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Taming the Vanilla

I’m going to quickly gloss over how long it’s been since I last posted and share a soapy pic – ‘cos that’s what you’re here for right? 😉

Soap fragrance oils containing vanilla are often considered tiresome because of their propensity to discolour and potentially ruin a carefully designed soap. But they smell so good! I absolutely love the smell of ‘Pink Kisses’ from Gracefruit, but my first attempt at using it was a complete disaster. It was early on in my soaping career, and discolouration wasn’t even on my radar.  I used a selection of pretty pink colours and was so excited to see what it would look like, so imagine my disappointment…

Looks ain't everything!
              Looks ain’t everything!

Every failure’s a learning opportunity eh? 😀

Four (!!) years on and I decided to give it another go – this time I was a little more careful with my design. Splitting the batter into two, I coloured one half with Orchid Pink Mica, and added the fragrance oil to the other other portion only, adding a little Titanium Dioxide to mitigate the effect of the vanilla. This was the result:

First Kiss Cold Process Soap
                 First Kiss

Needless to say I’m so much happier with this one. I think the browning effect of the vanilla actually improves the look of the bar and gives it some depth and interest.

I hope you’ll agree that my photography skills have improved a little too 😀 😀 😀

 

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Recent Makes

A very quick update with some recent creations.

First up is a restock of Luscious Lavender – an ‘In the Pot’ swirl fragranced with Lavender Essential Oil and coloured with Titanium Dioxide and Violet Ultramarine. It always surprises me how popular Lavender still is – this one’s already sold out!

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This next one is Orange Sherbert.  The batter thickened up VERY quickly but I still managed to do an ‘In the Pot’ swirl.  I really like the resulting folds, but I’m not sure I would ever be brave enough to try to replicate it as I was <this> close to getting the proverbial ‘Soap on a Stick’ :0) Fragranced with Orange Sherbet FO from Gracefruit and coloured with Titanium Dioxide and Orange Mica.

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Finally for today: Parisian Flowers.  A deliberately uneven layered soap, fragranced with a heady blend of Ylang Ylang, Rose Geranium and Lavender Essential Oils. Coloured with Titanium Dioxide and a range of pink micas, with a mica oil swirl on the top.

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Soap flowers and cupcakes

I made some cupcake soaps this week. It’s been a looong time since I’ve made any, and I was fretting about how to decorate them.

My very first soap cupcakes were decorated with non-soap, regular cake decorations. They looked pretty, but not really practical 😀

Cupcakes 001 (2)

I moved on to piping decorations with leftover soap from other projects. Much more appropriate for bathing with, but I still wasn’t happy with the result:

030

So I had a root around Pinterest and found a tutorial for making soap roses here on the French SoapSession blog. I have a bit of French (but to be honest the pictures speak for themselves) so I gave it a go. I didn’t think to take any photos (oops!) as I made them but here’s what I came up with:

Picture 046As it turned out I felt my cupcakes looked good enough ‘naked’ this time, and so chose not to add any extra decoration:

Picture 048But I did use a couple of flowers on some ‘leftover’ soaps – so called because the bases were made from leftover cupcake batter (I’d run out the round cupcake cases and so dropped the leftover batter into a couple of heart shape moulds) and the tops were made out of leftover cupcake frosting (just glooped and swirled on top) I thought a couple of pink flowers would look cute on top. What do you think?

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