Days of Wine and Rosehips





While helping my mother clean out her kitchen cabinets in November, I found a treasure trove of ingredients to go into soap—including a lot of neglected booze in dusty bottles.

This lovely bar contains a bottle of cheap red wine (don't ask me the name—maybe Sutter's Revenge???) that I reduced and used in place of water.

I think the scent of the wine actually made it through the lye process, there's a real intoxicating top note that hits you first followed by my pretty complex blend of lemongrass, orange, may chang, pine, cedarwood, ho wood and black pepper essential oils.

I tried to get clever and add kosher sea salt and some insanely expensive Himalayan pink sea salt as layers and as a sprinkling on the top. My thought was the salt would still do that miraculous creamy thing to the lather, but wouldn't make the bar so crumply. Also thought by doing that, the pinkness of the salt would be more pronounced.

The bars are still a bit messy—most of the salt on the top went all over my kitchen as I was cutting the bars, but I like the effect of the layers.

Ingredients:

olive oil infused with alkanet and rosehips

coconut oil

palm kernel oil

castor oil

cheap red wine

kosher sea salt

Himalayan pink sea salt

Fragrance:

Lemongrass, orange, may chang, pine, cedarwood, ho wood and black pepper essential oils

If you like this blog, check out my new one: The Haley Maxwell Soap Making Mysteries

Theme and Variation

One batch of lavender resulting in three different soaps thanks to my mini loaf pan.





Just Lavender

Lavender and Poppyseeds

Lavender Beach Bars

Subplot Soap: Spring 2013





As New York digs out of a blizzard and plunges into Fashion Week, Subplot Soap unlocks the doors of its curing facilities to unveil The Spring Collection.

Don't look for garish pastel colors reminiscent of cavity-inducing Easter candy. The hues this season are earthy and sophisticated. Hemlines are crisper—and for the most part, even.  

Look for playful embeds that keep bars from being too straight-laced. Unexpected ingredients like Himalayan pink sea salt, cheap red wine, coffee butter and lime basil will wake up your skin and get it ready to ditch the parkas and itchy wool socks.

Fragrances from Subplot Soap this spring feature bold blends with ginger, black pepper, crisp citruses and notes of the exotic. Think smart, sexy and just a little bit snarky.

The bars, like any haute couture collection will be limited to a select few lather fashionistas.  Wanna be one of them? See what's available.

If you like this blog, check out my new one: The Haley Maxwell Soap Making Mysteries

Photos of Soap I Never Blogged About

It's not that I don't love them…just haven't gotten around to writing a post about 'em.

If you like this blog, check out my new one: The Haley Maxwell Soap Making Mysteries

Baby Olive Oil Bars

Layered olive oil soap is nothing new for me, I've done it twice before, but this is the first time I did it using a silicone mini-loaf pan as a mold. I bought the pan before I found out about miter boxes and figured it was an easy way to make uniform bars—and for making Beach Bars since the salt causes crumbling when cutting.

The bars are on the smallish side, but so adorable (and alas a little rustic).

Made these the day after Christmas. Infused (from top to bottom) with wild indigo, mint and nettle. Did a 10% superfat. No fragrance. Cold Process/Oven Process, so they were technically ready the next day, but I'm curing them until February. I've read that a long cure helps get rid of the 'slimy' lather that olive oil soap tends to produce.

One bar of this batch has already gone into the shower with me. Fab.

Getting Things Straight

I'm terrible at anything that involves straight lines. Maybe it has something to do with my apartment being slightly tilted—I have books under the legs of my furniture to even the surface areas out. Or maybe it's just one of the flaws of my personality. Like being awful at spelling.

My soap has suffered because of this. No matter how hard I try and how careful I am with measuring, scoring and cutting—my knife goes wonky half way through the cut and I end up with bars that look like parallelograms and trapezoids and shapes they don't have names for.

One of my New Year's Soap Resolutions is to cut straight, uniform bars—especially important as I'm going forward with packaging my short stories with my soap.

To solve this I bought a miter box—normally used for cutting 2x4's. There're slots in the box to keep your saw (or in my case knife) straight. Works like a charm. I cut these guys after four whiskey sours at Druid's.



Straight little soldiers.

Days of Wine and Rosehips Beach Bars.


There's only one little problem with the box. When the soap comes out of my silicone loaf mold, it's too wide to fit in the box. Because the mold is flexible, it allows the soap to expand. I have to cut the sides—a lot—to get it into the box.

Meaning, the sides of my bars will still have that distinctive Heather Holland Wheaton crookedness.

If you like this blog, check out my new one: The Haley Maxwell Soap Making Mysteries

Experiment with Beeswax #1: A Screw Up




How quaint and rustic

 

My friend and fellow gardener at Oasis Community Garden, Jenny Markovich gave me some raw beeswax last summer. She used to have a hive in the Clinton Community Garden on 48th Street. Used to. Her hive was invaded by a New York City rat and her bees fled for a safer location.

I didn't get around to rendering the wax until fall. It wasn't difficult. Just a little scary and messy. It's now another skill I can put on my resume.

Before I actually used the beeswax, I did a lot of reading on The Dish because I also wanted to add honey (and oatmeal). I had a couple of variables.

The big thing I got from my research was:

1) Melt your beeswax in with your oils.

2) Don't let the honey get too hot. It'll scorch and/or cause a volcanic explosion.

Explosions make me nervous. I vowed to keep things cool.

So on a gloomy November day, while Jenny's bees were probably hiding in their new hive somewhere in Central Park (I like to think) I set out to make my soap. I'd leave it un-fragranced—from what I'd read, the honey, beeswax oatmeal scent would come through the lye process.

I dissolved the honey in hot water then let it cool down before adding it to the lye water. That went fine. No weird smells, no explosions.

While the lye/honey mixture was cooling, I melted/heated the beeswax and oils (olive oil pomace infused with orange balsam thyme and a smidge of annatto for color, palm kernel oil, coconut oil and castor oil) in my trusty crockpot then shut it off.

This was my scew up. By the time I mixed the lye and the oils they were apparently too cool about 90 degrees). The wax/oil mixture was still liquid, but not hot enough.

I didn't learn this though until I took the soap out of the mold the next morning and I found this on the bottom:

Yuck!

That's re-solidified honey and beeswax. Lesson learned. Don't go to extremes in temperatures. I do have a tendency to go to extremes. Maybe this is a Life Lesson as well as a Soap Lesson.

More research. Posted a question on The Dish about using the soap as embeds, but it looked like the best solution was to rebatch. I shredded the soap up, cooked it for hours in my crockpot and plopped it a mini-loaf loaf mold. And got this:

Screams Little House on the Prairie

Way too rustic for my liking. I'm trying to get away from that whole thing. I live in New York, not the Appalachian Mountains. I want my soap to look edgy, not homespun. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I also added too much water to the rebatch and after two months it's still soft in the center. When I showered with it, the lather was good, but you had to work on it (and beeswax can cause this). The honey, beeswax, oatmeal fragrance was there—it's subtle though.  My winter skin felt great afterwards.

I saved a few bars for Jenny as a remembrance of her hive and it's a good soap for washing up after digging in dirt. By the time spring rolls around, they should be hard. The rest of the bars were remolded into embeds including these:



Balls served up on a silver platter



I rolled the balls in different powdered herbs (patchouli, sandalwood, star anise, Boswellia resin, jasmine and frankincense) leftover from my Mountain Rose incense making kit.

The balls will go into an upcoming batch that I'll make in the next few weeks. And I still have a little of Jenny's beeswax for another experiment—using what I learned from this one.

If you like this blog, check out my new one: The Haley Maxwell Soap Making Mysteries