Exciting News and a Giveaway - Closed & Winner Announced!

Two exciting milestones reached today! First, this blog reached 100 followers (thank you so much everyone!), and I'm also happy to announce that Oil &Butter Store is now open!

So....today seems like an appropriate day to host a giveaway! The prize will be these 3 Oil & Butter soaps:

All you have to do is post a comment below sharing your favorite ingredient you like to use or have tried in soap. I’ll start - my favorite ingredient at the moment is glacial clay, I love the silkiness and creaminess it adds to the lather. Your turn! =)

Good luck, I will leave this open until Thursday!

Thursday, January 31: Okay, the winner was chosen using the online Random Winner Generator, scroll down to see the winner.....

Congratulations Carrie! Please email me at oilandbutter [at] gmail.com with your address details =) Thanks so much for participating everyone!
 

 

Almost Time...

Well, I’ve been busy straightening shelves, sweeping the floor, washing the windows, hanging up the signs….getting ready for the Grand Opening of the Oil & Butter Store on Monday!

Here is a sneak peek of some of the soaps that will be available to purchase starting on Monday:

Vanilla Bean and Cocoa Butter:

BC Glacial Clay:

Beach Bar:

Butterfly Whispers:

 Cookies and Cream:

If you are interested in purchasing Oil & Butter soaps, please make sure you follow my Facebook page, as I will be frequently updating that page as I make soaps for the store.

I am still very dedicated to sharing my soaping adventures on this blog…I have so many (too many!) ideas floating around in my little head that I look forward to sharing with all of you. Thank you so much for your support everyone, have a great weekend!

 

Buttermilk Lemon Squares

Words are failing me tonight, so this will be short and sweet :) I realized that I needed to restock my lemon soap...and you know I can never make the same thing twice! I thought I would add a twist this time by using 100% buttermilk for the liquid (I love buttermilk in soap!). The soap is scented with a buttery lemon and citrus fragrance blended with rich cake batter.

100% Goat Milk Soap with Rice Bran Oil

Okay, I contemplated not posting this...because, well...it's just a plain soap! However, I really like plain soap too...there is something very special about it's pure and clean simplicity. 

This is the first time I have used 100% goat milk as the liquid. I used the same method as my luxury soap recipe to make the goat milk / lye solution. I also wanted to incorporate rice bran oil into this recipe, because I haven't tried it in soap before and it was on my list :) 

I wanted to keep this soap as simple as possible, so I didn’t add any fragrance or color.  I used the divider mold and left it uninsulated. It did not gel, so the soap stayed very creamy looking. I did use sodium lactate, and the bars came nicely out of the divider mold the next morning.

Nothing fancy, and yet I enjoy it just as much as any of the really detailed soaps I've made. Sometimes simple is better :)

Hope you all have a great weekend!

 

Cookies & Cream Soap

I happened to come across this adorable little milk/cream container mold...and I thought it would be cute to make some little cookies to go with it for a 'cookies and cream' themed soap. I first experimented with melt and pour soap to make the cookies, but it just was too rigid and didn't look enough like real cookies. Then thankfully, inspiration struck, and I remembered I had some leftover vanilla bean soap from the night before that hadn't quite finished setting up yet. When I scooped it out of the mold, it was just soft enough for me to be able to mold it into little cookies. I did have a little bit of fragranced (with vanilla f.o.) leftover soap too, so I mixed a small amount of it into the cookies, so they would look a bit marbled. I used melt and pour colored with brown oxide for the chocolate chips. They were so fun and super easy to make...here is a picture of them after I finished baking making them last night:

Now that I had the cookies prepared, I thought it would be fitting to use 100% heavy cream for the liquid portion of a cookies and cream soap. I was not prepared for how thick the lye solution got though. Normally I strain my milky lye solution, but this was so thick there was no way it would have gone through the strainer. As I was contemplating whether to chuck the cream/lye solution and start over, my daughter (10 years old) piped up from across the room and said, 'Well mom, you never know unless you try!'  (Apparently I was contemplating out loud!) So, knowing she was right, I went ahead and cautiously stirred the creamy lye solution into my prepared oils. To my surprise, the soap batter came together just fine. I really kept expecting weird lumps or orange spots or something odd to happen, but it behaved very nicely.

When I tried to unmold the bars this morning, they were still quite soft and stuck to the mold. I did use sodium lactate, but I assume the high fat content of the cream makes the bars quite a bit softer to start out...I'm hoping it makes for a nice, rich lather though! 

The fragrance I used for this soap is described as cinnamon and butter, with caramel and apple undertones...it reminds me of snickerdoodles :)  I didn't fragrance the top portion of the soap, because I wanted it to stay light. The bottom portion looks orange right now, but it will turn a very dark brown as it cures:

 

As always, thank you for reading everyone!

 

Melon Crush

I feel like my last 2 blog posts have been so wordy and long, sorry about that…I guess I had a lot to share! I’m going to try to keep this one short and sweet :)

I’ve always admired soapers who are able to get crisp, clean lines by just pouring their soaps in layers. I never seem to be able to do that, maybe I’m just too impatient! Anyways, I was happy to finally get crisp lines with these new dividers…here is a picture of them at work:

Here is a picture just after I pulled the vertical dividers out of the soap:

This soap contains mango butter and is colored with green & yellow oxides and liquid red. It smells like melons but with a floral note…yum!

Thanks for reading, hope you are all having a great weekend!

 

Beach Bar

I wonder if this is one of those soaps that I will look back on and think…what the heck was I thinking?! It seemed like a good idea at the time! For a long time I’ve wanted to try making a soap using ocean water. I recently received a new beachy-scented fragrance oil and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try a soap made from ocean water. And what’s a beach soap without sand?! So, I headed off to one of the local beaches to collect some ocean water and sand.

To clean and sterilize the ocean water, I ran it through a coffee filter first and then boiled it for 10 minutes and then let it cool.  I poured the water into a jug and kept it in the fridge until I was ready to use it.

To dry out and sterilize the sand, I spread it on a foil-lined baking sheet and baked it in the oven at 250 degrees for 1 hour. When it was cool, I poured the sand through a fine mesh strainer to get only the fine sand to use in this soap.

I ended up using seaweed sheets (the kind for wrapping sushi), because I already had some on hand, and it was already dried and ready to go out of the package. I used my stickblender to break the seaweed down into smaller pieces. 

Keeping in mind that the salt in the ocean water might cut the lather, I used 31% coconut oil in my recipe and added some castor oil as well for extra bubbles. I added mango butter to offset any dryness that the high percentage of coconut oil might add. I was also concerned about using real sand in the soap, thinking it might be too scratchy, but it’s not at all; being that it’s just in a small corner of the soap, it adds a nice, slightly exfoliating feel to it.

This was also the first time using my new SoapHutch mold, and I can’t tell you enough how much of a dream it is to use! It was a bit of a fight to get it together the first time…the pieces fit so tightly, but I know it’s supposed to be like that! I also made use of the vertical dividers that Rich fabricated and poured the blue soap into one half of the chamber, and then poured the other two soaps in a layer on the other half, and then carefully pulled out the divider. The vertical divider is acrylic, which I like because I can easily see through it to compare if my two sides are even. 

From reading of others’ first experiences trying to unmold their first soap, it seemed like I might be in for a bit of a fight to get the soap out the first time. However, the pieces came apart and slid off the soap beautifully, I had no issues at all. In fact, I had to stop and take a picture while I was unmolding, because I was so mesmerized by the glassy-smooth sides of the soap (bad lighting pic, sorry!):

I should also mention that I did CPOP this soap, which most likely contributed to the ease with which the mold came apart from the soap. After I poured the soap into the mold, I put it in the oven at the lowest setting (170 degrees) for 1 hour and then left it to cool in the oven overnight. I did get tiny bubbles on the surface of my soap, so maybe next time I will just preheat the oven to 170 and then shut if off when I put the soap in. I unmolded the soap first thing in the morning...I forgot how much I love CPOP! I didn’t have to use any sodium lactate in this batch either.

  

I also read that you shouldn’t wash the SoapHutch molds with detergent, as you don’t want them squeaky clean…the pieces need to be ‘seasoned’, so that they will slide together easily and give up the soap easily as well. Instead, I just washed the pieces in plain hot water. I did find that when I put the base together the second time, it was so much easier to put together, the pieces slid together quite easily but still fit very snugly. Once I got it back together, I put those vertical dividers right to work again on this next soap, which I think I will call Melon Crush :)

Happy Friday everybody! 
 

SoapHutch Über Mold

Now that I am soaping on a more steady basis, I’m finding that the molds I have been using are starting to show their wear; either getting brittle and cracking, or getting flimsy and losing their shape. It seemed like a good time to look into some long-term, good-quality, sturdy molds. As I was researching soap molds, one name kept coming up highly recommended time and time again: SoapHutch.

When I looked closer at Rich’s molds, I realized that his CraftLine Über Molds are actually a combination slab, divider and log mold, all in one...Über indeed! This way I didn’t need to choose between slab, divider or log….these molds could be configured in so many different ways; I loved that I would be investing in one mold, but getting so much versatility from that one mold. Plus, you don’t need to line them… a definite bonus!

After pouring over all of his designs, I decided that I really just needed a mini Über Mold, as I make such small batches, but I was a little hesitant to ask for smaller custom dimensions. However, Rich assured me that he considers every soap mold that he makes a custom order, so he doesn’t mind at all configuring to customer requests.

I also whined and sniveled (okay, not really, but I would have if necessary…ha!), about the possibility of a vertical divider, as I love the look of vertically divided soaps but haven’t mastered the two-handed, pouring-on-both-sides-of-the-cardboard divider yet. Rich got right to work and fabricated some clever temporary dividers, so that I can pour two different colors into a chamber and then remove the temporary divider. He designed them so that the layers can be split into either halves and thirds, very cool! So many fun possibilities, I was super excited about trying these out:

I will admit that I was a little intimidated when I pulled all the wrapping off the mold and found myself looking at 53 individual pieces! However, once I got the outer slab together, the other configurations were quite easy to figure out and fit together so nicely. The first thing I did as I was figuring out the configurations, was separated them by groups into Ziploc bags, so that it will be much easier to keep all the pieces grouped together:

(I have no idea why this picture keeps insisting on turning sideways, sorry about that!)

What I love the most about this mold is the versatility. I can use it as a slab mold or with the individual bar dividers, or I can make up to 3 different widths and lengths of logs. I can also use the dams that came with the mold to create virtually any length of log that I need, even down to test-size mini logs:

I am super impressed with Rich’s workmanship and professionalism. He was so easy to work with, and you can tell he is very passionate about his work; the pride he takes in his craftsmanship is very evident in the construction of these sturdy and versatile soap molds.  Thank you Rich, I love my new mold(s)!

Of course, for my first soap in the mold I chose to try out those vertical dividers! In my next blog post, I will share with you how I made this fun Beach Bar (which contains ocean water, seaweed and sand!):

 

Leopard Spotted Soap

I think I’ve shared with you before that I also love to bake and decorate cakes. What does that have to do with soap, you ask? I find that designing and baking cakes, and designing and making soaps, are actually quite similar arts. The techniques used in baking and decorating cakes quite often carry over to soaping, and vice versa. One of the fun cake techniques I’ve come across lately is a leopard spotted cake. I thought it would be fun to try to replicate that leopard spot technique in soap, and I found a video that demonstrates the cake-design process fairly well here: Leopard Sponge Cake

Treating the soap batter as if it were the cake batter in the video, I basically followed the instructions given in the video; except I did straight lines instead of curved, because I was using a straight loaf mold. I separated my soap base into 3 portions; smaller pink and brown portions (both colored with micas), and a larger uncolored portion.

As you can see from the picture below, you actually have to pipe stripes to make the spots, if that makes sense! If you have watched the cake video, you will know what I mean :)

The trick is to have your soap batter at a thicker consistency so that the ‘spots’ can hold their shape. If the batter is too thin, the colors will just sink into each other; but if it’s too thick, you will end up with air pockets, like I did. To start out with, my pink and brown soap batters were much more fluid than the uncolored portion (most likely from the sweet almond oil I used to dissolve the mica)….in fact, I had to stickblend those colors to get them as thick as the uncoloured batter, and by then my uncoloured batter was way too thick. Next time, I will need to be quicker about separating the 3 portions and bringing the pink and brown portions to a thicker consistency right away. Of course, make sure you use a fragrance oil that doesn't accelerate either, you don't want any surprises :) 

One thing I should mention too, is that you would want to try to stagger your leopard spots throughout the soap by layering your stripes in different heights throughout your soap. In the video, they show just doing one layer of stripes, but I would try to do stripes at different layers of soap, so that the spots are staggered at different levels throughout your cut soap.

Next time, I would also cut smaller tips in my piping bags, so that I could fit more leopard spots into the soap.

Anyway, I think it’s a cute technique and has potential....you could do so many fun color combinations with this! Happy soaping everyone!