Holiday Soaps

Ugly Xmas Sweater

Scented with a combination of Autumn Wreath and Cinnamon fragrance oils, this one made our whole house smell like Christmas:

I had originally hoped to use Christmas Cabin as my fragrance oil, but it turned the soap a very unappealing salmon color. I was going for fun ugly, not fugly.

For colors I did a super-saturated Soapberry red mixed with Red Lake #30, and Soapberry green mixed with hydrated green oxide in a light TD base. I made up some small bars in red and green the day before, and shredded them and tossed them in the white base before layering them with more white. 

I was trying to avoid crackle with a water reduction, which mostly worked, except directly around the shreds. Interesting! I also got some marks from my new wire cutter, which I mostly love, but am disappointed that it doesn't product the perfect bars I seek... 

For the tops, I had poured a thin layer of uncolored soap and used this and that fondant plunger to make the shapes. I then tossed them in the mixed micas, to make sure they matched. My experiments with this plunger taught me the limits of the detail you can have in CP soap before it breaks. Maybe melt and pour would have worked better, but I really like to gel my soaps with CPOP. Holyrose's holly tops are much nicer looking, but I'm working on some texture mats that I might try instead.

Christmas in Hawaii

This was to be my non-Christmasy, Frozen-inspired holiday soap, as well as my entry for the latest Soapworks challenge, a spoon swirl. But it looks more like water than snow, and I liked my space entry better, anyway. It's scented with White Tea & Ginger; a family favorite.

The colors are coral reef mixed with hydrated green oxide, and Soapberry blue with a pinch of black. The white is very white, thus a lot of TD, and I mixed up mini batches of the colors ahead of time to shred and add as speckles. Next time, I would make the speckles much denser and lighten up all the colors, and do a better job on the mica tops.

Sugar Plum Fairy

This one is just for the girls, and smells like an explosion of fruity sugar. I think adults might find it cloying and unsophisticated, but the younger girls and tweens seem to love it.

For this confetti soap, I used shreds of bars I already had, and tossed some of them in mica for the tops -- which came out looking like girly rice crispies.

They are scented with Sugar Plum Fairy (plus vanilla stabilizer), but next time I think I'd use Cranberry Fig so that I don't need the stabilizer. After all, they'll still darken eventually even with that.

Happy Holidays, everyone!