Sunday 31 July 2011

Playing with in the pot swirls.

This week is was time to stock up on some favourites and try out a couple of new blends. I was having a great week as all the in the pot swirls worked out just perfectly instead of being a bit blobby. I'd had to find a new source for my olive oil which turned out to be quite dark in colour giving me a beige based soap rather the cream base I'd typically been getting, so was affecting the end results giving a lovely earthy feel to the soaps.

Morning Dew olive soap
The first one I was happy with was my restock of my Morning Dew Olive soap as I've nearly sold out of it. I use Australian pink clay and French yellow clay in this one. I soap a little cooler than normal as the rose geranium essential oil in the blend tends to cause a bit of acceleration the reaction.

I love lemon myrtle and when I make batches of this I always think of lemon meringue pie. Over the spring and summer my markets are busier so I like to play around with some new scent combinations. I was playing around with a some lemon myrtle blends and decided to soap a couple of them as well as the straight up lemon myrtle that is always popular.

Tiger's eye soap
Paprika infused olive oil













This one when I cut the soap reminded me of the gemstone Tiger's eye so I think I'll settle on that for its name. I used paprika infused olive oil in this soap. I spilt the batch into two. With one half I pulled out two portions, one I added some oil soluble annatto to and the other I put some French yellow clay to. I poured both of these into the rest of that half for an in the pot swirl. This swirled soap I then poured into the other half of the soap which I added cocoa powder to and swirled them. This mixture was then poured into one of my log moulds. It didn't quite turn out how I had imagined it but I really love all the shades I ended up with. The colour goes quite nicely with the blend of frankincense, lemon myrtle, ginger and vetiver I added to it. This gives a lovely spicy scent I love the smell of frankincense and vetiver.

Moody Blue soap
This soap turned out a little darker than planned and as my oils were darker I got a smokey mauve brown from the alkanet section. I added indigo powder and Australian pink clay to the other sections. I've decided to call this one Moody blue soap for both the blue tones and the blue cypress essential oil I've used in it.

I had a little bit of blue cypress essential oil kicking around from a special project that I wanted to use up. It's a bit hard to find any information on blends with blue cypress. Most of the suggested blends didn't appeal to me at all. But this one at My Skin Studio the keylime sublime inspired me to try a citrusy blend using lemon myrtle as the predominant scent, a little lime, some nerolina, ginger, clary sage and the blue cypress the produced my Moody Blue soap. I'm pretty happy with how it's smelling the lemon myrtle is predominant but the bit of floral nerolina and nice green undertones make it even better.

Moody Blue and Tiger's eye soaps in the mold
I find to get the nice in the pot swirls to work well I need to pour the soap at a fairly thick trace. This is what they look like just poured.

I can't wait until the two new soaps are ready to take to my customers at the market and see what they think.

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