Murder at Sunset

My daughter's favorite book is "An Exaltation of Larks", which lists many colorful names given to groups of things (not just birds). E.g.: an ostentation of peacocks, a parliament of owls, a charm of finches, a murmuration of starlings and -- of course -- a murder of crows.

I knew I wanted to do a sunset (which is actually a gradient, not an ombre, but still allowed), with something shown in silhouette. Enter my daughter again, as whenever we drive on highway 85 to my brother's place in Los Gatos, she's always got an eye out for the crow-covered telephone wire that spans it before our exit. So, a murder of crows at sunset it is. :)

Making them involved these basic steps:

1. Pour the gradient layers in a loaf mold
2. Unmold and cut the bars
3. Cut the silhouettes out of each bar with a cookie cutter
4. Put the cut bars into individual bar molds
   (securing them in place with soy wax)
5. Pour the black, wait, unmold and trim off any excess black

For each batch, I used 10 shades, and following Amy's advice, I didn't measure out my colorants, but instead tweaked the colors by eye, drop by drop. The orange I used was very frustrating, as no matter how much I mixed it, it was determined to make spots!

• Yellow: Micas and More's  Yellin' Yellow Neon
• Orange: Nurture Soap's Electric Orange + TKB Trading's Neon Red
• Pink: Micas and More's Radically Reddish Neon + TKB Trading's Rebord Soft Pink
• Purple: Micas and More's Vivid Violet Neon

I premixed these at 2:1 liquid coconut oil:mica, and put them in little dropper bottles. Because they're so bright, I just used a little to get the look I was going for, as inspired by this photo:

I ended up having to hack apart my meticulously designed and 3D-printed cutter, as it was totally wrong and impossible to use. This is it from TinkerCad.com:

The printed version is shown below, from my optimistic first attempt.

As you can see from the close-up below, the soap cracked when I tried to cut it. You can also see that the gradient isn't at all smooth, as I tried to use too many shades.

For my second try, I hacked up the cutter, but the batch ended up way too pink.

So, the third try, below, is the final one (shown with the dissected cutter parts).

They came out exactly as I'd planned, and look really cool in person (yeah!), but disappointingly blobby in photographs (boo!). They say the camera adds 10 pounds, but really? ;)

Recipe

I used my version of Soap Queen's Old Faithful recipe (swapping the Palm Oil for Lard):

• 32% Coconut Oil
• 32% Olive Oil
• 32% Lard
• 4% Castor

I mixed it with a wire whisk attachment on my stick blender until emulsified, then added 1 oz/ppo of Nurture Soap's 8th and Ocean mixed with my favorite decelerator (Nature's Garden White Tea & Ginger). The result is too sweet-smelling for me, but it was very well behaved.

I also used my standard 1.5:1 water:lye ratio and added a modest amount (for me!) of Sodium Lactate (0.25 oz/ppo), so it would be firm enough to hold its shape when unmolded, but not crack when I cut the birds.

As for the gradient layers, I measured out 10 equal amounts of batter, colored them and mixed them very well with a mini mixer (which I hate, as they're so under-powered and add bubbles, grrr!). I let it sit a bit to thicken up, then spooned in each layer and smoothed it out.

I CPOP'd both the loaf and the bars at 140F for an hour, then left them in the oven for another 3 hours.

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BTW, I was intrigued enough with all this to order my own 3D printer, which should be here tomorrow. Woot -- a new device to play with! :)

I think that most folks in the US have access to a 3D printer at their local library, but all ours are booked until next year; one of the problems with living in Silicon Valley. Otherwise, you can order prints from TinkerCad, like I did. It was pricier than I'd hoped ($12, including shipping), but came in less than a week.

Can you guess the first thing I want to make? A narrow mixer attachment for my big stick blender so I can stop using that stupid mini mixer! ;)

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Update (6/30/17)

After a few days of wrangling, we've got the BIBO 3D printer working. And as promised, here's my narrow mixer attachment:

It's very crude, and the mixer may be too powerful -- you can see that the green color + oil I mixed had it coming out of the top. I'm going to order a variable speed mixer, which may help, but I really need to add a hood to the attachment to make it work right.

D'Oh -- it's Klimt!

I was so happy when I learned we were doing soap dough for this challenge, as I've been hoping for a recipe/technique to get soap to behave more like polymer clay.

(Not to mention the opportunity to use "D'oh!" in the post title :)

And I really appreciated having Sorcery Soap's recipe, but as Bee points out: soap likes to stick to everything but itself -- which is the opposite of what is needed.

The ever-amazing Tatsiana Serko has her own recipe/technique, which got me closer to what I was looking for. The trick is to make the dough into bars, like normal soap, then when you need some dough, you plane off the edges and use the insides. Brilliant! 

I only had enough of the exotic oils the recipe called for for one batch, though, so I improvised on my second batch. Luckily, I was rewarded with a dough that's even more clay-like, and which I can actually post here:

• 25% Lard
• 25% Coconut Oil
• 25% Canola Oil
• 15% Castor Oil
• 10% Beeswax

The recipe is a rule-breaker, as the castor oil and beeswax are *way* too much for a normal bar. But the castor adds stickiness and rubberiness, and the beeswax adds the plasticity that's needed to make it behave more like clay. I also:

• Added 1 t/ppo of lavender + peppermint essential oils
• Used a superfat/lye discount of 8%, and 2:1 water: oil, but no sodium lactate or salt
• Added 1 teaspoon/ppo of kaolin clay and 1 scoop/ppo of powdered milk, stick-blending them into oils
• As with Tatsiana's recipe, poured the batter into individual bar molds, and put them in the freezer to stop gelling

I tried making all sorts of things, but I'm what's known as "artistic for an engineer" (i.e., not artistic). My Klimt-inspired bar was more of an endurance test to see what the dough could do. It's made up of "mod canes" in a bunch of bright colors:

It's a lot of work to get the colored dough mixed and ready to use, but you can save a step if you color and condition the dough at the same time:

1. Plane off and discard the outside of the bar
2. Plane off a bunch of slices from inside the bar
3. Weigh out piles of slices for each color
4. Kneed a pile of slices into a rough mass and then squash it out flat
5. Brush some rubbing alcohol onto the mass and add a small heap of mica
6. Kneed the messy mass until it's a soft, pliable, single-colored mass

You don't strictly need to use alcohol, but I find that it makes the colors more vibrant than with just dry colorant. But I've found that the only way to get completely smooth and consistent colors with dough is to color before trace, otherwise, there will always be bits of traced, uncolored dough in there.

To make the mod canes, I started by cutting out a bajillion little discs of dough:

If I were insane enough to do this again, I'd make little balls instead of discs, as it would go faster.

Once I had my disks, I stacked them into a cheap polymer clay extruder, pushed the handle, and out came these messy-looking 3/8" noodles. I didn't do a great job of capturing all the steps, so please see Lisa Pavelka's Extruded Mod Canes post of you want to know how it all works.

Then, I layed them flat, squished them together and cut and stacked them. Any time a cane wouldn't stick to it's neighbor, I'd brush it with a tiny bit of water, and then it would stay.

It came out pretty cool-looking, but I was worried it might fall apart, so I added a another band of dough in a checkerboard pattern, then put the whole thing into a bar mold with some black cold-process batter to make sure it wasn't going anywhere:

(The above picture was taken after using the bar for a week, just to make sure it would stay together!)

I dry-brushed the bar with gold mica for the Klimt-look, then took whatever scraps of dough I had left and attempted to make a swirled lentil bead:

FWIW, earlier in the week I made this crown on a pillow:

I used some paper templates for the rough shapes:

Then shaped it and smoothed it with water:

For the pillow itself, I made a cookie cutter like this:

I made the tassels using the same extruder, but with a different disc:

Of course they need gold mica, too!

Neither of these creations comes close to what other (actually artistic!) folks have come up with for this challenge, but it was fun to do, and I'm happy with the dough recipe I came up with. :)

Rusted Soap

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

It doesn't even make sense 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...

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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 to harden than I'm used to!

I like to make up a big batch and keep it 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:

FWIW, I did try making a fluid hot process bar, with mixed results. It turned out pretty complex for hot process (i.e., you really can do swirls!), but keeping everything hot was a pain, and the tops were so ugly! Here's what I made, scented with Wholesales Supply's Sweet Pumpkin Pie fragrance:

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...

Dancing Bubbles

This month's soap club challenge is the Dancing Funnel, which is basically a series of overlapping circles. It looks really easy to do, but, like so many others, turns out not to be.

Tatsiana presented the technique using a super thin, hand-stirred batter that I wasn't able to master. When I tried it, the colors ran together and the circles distorted into odd shapes.

I was trying a much softer recipe than I usually use:

• 40% Costco Mediterranean Blend
• 38% Lard 
• 20% Coconut Oil
• 2%   Castor Oil

Plus 28% water and 1t ppo of my go-to decelerating fragrance oil (White Tea & Ginger from Nature's Garden). 

It seemed like it took forever to harden -- I'm used to unmolding after 4-6 hours -- and the circle definition was terrible.

For the next batch, I dropped the water to 22%, and switched to a neutral accelerating FO (White Tea & Ginger from Crafter's Choice). This worked much better, as it started to set up as I went, allowing better definition as I got to the top:

I intended this to look like bubbles, so the circles are small and monochromatic, and colored with different intensity levels of the same blue mica.

(My daughter, Maddy, says she loves this soap, but pointed out that bubbles aren't actually blue. So, next time, I'll be sure to make them transparent... ;)

FWIW, the color levels I used (of Tropical Teal from Nurture Soap Supplies) were:

• Dark: 1 t/ppo
• Medium: 1/2 t/ppo
• Light: 1/4 t/ppo

One of the best things about this technique (IMO) is that the design goes all the way through the bar, which always makes me happy.

On the sides, the circles are flattened and look a bit like chrysanthemum petals. Even the back looks pretty cool, which doesn't often happen:

I wish I had had more time with this technique, but summer vacation followed immediately by back-to-school prep on top of work made it hard to squeeze it in.

I'm not making excuses, though.

OK, I clearly am, but still! :)

I hadn't been planning to submit this, as I felt I could have done better, but my husband pointed out that I was being a big baby, so here it is!

Patriotic Pipes

Hmmm, I wonder what month this challenge was in? :)

It's been a discouraging, yet oddly entertaining year politically, what with the upcoming election.

But that's not what led me to this color scheme -- it was the stripes.

I just love red and white stripes. Maybe it's a leftover from Christmas, but they make me happy.

So, I had been planning to do a "Christmas in July" sort of thing, when the 4th rolled around...

I love how it turned out, but holiday themes go from timely to tired in the blink of an eye. Luckily for me, my son adores red, white and blue, and doesn't care about such things. :)

Technique

This is, of course, for the Soap Challenge Club's Pipe Divider Swirl, my new favorite technique. So much so that I must of made 5 batches, in different color schemes, and they're all good enough to give away to family and friends, which almost never happens for me!

If you're unfamiliar with the technique, you can watch it's creator demonstrate it on YouTube. It's basically a faux funnel pour in a tray mold, using pvc cylinders to separate the foreground colors from the background.

I used my new Brambleberry 9-bar silicone liner for these, and as it's translucent, I could print out a bar outline grid and slip it underneath. 

I traced the circles on the liner itself, which survived every batch but still easily come off with alcohol.

Instead of beeswax or cocoa butter, I used soft soy wax to affix short pvc sections to the silicone, which both adhered and detached really well.

The colors in my first batch came out completely different that I had pictured. I've been trying to work light/bright greens into my soaps, but haven't quite mastered them, yet.

The next batch had, of course, to be purple. It came out too speckled, and there wasn't enough contrast between the two shades of purple to show up on camera.

OK, so what's next? Bright green combined with purple, of course! The green and purple came out too vivid, and the the pink not vivid enough.

How about that same pink, in two different saturation levels, combined with black and turquoise?

Details

OK, back to my entry. I had a lot of fun swirling it, even knowing I'd plane off the tops in the end. I didn't plan anything (obviously), but went for a lot of little flourishes, just cuz I like them.

For each batch, I used my favorite recipe:

• 42% Lard
• 22% Costco Mediterranean Blend Oil 
• 25% Coconut Oil 
• 11% Castor Oil

Plus:

• I soaped at 85° F, with an 2% lye discount
• 1 oz/ppo fragrance oil + 1 oz/ppo sodium lactate
• My fragrances were all over the place -- mostly the best-behaved ones (i.e., "Superstars") from Nurture Soaps (8th & Ocean, Cucumber & Melon, etc.)
• Each FO was combined with 50% of my go-to decelerator (White Tea & Ginger FO from Nature's Garden)
• The red is Nurture Soap's Really Red, which is gorgeous, and 1/3 the price of TKB Trading's Red #30. Hello Christmas...

Can you see the fireworks, or is it just me?