Cosmic Christmas

Every year, my husband and I take turns choosing our style of Christmas tree decor.

This year it's his choice, which means brightly colored balls, big 1970's lights and lots of tinsel. Very Brady Bunch. Next year, we'll have little twinkly white lights and delicate ornaments in muted colors -- stopping just short of Martha Stewart, but only because I have less staff. ;)

So what does this have to do with soap? Everything -- if you're me!

This month's soap challenge is called the Cosmic Wave. It's one of the more difficult ones we've attempted, because you have to get the batter thickness, color balance and placement exactly right.

I mean exactly.

And you have to have some luck on your side, as once you mix the colors in the pot and pour, they need to just flow out as they will, without one wiggling them about. This works just fine as a study in Brownian motion, but is nerve wracking if you're as control-oriented as I am!

In my first attempt, my batter was too thin, and each successive pour just sunk to the bottom in a muddy mess. On my second try, the batter was too thick, and it ended up looking like a blobby finger painting.

What you see here is my third, and while I'd love a few more tries, we're heading out of town at the crack of dawn, so it'll just have to do:

The colors are some of my favorites for Christmas: lichen, plum and raisin. And while not traditional, I really like how they go together, especially for the holidays:

• Lichen: Green oxide and True yellow
• Plum: Soapberry purple, Red lake and Bright pink 
• Raisin: Soapberry purple, Chocolate brown and Brown oxide

Since I used only 5% of the batter for each color, I super-saturated them at 1.5 t/ppo. The remaining 85% was colored with titanium dioxide.

For this intricate technique, I used a slower-moving variant of my go-to recipe:

• 30% Lard
• 41% Costco Mediterranean Blend Oil 
• 25% Coconut Oil 
• 4% Castor Oil

Which just means altering the ratio to use less coconut and castor with more olive/canola/grapeseed than I normally do.

For the fragrance, I mixed:

• 2/3 8th & Ocean (for its candy sweetness)
• 1/3 Frangipani Jasmine (to slow down trace)

The latter is one of a handful of decelerating fragrances I use only when I need to, as they all have a cloying and rotten-smelling note. Bleh, but they work!

FWIW, I:

• Soaped at about 85F
• Used no lye discount, as I mixed my colorants 1:3 with fractionated coconut oil
• Used my standard 1.5:1 water:lye ratio with 1 oz/ppo of both fragrance and 60% sodium lactate
• Mixed quite a bit with a standard stick blender, as the decelerant slowed things down almost too much
• CPOP'd in a 140F oven for two hours, and unmolded after four hours

Next time, I'd do almost all of it as a quick in-the-pot swirl, and just add the cosmic wave technique on the tops. There's really no point to doing it elsewhere, as it won't show. D'oh! That way, I could also skip the decelerant and make a much bigger batch.

Which is exactly what I'm planning to do for my Christmas Sugar Plum Swirl...

Rusted Soap

I have never once been mistaken as someone for whom less is more. 

It doesn't even make sense to me mathematically.

So it wasn't that much of a surprise when Amy said my Easter-inspired soaps weren't exactly rustic enough for this month's Rustic Soap challenge.

 

I had been thinking: it's an egg. Like on a farm. Farms are rustic, right?

And I'd shaped these by hand, like without a mold. Isn't that rustic? Hmmmm.

I tried a few more in what I thought were earth tones, but my family took one look and declared... Nope. Still not rustic.

What was I missing???

Apparently sparkly mica isn't rustic. Who knew? Sigh...

So, I put them aside and made the next batch using only clays and tea powders for colorants. Sadly, they don't sparkle one bit. 

See? Not even a little. 

This challenge included some sort of packaging, and again, I was stumped. 

I consider shimmery organza bags and velvet ribbons to be sort of a baseline, so what was I to do?

Apparently, very little. 

Don't get me wrong, as it still took me forever to come up with this. Striped cotton ticking in tan and black, and a custom, home-made label printed on simple kraft paper. 

The background printed too light to tell, but it's intended to look like an old fence. The fonts are Janda Apple Cobbler and Bernard MT Condensed.

My husband says they're still not rustic enough, as they should be just a single, dull color. I disagree. After all, they literally look rusted. Hello? Rusted? Rustic? That can't be a coincidence...

---

In case you're wondering, I made these from cooled hot-process soap dough, using this recipe:

• 30% Lard
• 25% Coconut Oil 
• 20% Costco Mediterranean Blend Oil
  (50% canola, 40% olive, 10% grapeseed)
• 12% Castor Oil
• 10% Shea Butter
• 3% White Beeswax

I skipped my usual sodium lactate and used 40% water, which is almost twice as much as I normally do, so they take much longer than I'm used to harden!

I like to make up a big batch and keep in a gallon ziplock for when I (or my daughter) need some soap dough to make something with. I usually scent it with Cucumber-Melon (from Nurture Soap), as everyone loves that one, but I did this batch using Indian Sandalwood (from Nature's Garden) as it's more exotic and the scent lasts forever. Like years, even unwrapped.

To make these two bars, I:

1. Measured out 9 oz of dough, and broke it into little pieces with my fingers
2. Spritzed the pieces with water
3. Tossed them in green tea, yellow Brazilian clay and Australian black clay
4. Started squishing them together, working out a design as I went
5. Plopped the whole mass onto a silpat mat
6. Shaped it into one long bar
7. Let it sit for a while to harden up, and then cut into two

The process is pretty straight forward, and is based on the same idea as a pencil line. But, it does take a bit of practice to get the ratio of colors right, and to keep the sections from coming apart as they dry.

For this soap, I was going for more of a stone look, so I pulled the shapes into longer sections to make them look more like veins of marble or granite. The middles could of course have just been a solid color, but it's more fun to me if the designs to go all the way through the bar. Here is the backside of one: