RobsCreations

I have been watching video tutorials about card making  for weeks now.   In particular, I've been following a couple of Youtube channels ( Christina Griffiths Card making magic  and Jennifer McGuire Ink ) that really inspired me so that I decided to give it a try myself. To be honest, I've always tried to make gift tags or Xmas cards myself whenever it has been possible, but I have to admit that I've been always making very simple things by using whatever I had at home... This time I invested some money (not much to be honest) and decided to go  for craft shopping (embossing powders, stamps, heat gun, some paper sheets, tapes etc). I've watched ( 10 many times) and already shared on my  FB page  an amazing video  about how to make vellum overlay cards. Vellum it's a very interesting material and that's the reason why I chose to use it in my first card. That's my attempt to create a 'Mother's day card'   Below you'll find more...

I will be making some Melt&Pour soap bars (and possibly one Cold Process soap too) in the forthcoming weeks and I was trying to get my head around the behaviours of soap colourants in different soaping processes.  Some of them are alkali-resistant while some of them are not, some can bleed through soap layers but some don't...  I now have a fairly good number of colourants (liquid dyes, micas, oxides and ultramarines) and I keep forgetting which, among them, is suitable for Cold Process soap making, which works better in Melt&Pour and which, on the other hand, gives great results in both processes... For my own sake, I decided to go through all the colourants I currently posses, to create swatches for each of them and to generate a table with all their features and behaviours. Definitely useful

This soap contains equal amounts (~30% of total oils) of olive oil, coconut oil, and palm oil. It also contains 5% of canola oil and 5% of castor oil. The lye solution has been prepared in distilled water. The raspberry fragrance comes from the Soap Kitchen UK and it has been used as less than 0.5% of the total weight. I believe the stick blender really made the difference this time: I've reached the trace in less than 2 minutes ... It has been probably a way too fast and that's why I couldn't play around with colours as I wanted... but I'll do better next time. The soap hardened in the mould after an overnight only and I managed cut it straight away. I measured the pH which is around 8.6 and the small bit of soap that I rubbed on my hand produced a nice fluffy lather . Now curing time for four long weeks!

As promised, here you have my summary on the last soap I made... yes, the one with coffee and a really weird texture ! Soap unmoulding: 48 hours after pouring. Soap cutting: 2 days after I removed it from the wooden mold... 4 days in total and...   Soap slices do not look good...at all! :-/ The lower layer appears to be very soft and sticky (my fingerprint is well visible in the lower left corner)   ...and the upper layer is even flakier than 2 days ago (below you see the result I got after having gently squeezed a bit of soap between thumb and index finger). Soap facts: - very poor lather with any of the two layers - layers' weird consistency does not make the usage of the slice easy - pH of the two layer is pretty different: well below 8 for the white layer and higher than 8.6 for the brown one. GUESS WHERE IS THE SOAP NOW???   In the bin!