Soaps – Page 3 – Coastal Carolina Soap Blog

Tiger Lily Revisited

Once upon a time, I received a free bottle of Tiger Lily fragrance oil. I used this fragrance in an early batch of cold process soap, adding orange and pink swirls. It smelled wonderful and looked lovely. I hadn’t thought a whole lot about that fragrance, but I am at that point in my business life where I want to get rid of unwanted or remnants of fragrances, and I knew I had a sniglet of that scent left. Then one day, these showed up at my door via FedEx.

Pictures of lilies arrangement — A beautiful bouquet of white, pink, and orange lilies

Aren’t they gorgeous? And they got even prettier as the days progressed and more of the buds opened. My best friend sent these to me to celebrate the beginning of our school year and his final liberation from a hellish marriage. Looking at this arrangement three times a day reminded me of that Tiger Lily fragrance, and I just had to find it and make a batch of soap with it. It wasn’t a big batch, since I didn’t have much oil, but I managed to get six bars out of it.

That means that there are five of these glorious chunky bars available for your bathing pleasure (I’m keeping one for myself, thank you very much). Specially formulated to last and to produce a rich lather, these soaps are a true skin and nose treat as we hang on to summer just a tad bit longer. Their nubby tops were a happy accident and will feel fabulous next to your skin.

What’s your favorite flower that you’d love to sink into as you bathe?

Punky Patchouli

This is the coolest, most prettiest soap I have in this house. It has a flaming swirl that could probably take your breath away. My Mom, my sister and I made this. My Mom makes the soap. My sister stirs the colors into the oil, and I stir the colors into the soap and I hold the funnel. This was so cool to make and plenty cool to design. Mom wanted to leave the blue and gold. I wanted a swirl, so I suggested to do a tiny swirl in the center but just to the edge of the blue and gold. The funnel holding is not so fun because it gets boring. Here is a picture of the soap.

Patchouli soap swirl — The center of our amazing Patchouli swirl.

I am also including a picture of what the funnel looks like, too. Isn’t it beautiful? That is what it looked like when we got done pouring all of the soap into the mould.

Funnel with soap in it — The funnel after we finish pouring all the colors for this soap.

I love seeing the final product.

Pink Sugar – a New Special Edition Soap

Just gotta soap. That’s my personal justification for making a new soap out of a fragrance that simply doesn’t rock my world when I have a whole slew of “must-makes” on my dry-erase board. Sure, sometimes I get tired of soaping the same ol’ things, so I succumb to the urge to whip up something different and fun. From that urge came my newest special edition soap, Pink Sugar. This delightfully, totally girly soap is bathing bliss with a blend of some of the greatest soapmaking oils and lusciously rich coconut milk. I topped it with sparkly soap frosting and Himalayan pink salt.

Pink Sugar Soap Loaf — My Pink Sugar Soap freshly poured into the mould

This is that same wonderful girly goodness sliced. Unfortunately, some of the salt fell off, but the inside is so pretty. I expect the white parts to turn very brown because of the vanillin content in the fragrance, which will leave me with a brown and sparkly, hot pink swirled soap. How pretty will that be!

Eight delightful little bars of Pink Sugar Soap

These will be all ready for your blissful bathing enjoyment in around three weeks. I bet you know someone who would appreciate such a girly, fun soap.

Bringing Back Some Favorites

Do y’all hear that deep, straight-from-the-toes sigh? It’s the sound of a woman/mom/entrepreneur who is able to shed some additions to her schedule and get back into the business of taking care of business. Several weeks ago, my younger daughter said, “Mommy, it’s not for long.” She was referring to my being stuck behind a dump truck on the way to their swimming lesson, but I thought about it in light of all the things I had on my plate at the time. I was chauffeuring them to swimming lessons Mondays and Fridays, soccer practice (including coaching my younger daughter’s team) Tuesdays and Thursdays, church activities Wednesdays and Sundays, and Saturdays were soccer games with all four of us being involved in some way. But I knew soccer would end in mid-May, swimming lessons would end the end of April, and Wednesday night church activities would be over for them before our trip. In short, “it wouldn’t be for long.”

All that’s over now. We’ve returned from our EPIC Spring Break trip, wrapped up the soccer season, we’re days away from the end of our school year, and I am plowing head-first back into work. I kicked it off with three batches of amazing soap restocking. That was Friday evening’s fun. Mostly this weekend, though, I did minimal production and lots of resting.

Two fresh soaps - Fresh Cut Roses and Lemon Grove Gardeners Soap — Two fresh soaps – Fresh Cut Roses and Lemon Grove Gardeners Soap

In my mad soapmaking endeavors Friday evening, I started with a glorious batch of Soap of Milk & Honey (and Oatmeal!), which you can sort of see a bit of in the bottom of the picture. I followed that with Fresh Cut Roses (the pink soap) which I’m making primarily to restock for ConTemporal, but also to add to my line as a Special Edition. I brought the production home with Lemon Grove Gardener’s Soap (the pale yellow there with the specks of calendula petals), a perennial favorite with its scrubby properties and all natural, fresh lemony scent.

Up next is a rendezvous with The Perfect Man. Stay tuned…

Starry Night

I love this soap. This is another one of those fragrances which I first encountered due to a swap and getting a free bottle of it. It’s technically a seasonal fragrance, but I call it Starry Night. You see, I find myself humming Josh Groban‘s Vincent at random times, and that song was going through my head when I was first designing this soap a few years ago.

This soap was one of the first beer soaps I ever made, maybe about second or third ever, and its properties, scent, and design keep it a top seller. The scent is a lovely, exotic blend of frankincense, myrrh, sandalwood and patchouli, earthy and sweet. It contains a blend of premium oils and beer, which gives the soaps great conditioning properties. This soap is a total treat! You can pick up this treat for yourself in 3 1/2 weeks.

Patchouli!

It’s that great earthy scent that is a flashback to the 60s, the Summer of Love and the Peace Movement. It conjures up images of painted VW vans with shag carpeting in the back and very mellow hippie people with long hair with flowers in it. This is a love-it-or-hate-it scent; I’ve yet to hear anyone say, “I kinda like it.” It’s Patchouli, and if you can’t tell, I’m completely in the “LOVE IT!!!” camp.

This was such a fun soap to make! The business rule is, no one under the age of 12 gets to help make cold process soap, which, of course, means that both my girls are salivating for the opportunity to help me make it. My four-year-old mixed all my colorants for me (there are 12 total), and my ten-year-old mixed the raw soap into the colorants. Mom was here when we mixed and poured it, which was her first experience watching me make soap. When I swept the coat hanger into the soap and we saw the swirl emerge, we gasped at how cool it was. Click either pic to purchase a bar of Patchouli soap, or wait about 3 1/2 weeks for these jewels to be ready for purchase.

In which camp are you? Do you love it or hate it?

Weekend Soaping Disaster

Saturdays are made for making soap, and I managed to squeeze some time in to throw down a double batch between my younger daughter’s soccer tryouts and my older daughter’s tryouts. I was working on stocking up for my private label account, but my mind wasn’t on my work. I mixed my lye mixture, melted my saturated fats, mixed it all together, added the fragrance, did a great swirl, and began to pour it into the moulds. I noticed it was getting thick kinda quickly, and I didn’t think that fragrance blend accelerated the trace. I poured it into the moulds, and… What the heck!?!?! My moulds were only half full. I stood and stared at the moulds, wondering what had happened. Then it hit me: I had forgotten to put the unsaturated oils in.

So, I dumped all the soap back into the bucket, added the liquid oils into it, and mixed it all together. Buh bye beautiful swirls. I ended up with some lovely shade of wine that I could never duplicate in a million years. I still had a little bit of red and black soap left that I wanted to use for swirls, so I dropped that on top. My oldest said, “That looks like a crime scene. Not as bad as Daddy’s brain soap [interestingly enough, same type of soap], but still pretty bad.”

I went ahead and did the swirl… (This is after it saponified; I forgot to get a pic before I put it to bed)

Here's the finished soap with its swirls — Here’s the finished soap with its swirls

When I popped these bad boys out of their moulds, I was delighted with the fascinating swirls on the bottoms. Not all the soap had gotten out of the moulds, so the effect was really cool!

The back of these soaps turned out so pretty!

Not every batch of soap happens in soapmaking utopia, and not every batch of soap turns out to be just the most awesomest, coolest, most incredible ever. This one sure didn’t, but at least it wasn’t the worst batch to come through the lab.

Beer Soaps are Online!

I talked about these soaps months ago, telling you how spectacular they are for skin with their great scents, fluffy lather and skin-nourishing properties. Now that they’re off of consignment and back in my hands, I get the thrill of showing them off. They are beer soaps.

All that’s left of the beer in these scrumptious, hefty bars is the extract of the hops, the flower used to give beer its distinctive flavor and one which has long been reputed to have excellent hair and skin conditioning properties. Each bar weighs between 5 and 6 ounces and will last my husband and me at least 10 days in the shower with daily use.

Need help deciding on a fragrance? Feel free to email me at sara@sarassoapsnsuch.com and I can help you find that perfect scent for you or someone else.

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