RobsCreations

Last, but not least, batch of Melt & Pour soap for this month!  I like to call this soap bar Emerald soap or 50 Shades of Green! Aahahahahahaah :-) I'll try to give you an idea about how I've obtained the different colours in the layers. From bottom to top: 1) Green liquid colour (few drops),  1 mini-scoop of  titanium dioxide and of Clementine orange mica, 2) Green and violet liquid colours (few drops of each), 3) 1 drop of yellow liquid colour, Aqua green mica and Chromium oxide green pigment (1 mini-scoop of each), 4) 1 drop of  Green liquid colour.

Half with embeds, half without! Scented with lavender fragrance, coloured with blue liquid colour from The soap Kitchen and sprinkled with dried cornflower petals.

What a cookie cutter can do... I've melted the Stephensons soap base, coloured it with a bit of clementine orange mica, pour it in a rectangular container and, once solidified, I cut the cute cats out by using  this amazing  cookie   cutter I just received for my B-day! Swimming cats... ahaahaha!  If working with embeds, ALWAYS  check the temperature of your melted soap before pouring!!! ...and the slices... Meow!

I received a fairly big  request   (at least from my point of view) of M&P soap from friends, lately! The SLS- and SLES-free Stephensons Clear soap base had a great success among my friends! It's highly rich in glycerine and it is made from vegetable-derived ingredients (no animal-derived oils/fats). The problem with this material, is that each time I have to order it from the UK I pay a lot of money for the shipping...after some research (and with the help of people from The Soap Kitchen ) I found a distributor in France ( soapbox-shop ) that accepts both bulk and small orders. For the moment, I cannot tell you if I really like this company, because on one side they've been very proactive and useful when I was about to place the order and I had a problem with the TVA and the delivery address, but on the other side one of the product I've ordered, and paid for, was not in the package I received... In addition, it's some days that I'm trying to contact them

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

I wasn't really planning to do any M&P soap for Xmas time, but... I received an adorable silicon mould to make reindeer-shaped ice cubes from my friend Nora . In addition, knowing my love for candle making, my husband Mass i, suggested me to use the mould to do reindeer-shaped floating candles (that I'll certainly do later on, and NO I won't be using the mould for cooking anymore!). Few nights ago I couldn't really manage to sleep...to avoid getting stress by this, I decided to start thinking about something positive and nice, and came up with this idea: Reindeer M&P soap!!! It's white and red, full of glitters and with a reindeer in the middle of each slice: very Xmast-ish indeed! M&P base is always the same kind as for the other soaps, the soap is delicately amber scented, and each reindeer is coloured with Fairy Red mica , that shouldn't bleed!!!  

It has been a while since the last post...you know... work, a bit of health issues and other things kept me pretty occupied in the last weeks! Today I took a well-deserved day-off from work and I decided to consecrate it to relaxing things! Today's topics: a bit of melt and pour soap and how to use mica in candles . This one is my first M&P soap ever: it's again a melt&pour base I got from The Soap Kitcken, all natural, no SDS, no SLES, no Paraben etc. You can refer to this post for 'soap curls preparation and embedding'  Post how-to-do-curls

This is a melt and pour soap I've prepared more than a year ago just before Xmas time. Before this, I have been using a wooden loaf mould and I have been slicing the the soap to make nice 1-cm-deep chunks. Anyway, I wanted to try different shapes, and bought a silicon cookie mould for my Xmas spice cakes . You can also recycle old cookie moulds you have in your kitchen, but don't use them for cooking ever again ! As always, I used  the  SLS and SLES-Free Stephensons 'Crystal' soap base I bought from The Soap Kitchen. This is a vegetable based M&P base that is glycerin rich and that is made from 100% natural ingredients. To make the soap cake more sparkling I've added plenty of Cristallina glitters and grated on top some pink soap I've prepared in advance. You'll find more on my  FB page

There's nothing particularly special behind the making of a soap starting from a M&P base, but there is definitively a lot of fun! I won't give you too many technical details about how to melt, colour and pour M&P soap bases (but if you'll ask you'll certainly have an answer  ;-) ), but I'd rather share tips on how to prepare nice SOAP CURLS you can use to decorate your creation! For this soap I've prepared two different kind of curls. For both kinds, I've initially melted, coloured and poured two small blocks of about 5x5x2 HxLxW cm. For the big light purple curls I've used a potato peeler on the thinner edge of the soap block. Once you have peeled-off a ribbon of soap, you have to roll it with your fingers to make it became a perfect curl! I've then laid down the curls in the bottom of the mould before pouring the first transparent soap layer. For the small curls I've simply used an old ( crafting-dedicated! ) grater an

Speaking of skin-friendly M&P bases, for this and all the following projects I have chosen an SLS and SLES-free Stephensons 'Crystal' soap base. It doesn't contain surfactants or mono propylene glycol, parabens , phenoxyethanol, sulfates, PEG and Propylene glycol. Made from 100% natural ingredients. Vegetable based. It has a good moisturising power because of glycerine. Products are from The Soap Kitchen. I have 'personalized' the soap base with a superb lemon fragrance , yellow liquid colour, titanium dioxide for the white layer, and   poppy seeds for a gentle and natural scrub !  The top layer is sprinkled with dried marigold petals .

Let's start by saying that making soap with the M&P method will allow you to prepare a  home-made  product that, differently from the commercial soaps, will have a  controlled list of ingredients. M&P soap is actually a  blend  of true soap ingredients plus  glycerin  (great for repairing skin) and molecules like  sorbitol  and  propylene glycol (also used in coffee-based drinks, liquid sweeteners, ice cream, etc.) which  allow this kind of soap to melt.  M&P soap  is  made with lye+natural oils like true soap, but this step is done for you,  by the soap base producers,  beforehand. This method is suitable for kids   (taken for granted that an adult will be around to avoid the poor kids to get burned!)  It doesn't need lye ( Sodium Hydroxide)  handling and it  doesn't  require CURING time. The only disadvantage I see, is that you have a limited number of ingredients you can choose because you start from a pre-existing base. For this reason you hav