For the two coloured soaps at the back I used the recipe from The Greening of Gavin (see here ) substituting 100g of my herbal colourant sunflower oil for the plain sunflower oil. The round slightly orange coloured soap top left of the photo is coloured with annatto and scented with rosemary, white thyme and cedarwood. It has a scent reminiscent of the old Pear's soap, which I used to use and loved. Maybe sometime in the future I will progress on to making translucent soaps and try to recreate it. But as this one has turned out OK I might just stick with this recipe for now. The soap is nice and moisturising. In fact, I saw it 'sweating' badly to start with. On investigation this isn't leaking moisture it's attracting it from the air, which is apparently a sign of a good quality soap. On the negative side, I think it's fair to say it's quite a soft soap and doesn't last very long.
The soap top right is coloured with alkanet and paprika and scented with lavender and patchouli essential oils.
Overall, I'm pleased with how the 2 coloured soaps came out, although as I said, they are quite soft and won't last long.
Therefore I decided to dig out my tallowate from the freezer (made from rendering beef fat). I used the recipe from Suburban Jubilee (see here), however I did scent it with some lavender essential oil. I am still curing this soap so am not sure how hard the bars will be. Two things that I was a little unsure of also - firstly it was very sticky on removing from the molds. Possibly I should have left it longer before unmolding them (it was about 48hrs). Also I used some silicone flower shape molds which I sourced from a charity shop. The soap from these molds came out a little orange in colour, so I'm figuring the soap reacted with the silicone somehow, or maybe they'd been used for coloured soap before me! I did wash them before using. A little bit of a mystery. Hopefully if I use the molds again this will not occur. We have a good number of the plain round soaps anyhow, but I will probably use the 'duds' for hand washing only. Has anyone else had any problems with using silicone molds for soap?
Those soaps look beautiful. I wish you could send some to me. I really enjoyed using the seedy soap you brought last September!
ReplyDeleteFrom big sis. x
Hey Sis, I'm so glad you liked the one I gave you. I will have to arrange to send you a parcel :-) x
ReplyDeleteWish you could send over some of the delicious foods too!!
ReplyDeleteAh, that might prove a tad more tricky! ;-)
ReplyDeleteJust thought I'd say that I have had that happen with the floppy bright coloured silicone molds but not with the rigid silicone molds that you can get from briscoes or
ReplyDeleteGoNative online shop. They sell soap molds and I've never had a prob with these ones! Hope this helps you I am enjoying your reads! Thanks
I have found this happen when I've used the really floppy silicone molds which are of a cheaper variety, the briscoes molds the red ones actually work well and the ones from GoNative are awesome too!
ReplyDeleteHope this helps you
Cheers Jen
Hi Jen
ReplyDeleteThanks so much for telling me that you've had similar problems too. The soap doesn't look quite so orange now it has cured. I wonder if it would continue to happen if I used the moulds again or was a one-off? Will check out the ones from Briscoes and GoNative.
Best wishes Bridget