forth to them in-between tasks.
But, I’m not going to beat myself up quite as much now. After all, as the Inc. article states
We need to appreciate the ways in which multitasking and interruption have become essential to meeting the increasingly nonlinear demands of our jobs.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Satisfaction Font at myfonts.com and Linotype Zapfino are amazing. The fonts are affordable and an easy way to differentiate yourself from everyone else out there using the 64 free fonts that come pre-loaded with MS Publisher.
I posted a few weeks ago about the quantifiable effects of multi-tasking (short answer: they’re not good) and bemoaned my non-ability to do one task at a time. I made a little progress on doing one thing at a time (for about a week) but quickly slid right back into doing ten trillion things at once.
However, I am getting inspired to try the one-project-at-a-time idea… again (hopefully with more success this time!). I just read one of my favorite blogs this morning (Success Rocks! by Lea Woodward, a business coach specializing in heath & fitness companies) and she did the math. She figured out that doing 4 projects at once is way less efficient (from a $$$ standpoint) than finishing up 1 or 2 and then moving onto the next two. Whoops. Guess I should probably structure the way I’m running our multiple-company pursuits right now. My desk is currently so messy, piled with to-do piles, that when my supportive spouse brought me flowers yesterday, um… I totally missed them. Apparently, they’re on my desk at Bramble Berry right now complete with a card. He was a little puzzled why I hadn’t acknowledged them yesterday. And I’m just more than a little embarrassed that my desk has come to such a huge chaotic mess that I could miss an entire flower arrangement on it.
To read Lea’s article, click here.
As for me, starting tomorrow, I’m going to try to do one task for an hour and stay with it. Baby steps. Must start small. I’ll keep you posted on the daily struggle to stay on task, one task that is.
We used Fresca as a base for dying our Easter Eggs instead of water & vinegar. We believe the Fresca must be somewhat acidic as it very much allowed the color to stay on the eggs, without vinegar.
The thin layer of yellow you see in the above picture is Olive Oil. We dropped the egg into the Fresca-Labcolor mixture, making it first pass through the Olive Oil so that portions of the egg were coated in oil. The coated portions of the eggs did not take on any color, leaving a marbled or speckled effect.
The Fresca carbonation (with or without olive oil) made a really interesting effect as they bubbled up. They ended up making a fizzy bubbling pattern up the sides of the eggs. The eggs more near the end of the process had less of the fizzy bubbling pattern than the eggs from the freshly poured Fresca.
Other than the drawback of oily eggs, the experiment was a huge success! We loved the different and unique patterns each egg took on. We will definitely have this in our Easter Egg dying repertoire next year! Plus, as an added enticement for more Fresca Eggs, my daily of intake of protein (egg whites) is way cuter now that the eggs are brightly colored nuggets of fun.
I just got this question and wanted to share the joy with you.
I just read that the inside of a Duracell battery contains very concentrated Potassium Hydroxide.
Could I open a battery, dilute the contents and use it to make soap?
For future reference, batteries do not need to be purified to the same standards as skin safe products and you should not use battery components in your soap or toiletry making projects.
I get a lot of questions about soap and toiletries. I answer anywhere between 120 – 200 emails, every day. My staff answer that or double that daily. The most frequently asked question I’ve gotten this year has got to be about making soap from biodiesel glycerin. Glycerin is a natural byproduct from the biodiesel refining process. In the photo above, the glycerin is on the right. The biodisel is on the left. I personally would not ever use this glycerin as an ingredient in soap but there are a lot of people that would like to, purity concerns be damned. I am posting my thoughts on this interesting subject for all to see, in the hopes that it educates and possibly stems the endless tide of “I know this is a really strange question, but I make biodiesel and I was wondering ….” emails.
I do not personally recommend making soap with the byproduct glycerin from biodiesel manufacturing as I don’t think it’s entirely clean and pure and has some extra things like methanol in it. However, we do have a local customer in Bellingham, WA that does make a soft, smushy, gray looking bar of solid, slightly lathering soap with their byproduct bio-diesel. They have shared a bar with me and while it is soap, it is very soft and fairly poor in terms of lather. This is probably due to the fact that it is 100% glycerin which is not entirely saponifiable by lye.
If you really want to use the byproduct glycerin, I would recommend a more modified, traditional recipe such as:
16 oz. Coconut Oil
16 oz. Palm Oil
32 oz. Olive Oil
16 oz. Liquid Glycerin
Lye 9.4 oz.
Water 16 ounces
Please not that you must do a certain amount of safety precautions to make lye and I strongly recommend researching how to make cold process soap prior to attempting to make it. My favorite books The SoapMaker’s Companion by Susan Miller Cavitch to learn about soapmaking or The Natural Soap Book, also by Susan Miller Cavitch. My favorite DVD on the subject (by moi) would also be a good starting point for learning how to make CP soap.
The recipe above will be soft but will lather decently and last much longer than 100% glycerin soap.
Also, you might think about other things like fire-starters with your by-product liquid glycerin.
The C-Store (a small 100 store chain in California) will be wafting coffee aroma at their gas pumps to entice their gas users to come into the store and spend some money on coffee. It makes sense that a gas station would do anything it could to lure customers into the store. After all, gas stations don’t make their money from gas. They make it from selling chips, pop, candy and donuts to their road warrior customers. So, when you’re pumping gas, hopefully you’ll be able to smell that coffee whiff over the gas smell; the C-Store is counting on it!
