Sunday, April 29, 2012

Great Cakes Soap Works, challenge #6.




Yes I am a bit slow off the mark, but, hey, it is better late than never. To really tell the truth, I have been putting off soaping, as I said in my last post. This last week I have been thinking how I really need to get back into it, so to get some inspiration I checked out some of my favourite soap blogs, and following some links to some other favourite ones that I had forgotten about and some new ones. As you do.... I felt like I wasted days, as you do.... Any way I re discovered Amy at Great cakes soap works and she has been running a weekly challenge. As you can tell I am 5 weeks behind but the beauty of this is that you can just jump in where you are.

So this weeks challenge is a Faux Funnel Pour. I do a similar pour for my Aussie Bush soap but for this I wanted to make it a bit different, I have been thinking about making a peppermint soap as I am totally out of peppermint, I wanted it to be green, naturally, so I went to the garden and picked some silverbeet to see how that would look, but one colour does not work with the fauz funnel pour, so I made two batches simultaneously, one with the silverbeet in the lye, and the other plain




The green colour started coming out instantly. This was very exciting for me.


And made the soap mix a really pretty grass green. I halved this pot and added charcoal to the other half.


I halved the plain batch and added alkanet root that had been infusing in oil for months to one half. To the other half I put in White Kaolin clay.


Here with the rest of the mess on my bench is the four pots with alkanet, kaolin clay, silverbeet and charcoal.


Sorry no photos of the actual pour but I am not very good at multi tasking. And the only person available to photograph was busy making our dinner, so that was a good enough excuse not to grab the camera, especially when I got to taste test the dinner before it went into the oven to bake for the afternoon. 

 The mix was a bit runnier than I was hoping for. But that meant that I had time to do a hanger swirl , again no photos. But it will be interesting to see when I cut it.


Now it is nicely tucked up beside our combustion stove, and as you can see,(or maybe not, the photo is worse than I thought it was)  that it is starting to gel. 

I ended up scenting it with 2 parts each of peppermint and lemon myrtle, and one part eucalyptus, or there abouts as my scales decided that weighing something that small was too hard. But the smell is great any way.
As you can see I have not got my most expensive mold for this batch, the reason for this is that most of my soap making stuff has been moved to the hut, but the hut is not quite ready for soap making to happen in yet,  so after giving it some thought I decided that this box would be just fine. I'll post photos of cut soap as soon as I get to cutting it.





Over all I am pretty happy with the end result, as I said earlier the mix was a bit runny so it swirled more than layered, but you can still see all four colours. The batch did get a bit too hot while it was gelling and there are a few small "volcano Pockets", but it looks pretty and smells great.

9 comments:

  1. How pretty, Louisa! I love how you colored it all naturally. I've never even heard of silverbeet - it really did turn a nice green!! Lovely contrast of colors and such an interesting swirl!

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    1. Thanks Amy, I think my husband and son are much happier now that I can put silverbeet (chard)into soap instead of onto their plates at dinner.

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    2. LOL! Ok, now I have heard of chard...may have to give it a try!

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  2. Wow, it looks fabulous! You did a great job with the natural colorants on this soap. :)

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  3. I love this soap it looks magical. Your coloring is perfect and how nice it is natural. Not sure what silverbeet is but I sure love the color it infused into!

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  4. Very nice! I love the natural colourants as well.

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  5. Wow, your soap is so lovely. So you make first the lye solution and afterwards you put the herbs to infuse... and do you mix the herbs together with the lye or do you sloop the obtained solution, without herbs?Thank you!

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  6. That silverbeet color is beautiful, Louisa! Green's my favorite color, so I give it a double thumbs up. The colors are subtle in the final bar and the swirl is just so pretty. Very nice! Going to check out silverbeet as I'm not familiar with it, but would like to try more natural colorants.

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  7. That first bar swirl is exquisite! What a lovely green and the black almost looks blue, like midnight. This is gorgeous!

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