Dirt Diver Soap

Another old favorite...

It amazes me that there is an actual fragrance that smells like dirt. I, mean, actual, potting soil dirt. Call me weird, but I love it! And so do a few other kooks who can't seem to get enough of it.

I'll admit that I'm not brave enough to shower with this one, and I love using it as a kitchen soap.

Cherry Blossom Kiss V2

So I made some soap...Cherry Blossom Kiss. I went a little too heavy on the colorant. I wanted a pinkish tint, not a full-blown red. It smells dee-vine though:)

A Sample Box Soap

 

I'm getting my feet wet again. I have not made any soap since August! Caribbean Queen is one of my favorite, yet most challenging soaps to make. I love the scent-very tropical and fruity. The technique on the other hand, requires a quick hand. This is only my second time making this particular soap because I incorporate 4 different colors. However, in this photo, you can really only see 3, maybe 3-1/2 lol...I used yellow for the base, then swirled green, purple, and what was supposed to be a pinkish/red, but it turned out lavender, so it looks like purple, lavender, and green.

But it's all good! It smells heavenly, and it's for a sample box I'm participating in this month.

I Call It Apple Sauced...

I couldn't decide between Apple Sauced and Apple Saucy, but I wanted the name of the soap to be one that conveyed action more so than description (sauced meaning the act of saucing, and saucy merely describing the apple...yeah, yeah, yeah...) An-t-way, please meet Apple Sauced. This is another fall/limited edition soap that smells of....okay, give up? Well it aint apple sauce if that's what you were thinking! The core of this fragrance of course is apple. I bought Big Red Apple from Southern Soapers in their going out of business sale, but it didn't wow me. Frankly, apples don't wow me much at all unless you shove it on a stick, drench it in caramel or chocolate then roll them around in a bed of chopped peanuts (Mrs. Prindle anyone???) Okay, I digress, but what else is new? I wanted an autumn scent, so I blended it with a few drops of anise essential oil and about an oz of another apple blend that I wasn't crazy about either. But blended altogether, I like it-very mucho. I personally think I could have used more anise because I wanted a spicy kick to it, but I'm relatively pleased with the outcome.

These bars are not symmetrical. I seriously under-calculated my formula which puzzled me. Olive oil-check. Coconut oil-check. Palm (organic)-check. Castor oil-check. Shea butter-check. I ran out of soybean oil which explains why my mold was only about 3/4's full. Oh well. I had to quickly compensate for the shortage, so I stuck these balls on top to give it a lil more sumthin' sumthin'. Do you likey? I also wanted this soap to be as natural as possible, so I used French red clay for colorant. I added a heaping tablespoon directly to my lye mixture. This French clay is more of a brick/orange-ish color than red, so that's why it's not red. Overall, I think it's a winner. Now I need to make more soap balls and a matching limited edition scrub...

First Soap For Fall

Yes, the title of this post is lame-o, but I am still pondering the name of this baby. It didn't quite turn out the way I wanted. One of these swirls was supposed to be orange, but I used extra virgin olive oil as opposed to the pomace variety, and I ended up with this. The scent is TO DIE FOR! I went very dark on this one. I am usually the sweet, sometimes musky type of scent lover, but this one is scented with 50% anise essential oil which I am in love with. It reminds me of those black jelly beans. I hated those damned things when I was a kid. I would pick them out of my Easter basket and give them to my uncle or my mother, and they would gobble them up. Puke! Anyway, my tastes have grown much more refined in my old age, and while I still can't stand black jelly beans, I love the smell of anise and black licorice. Oh yeah, the other 50% is a blend of orange, cinnamon, ginger, and clove.

 
I CPOP'd this soap because I personally cannot wait to use it. I'm thinking of making a scrub and a candle out of this blend too. It's that delicious...

The Razz Bar

Here's my latest salt bar-The Razz. I was much more successful this time because I cpop'ed it for about an hour and a half. It made it much easier to slice without it crumbling all on me like the last batch. It's scented in a heavenly raspberry scent with just a dollop of heavy cream. I love the little white salt flecks that are peaking through the bars. Most recipes call for sea salt, but I used dendritic salt. The granules are teeny-tiny like table salt, so these bars don't look "grated" like many salt bars look. I'm pleased with the results....

Caribbean Queen Soap

I was jonesing to make something, so I decided to turn the fragrance I used for my Caribbean Queen bath bomb cupcake into a soap. It's an explosion of everything fruity and sweet-like a SweeTart. Every whiff conjures up a different scent-strawberry, cherry, mango, pineapple, grapefruit, and madarin orange...I had to work with the quickness to mix up these different colors. I only soap using the room-temperature method-no heating or temp measures, so once that lye mixture hits the oil (hard and soft) mixture, it's go-time! I used a total of 4 different colors-green, yellow, red, and orange, and I'm pleased with the results, but I can't stop thinking about Fruit Loops and Trix cereal now. I used to eat that stuff dry out of the box...I've never been so tempted to bite soap before-seriously. I love this one!

A Makeover for Yuzu Crazy

I am sooo ready for warmer-and sunnier days! This cold and dank weather is depressing. I've decided to give one of my all-time favorite scents, cranberry yuzu, a much-needed, happier makeover. It's bright and inviting, and the smell literally makes my eyeballs pop with each sniff. I can never get enough of the sweet, tangy aroma of cranberry and yuzu. I was really going for a dark pink, but of course, I didn't use enough raspberry pop oxide, but I do love my poppy seed topping though. Up next: a new look for Lothario. It's time to brighten things up around here...

Old Yuzu Crazy

An All-Natural Soap

 

I L-O-V-E this soap...fo' real! I've decided to do an entire line of all-natural soaps. "Well, aint that what you already do?" Not entirely. I use synthetic fragrance oils (until you can prove to me that Lemon Chiffon comes from a plant, then it's synthetic), and man-made oxides in many of my products, but I think I should get some extra credit for using only pthalate-free fragrances. Anyway, here is my first official soap of the "Au Naturale" line. I call it Naturale 1106, but it smells so....natural and clean-like you would really expect a soap to smell if-you-know-what-I-mean. I can definitely say that my olfactory senses are becoming much more sophisticated and accustomed to the aroma of essential oils. At first, I could not stand the smell of any essential oil! They smelled like, well, plants! Duh! They are derived from plants, and pure essential oils are expen$ive as hell! I have to really budget for pure essential oils. The good thing about them is a little goes a long way. This batch was almost 3 pounds, and it only took 1.7 oz of pure essential oils to scent it-and it's strong! To the unsophisticated palate, it will smell very medicinal and plant-like. But the more you inhale the aromas, it sort of brings a calm to your overall senses. I'm smelling this one constantly. I cannot wait to try it!

Oh, I forgot to mention exactly which essential oils I used for this batch: rosemary, lime, and bergamot. The soap is uncolored, and the little brownish streak you see throughout is actually rhassoul clay-mined deep beneath the Atlas Mountains in Eastern Morocco*.







*source

Sensuous Rose Soap

I've been a lazy blogger lately. I just don't feel like doing NADA-but I managed to squeak out a new batch of rose-scented soap. I call it Sensuous Rose. The bottom layer is scented in English Tea Rose, and the top is scented in aromatic sandalwood. I love it! Yep, that's about it, lol...

First New Soap of 2011

Again Happy New Year! Is it me, or has readership fallen off? Nobody comments anymore, and I miss that (sniffle, sniffle....)!

Anyway, here's my first soap of the year, and it looks like I was celebrating a little too much when I made it. The colors are all wrong-but it smells nice! It's Wicked-version 5 or 6. This is the one soap that I change the design of each and every time, and it seems to get wickeder each time. Fool that I am used that brick red oxide which is really nothing more than orange/brown if you ask me...I tried to offset it with a lot of purple, and this is what I came up with. The scent is Black Raspberry & Vanilla-probably one of my top 3 scents of all time. I do love the black swirls though. This is also a palm-free soap. I'm really low on palm oil, so I'm reserving what I have left for a more elaborate batch I'm planning. I used extra virgin olive oil and unrefined shea butter, so my batter was a greenish-orange tint before I colored the soap. As a result, the top is kinda orange-ish-go figure. I really wanted more bells and whistles for this one, but I was so pressed to make some soap, that I didn't design my project before starting. Well, here's to you Wicked: You prove every time that beauty's only skin deep...yeah, yeah...

Fashion Fail!

Yep, that's the name of my new soap! Why? Because the outcome reminds me of these starlets who try to be all original and avant-garde with their fashion choices, but the end result ends up looking like a hot mess! The only redeeming quality about this soap is the smell. It's essential oils galore: lavender, sweet orange, patchouli, litsea cubea, and rosemary. The lavender buds make the soap look like it has the chicken pops (as my little cousins used to always say). Anyway, I still love it. I did Mr. Blackwell proud...

Raspberry Hooray!

 Raspberry Hooray

Meet my second official holiday soap: Raspberry Hooray. This time I stayed kind of true to what we expect in a holiday scent: something sweet, edible-smelling, and fun, and this one does not disappoint! Last year, I made this soap, Lardy For the Party in the same scent, and it was a hit. I really didn't know what the reception would be, but i had one customer buy 4 of them at once, and I only made 9 bars, so yeah, I was pretty pleased, lol. Unlike Lardy, however, Raspberry Hooray is totally vegan.

 Lardy For The Party

 Raspberry Hooray contains top notes of raspberry, pear, and apple, with middle notes of Madagascar Vanilla, sugarcane, butter, and maple, and bottomed out with a shot of vanilla extract. Okay, that's the official scent description, but I gotta tell ya: All I smell is pure raspberry and cream. That was all I needed to convince me to use this fragrance! Raspberry Hooray will make its offficial day-bew in the coming weeks....

Naughty or Nice? How About Nicety!

I’m not waiting til the last minute like I always do to start crafting my holiday offerings. I will have 3 official holiday soaps this year. I usually only do one, but these soaps will carry you into the Hanukkah, Christmas, and Kwanzaa season and beyond! For this one, I deviated from the traditional holiday scents like sugar cookie or frankincense and myrrh, or basically anything with vanilla in it and decided to go darker.

First up is Nicety. It’s part naughty and part nice. There was also a song back in the day called Nicety. Whatever happened to Michel’le? Oh well, I digress (when don’t I digress…) I wanted Nicety to be “sooty” not entirely black, but I had a heavy hand with the black oxide. I should have only used a pinch instead of 3! You can barely see the poppy seeds in the body of the soap, so I compensated by sprinkling little sooty balls on top. The soap is scented in a blend of sweet orange and patchouli (love this combo-the ultimate naughty meets nice) with a little hint of fir needle to give it an unexpected “Hmmmm” factor. No, this soap doesn’t smell like a fir tree. It smells like a nice romp in the woods with someone you don’t mind getting naughty with..

My New Cupcake Soaps!

I'm officially stating for the record: I aint never making cupcake soaps with a glycerin base again! (Okay, that was a double negative which cancels itself, so technically I have given myself a window of opportunity...) My newest cupcakes are CPOP soaps, and while it's a messy, yucky process, the outcome is well worth it in my biased opinion.

 The Big Damn Lemon Cupcake Lust

 Smashing Pumpkin Cupcake Lust

 
Here we have The Big Damn Lemon Cupcake Lust and Smashing Pumpkin Cupcake Lust. If you know my lemon well, you know why it's called "The Big Damn Lemon". Smashing Pumpkin was a beautiful, deep orange, but the color straight faded-the vanilla stabilizer perhaps? Anyway, it's a blend of straight pumpkin, a minute amount of cassia essential oil  for added scent, brown sugar, with a generous dash of ground cinnamon and gold soap sparkle. They'll make their debuts in my new online shop around the 15th-ish.

Bitten

I'm very fond of sequels even if they're not as good as the original. 

For example, everybody (I'm speaking very broadly here) loves Grease, but not me. I love Grease II. I think the music was better, and I loved the storyline much better than the first one. And I just think Michael Carrington is way cuter than Danny Zuko. Sue me...

Anyway, I'm saying all that to say that Bite Me has a sequel, and it's called Bitten. It's the same delicious blackberry sage scent, but it looks noticeably different. I decided to put some fancy piping on the top this time, and I LOVE how it turned out. Once again, I botched up the color. I added too much brick red oxide, so it looks dark orange instead of that pretty berry color I had with Bite Me. See, my problem is, I am either singing or talking on my phone while I'm making soap instead of concentrating on the task at hand...

So here is Bitten-all dressed up and no shower to play in. I'm saving this one for my website launch. Til the next post...

Dirty Soap

It's kinda obvious how I came up with the name for this one. It's yet another half-successful attempt at creating the chocolate line. I'm getting closer, but life's littlest accidents can turn into something unique and fascinating to behold...sometimes.

The scent is actually a very crisp and light olive blossom. I actually love the pale green color-another perfect accident (hopefully I can duplicate it). The scent seized like crazy on me, so some of the bars look extra dirty, lol. Ahhh, this one is truly full of accidents, but the soap is perfectly perfect to use. This one's made with olive, avocado, and organic palm oil and will make its auspicious debut in a few weeks!

Yuzu Crazy

This soap holds a special place in my heart for many reasons. One, it reminds me of my very first successful batch of soap-Grapefruit Lily. I loved that soap. If I could describe what happiness smelled like, that would be it, but I can't remember where I got it from. 

 (Grapefruit Lily)

 

Two, it’s scented in one of my favorite spring/summer scents: cranberry yuzu. This soap is called Yuzu Crazy because I am crazy about this scent. Yuzu is often called the Japanese grapefruit, but it’s origins are actually from China . It’s very tart and aromatic, and the actual fruit looks like a hybrid of a lemon, a lime, and a small grapefruit. It looks rotten in this pic, doesn’t it?

(Image courtesy of Wikipedia)

I think this is my 3^rd batch using this scent. While the scent to me is overwhelmingly yuzu with a touch of cranberry, I decided to make the color more cranberry-ish. The bottom looks almost translucent, and I sprinkled the top with raspberry seeds-just because! Yuzu Crazy is part of my official Limited Edition line. There are 5 in all. You’ve met Onion Bagel earlier, and next week I’ll introduce you to Edward Cullen (Yes, I’ve been bitten by the Twilight saga) and Miss Priss. Stay tuned….

 

Brown Sugar Baby Cakes and Special Packaging

 

 I'm starting to like my alligator-textured soaps. While it does take away from the colors, it's different, and cpop'ing seems to intensify the fragrance. I made these little cakes with leftover batter from a log batch made on the same day. I absolutely love this scent! It's a Bath and Body Works dupe of Brown Sugar & Fig, and it's fragrance heaven. It's almost raisin-y, but the brown sugar and the fig really compliment each other well.  Here's a pic of the loaf I made. I haven't sliced it yet because I can't decide if I want to make these a thick limited edition or slice them regularly. I need to order more oils, I'm almost out-Yikes!

I'm also experimenting with packaging, and I think I've found something I finally like. Here's a look/see. At first I just wrapped them in this cute paper and slapped a label on it, but then I decided to add a strip of hot pink cardstock to make the package POP! The label also doesn't get lost in the busy background. Whatcha think?

My New Test Batch Molds

 (The lighting is poor...I was rushing)

Okay not exactly, but they could be. I obsess over love silicone molds! They are so easy and convenient to work with because you don't have to line them and you only need to swish some water in them to clean them out. What I'm not so fond of though is the way they bunch over when you fill them with heavy soap batter. My Wilton loaf mold has become permanently misshapen, but I'm still using it.

I found these 2 pound loaf molds on Wholesale Supplies Plus (and they ship for free!) and they have these sturdy edges so the soap doesn't get all lean-y and lopsided. I think the technical term is "bowing." I personally prefer "lean-y." These molds are perfect for testing a new recipe or making small batches of soap.

 (Photo courtesy of WSP)

I made this batch of olive-scented soap-cpop of course. It's made mainly with olive and avocado oils. This is a very rustic-looking soap. I'm not going to touch it at all. I like how it looks. It smells very light and clean-perfect for you anti-foody scent folks. This is the type of scent you'd find in say, a bed and breakfast, or a foreign inn (yeah, like I've actually been to one).

I haven't decided if I'm going to list it yet. I still have some soap snob issues. You know, having to have your soap look "perfect" before you can sell it-at regular price! We'll see...