Making Soap with a Friend, Part 1
Last year I met Kenna of Amathia Soapworks who lives about 20 minutes from me, after she found me on Facebook via Celine of iamhandmade in Ireland. This is how the internet works for us!! We’ve been to lunch at […]
Goat’s Milk Soap Tutorial Updated
This is just a quick post to let you know that I updated my tutorial on How to Make Goat’s Milk Soap yesterday. I’ve changed my method slightly, plus the photos were all skewed in the original post so I […]
How I Make Soap: A Video
This is mostly for my customers who may or may not have an idea of how soap is made. I use the cold-process method, which means there is no heat applied to the soap. The visions most people have of […]
How to Line a Wooden Soap Mold
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard other soapmakers say they just hate to line their soap mold! I find it pretty relaxing, and thanks to the lesson from my soapmaking friend April McCart, there’s a method I use […]
Bumpy Soap
A couple weeks ago, Erin at Inner Earth Soaps posted about the problems she had with her new soap cutter causing what looked like air pockets in her soap. As I read her post, I realized that my soaps had […]
The Highs and Lows of My Soapmaking Day
Today was a marathon soapmaking day, mostly in preparation for the holiday season. I made four batches of soap and each of them was a different recipe. I had melted all the oils last night, and cooked a bottle of […]
The Making Of the Winter Rose Soap
This is for Donna who asked how I swirled the Winter Rose soap! With comments like “it needs its own museum,” and “If I made that I would be putting one on the mantelpiece and spend all day gazing at […]
Mixing Soap Colorants – A Follow-Up
I am following up from the previous post on mixing soap colorants since I claimed that oxides and ultramarines are best dispersed in glycerin or oil, and then several soapmakers commented that they disperse their oxides and ultramarines in water. […]
Mixing Soap Colorants
There are three different ways (that I know of) to mix soap colorants. One is with water (which only works with water-soluble colors such as FD&C, most micas, clays, and water-soluble titanium dioxide). The second way is with vegetable glycerin, […]
On the Curing Rack: Cherry Blossom Soap
Just in case you haven’t been following the saga of the PVC Pipe Soap Experiment, you may find Part 1 and Part 2 quite interesting. It was no easy task getting the soap out of the pipe, let me tell […]