Soaps I have made last 10 days

[Alexandra]

First I tryed to make salt-bar. It was schocking expirience... very scrumbly and hard to work with. Yes, I have read all your instructions here but still... I used olive, palm and coconut oil, salt at trace and EOs geranium and cedarwood....

Than I made an attempt to mix the scrumbles left from salt-bar with strowberry soap.... well... is not THAT bad as it sounds ... :roll:

After two days soap-making-apstination I decided to make simple soap with pumpkin and vanila.... But, I did the same thing I am doing when cooking.... I improvised.... so instead of simple vanila-pumpkin soap, I made vanila-pumpkin-cacao soap with - swirls.

Finally I made my second salt-bar, with mint-petitte grains EOs and with cramberry+yoghurt. Cramberry became dark brown, but the bars look much better than previous salt attempt.

Well, all my bars are pretty hard... The strowberry and pumpkin soaps turned out much darker as they got dry... They have great lather and are very gentle for skin...

However, I am not sure how to deal with these drying edges you can see on photos.... I dont know if this is normal or it happens due to some mistakes I made. I also think that I should consider to change my molds...

All soaps are HP made (in the oven).

I am waiting anxiously for your opinions :?

 

[holly99]

I've never made salt bars but I've sure heard that they can be tricky!

Your pumpkin swirl soap is quite pretty! What did you use for the sparkles?

 

[Alexandra]

Holly, I am glade you like my pumpkin soap

I used gold glitter-dust for sparkles for pumpkin soap and red gliter-dust for strowberry efect in strowbery soap.

Actually, I mixed it in trough the whole soap.

 

[bombus]

Alexandra-

I am glad that you tried that second salt bar. I think you will enjoy using them. I learn from every mistake I make.

You did great getting your pictures
on the page, but if you made them smaller before you post them, it would
be easier for us to view. My camera takes pictures that are 17 inches wide,
but I always shrink them down to about 3 inches before I put them on the
forum, and they are well proportioned to my posts.

From what I can see, your soap is lovely. I especially like your dark swirls!

 

[Alexandra]

Ohhh..... I know I made mistake with pictures (I forgot to resize them) but I didn“t know how to correct it....

I like second salt bar, and its mint scent.

The swirls I got.... it was by mistakes too... I put too much liquid in soap and the HP became workable just as it was CP.

 

[nup]

I loooove the strawberry one!

 

[TomDillinger]

your pumpkin/vanilla bar looks awesome

 

[dagmar88]

hey Alexandra,
I took te liberty of resizing your pics :wink:
The strawberry soap and pumpkin vanilla both look really nice
The salt bars look overcooked though.
When you make them next time I'd advise you to soap colder (I do them at room temperature CP), and they'll come out much smoother and easier to cut.

 

[Alexandra]

Oh Dagmar, thank you, thank you... 1000 times

I really couldnt do that again (resizing etc.) .... i just dont like to work with photos at all...

Thanks you a lot for your remark regarding my salt bar ... I couldn“t realise what I did wrong because I havent put much salt at all... I put about 15% or so.

And, its true, I really use to overcook all my soap... The reason is because I am geochemist, and I have a bit "traditional" aproach to saponification process... What I have learned is that uncooked soaps are sometimes unsafe... Well, I know that CP is great process and that usually and with proper curing time everything goes well, but still... I had no courage to make the CP.

Thank you again for your time. I“ll try the salt bar next time with CP (it will be the excuse for me to make CP soap 8) )

 

[Pepper]

Wow, I love the pumpkin and vanilla swirls. Very mascualine looking. I'm thinking of mashed pumpkin for my next project.