The Demise
of the Strawberry Soap
I made the cutest soaps, but… well, here’s what happened…
Having been awhile since I made soap involving a fancy mold, and having known that I did not yet have a permanent embed plan in place, I sat down one day to figure out my new recipe. In a way, it wasn’t going to be new at all — only changed. As I pondered how to take the same 6 oils that I typically use, and change the formula enough to make a firmer result for the purpose of embeds, I also wondered, “How big should my recipe be?”.
That question was definitely a tough one, which may seem strange to some because I did, after all, make a video on how to determine the oil amount you need for a new soap mold. But that was for a rectangle mold, and these were in the shape of: Strawberries! How do you determine that? I only knew that there were 10 of those little pretty berry molds, and I decided to play it safe by making the recipe bigger rather than smaller. So I made this batch to be 15 ounces of oil
After awhile of changing this and that, and then going back to that and this, I at last settled on what was a little more cleansing than we might typically go for, but it was still good and firm. I decided that since they will be embedded into my regular soap bars, the super-cleansing result would not be overbearing, but hopefully balanced out, as I had done in the past with this Ocean Breeze soap (that one is long gone, but it was SO PRETTY!)
After all that thinking, my embed recipe was ready to try out in the strawberry molds! I printed it out, and when I was ready (a day or so later), I got to work.
The first thing I had to do before mixing all the melted and cooled oils with the cooled lye water, was figure out how I could possibly make green leaves for my strawberries, without making a mess. As you can see in this picture, I set up the mold to work with me on that. It helped as I carefully poured a tiny amount of green soap in each cavity “bottom” (the leaves were now at the bottom). That was good, but taking a couple of cotton swab tips to clean the excess green wherever I didn’t want it to
go, completed the work for this artist. Next, I mixed the red. It was starting to get thicker, so I’d needed to work quickly, without panicking. I spooned red soap in each cavity until I was able to lay the mold down flat and tap out all (hopefully) of the air pockets.
Done! That was satisfying. But whoa! I made WAY too much extra soap! I guess 15 ounces was far more than this little mold needed. Looks like my family will be using really red soap bars for awhile! And we will all smell like strawberries. 🙂
But will these pretty berries turn out? I had to wait and see…
So, after a good while (like many days or a couple of weeks later), I was able to unmold the soap, and at least 6 “berries” looked usable for an artist soap piece. These would be used as an embed to place on top of chocolate-scented square soaps. The plan was to make the soap look like it had cream with a strawberry on top of the cream.
This I did, and at first, they looked great! The soaps were so beautiful!
But little did I know that they would not stay beautiful. I actually should have thought of it ahead of time, because I do know that if the fragrance used in soap has any vanilla in it, it can darken cured soap. This was okay for the chocolate part, but not-so-good for the “cream” part of this artistic piece. And after a time of curing, this is what it ended up looking like:
Can you believe it? All that time planning and thinking and working on this masterpiece! Oh, well. Things like this happen and it doesn’t have to be a big deal. They say that “if life gives you a lemon, make lemonade”. That is a great saying that certainly applied here.
In order to do that, the next step to carry out was to (*gulp*) chop these newly made soaps into a whole bowlful of pieces. Sad as this might be, it was the only way to redeem the situation. Confetti soap was underway! You can see how I made this confetti soap on YouTube, if you want to. In the end, the soap in the next picture was the pretty soap I ended up with, all-be-it wasn’t as beautiful as the original plan.
None-the-less, it smells great and it is very kind to your skin. Your skin will smell nice and chocolatey! I highly recommend that you grab one for yo
urself, because this is obviously a soap that I hope to only make once. Future strawberry soaps will hopefully look like they have a strawberry on top!
So there you have it.
Now you know the story of this interesting soap.