After my first awesome experiences in the Bramble Berry Winter Soap Crafting Club, you can only imagine my thrill at receiving a Summer club subscription for Mother’s Day! You can check out my first club soaps here, here and here. They all turned out pretty great, and I couldn’t wait for my next kit shipment to arrive in July.
Here’s what came in my first summer kit:
9-bar birchwood mold with silicone liner, divider insert, and lid, premixed base oils, Oatmeal Cookie fragrance oil, Almond fragrance oil, and oat extract. (Also included was a bottle of lye and a shiny new scale for measuring it out to make each lye solution.)
All I had to supply was the mixing equipment, the Soap Crafting book, and some water and oatmeal! Easy peasy.
O Soap Crafting Club, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
- Base oils come pre-measured and pre-mixed. Joyful joyful.
- Silicone-lined mold included. Need I say more?
- Awesome instructions in the book and online, plus videos, and a live demo session. Whoa!
- Online community in which Anne-Marie and Bramble Berry staff interact frequently. Soapers Unite!
- A chance to learn new techniques and simply make awesome soap.
- For three straight months, it’s so fun to receive a new shipment of materials for each soap!
- Different soap recipes with new oils and/or butters, new fragrances, and new colorants and/or additives to try. Such a great way to try out ingredients using someone else’s published tried-and-true recipes and techniques.
I’m certain there are more reasons, but I digress. On with the soaping.
After reading all of my materials and prepping my space, I began making my soap. First, I made my lye solution and heated up my oils. While those were cooling, I blended up some oatmeal to make oat flour. I also added a bit of goat’s milk to the oils for some extra skin-nourishing goodness. When my lye water and oils were both at about 120 degrees, I mixed them, added the oat extract and divided off half the soap. To one half, I added whole oats and oatmeal cookie fragrance and whisked it all together, then I poured it into the mold. Next, I added the almond fragrance oil and oat flour to the other half of the soap and blended. I poured this mixture over my spatula and into the mold, creating a new layer of soap on top of the first.
Pouring the top layer
Finally, I inserted the dividers into the soap and sprinkled a few oats over each bar. I spritzed with alcohol, put the lid on, and popped the mold into a barely warm oven.
Raw soap with oats on top
To my surprise, after just a day, the soap seemed hard enough to attempt to unmold. Yay! It slipped right out of the silicone liner, and I had no trouble at all pushing each bar out of the dividers. I was also surprised to find that the bottom layer had already begun turning brown thanks to the vanilla content in the fragrance oil.
Just one day after making it, here’s the soap fresh out of the mold. The layers are pretty darn straight and even. Yippee!
It was fun to see how the outside was brown, but the inside (the part not yet exposed to the air) was still all the same color.
Pretty cool, right?!
It’s fun to watch the bars cure. Over time, the vanilla on bottom has caused the soap to turn a very deep shade of brown. After just 2 weeks of curing, here’s another look.
The layers are quite distinct now, and you can see the bits of oatmeal suspended throughout the soap. It has developed a bit of soda ash all around, but that’s an easy enough fix (or it’ll be gone after just one use anyway). 😉
These bars are really simple and beautiful. And they smell AMAZING! Love the fragrance blend. Plus, they’ll be super skin-nourishing as well as exfoliating. This was a fun, relatively simple and fast soap to create with great results.
I can’t wait to see what arrives in the August kit!
Beautiful and so delicious looking!
Thanks! 🙂 It certainly smells like it’s good enough to eat!! Oatmeal almond cookie…mmmm.
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