Ciaglia & Confetti Soaps

[Catscankim]

Love your soaps as usual @Mobjack Bay

BTW where did you get your sea turtle mold. That little guy looks like my logo turtle and need that in my collection lol

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Thank you @dmcgee5034 @Carly B @Catscankim I’m really glad you like them.

catscankim - The stamp is from Viktor at SoapStamps4You on Etsy. His stamps are designed specifically for soap and he offers a good selection. They’re well made, and IMHO, worth the price and the wait for the shipping from Europe. He also provides good guidance. For example, this type of stamp has a lot of surface area and works best when the soap is still a bit malleable, e.g. I wouldn’t try to stamp a bar of ZNSC with it. I have another small turtle stamp from MKM pottery that works fine even when the soap is firmer. Using a piece of plastic wrap between the stamp and the soap makes it easy to keep the stamp clean and doesn’t affect the impression.

 

[Zing]

*with jaw on the floor
WOW WOW WOW. I clicked the link to your post yesterday and oohing and aahing over photo after photo. I love the one that looks like a sunny day at the beach with birds and sun rays in the sky. All of them are stunning. AND THEN, I discovered more photos at the top of the page from earlier this month! Not sure how I missed that. I believe I've asked this before but do you sleep, Woman?!

 

[Paulie]

Reporting back on the confetti marathon, which expanded to include some confetti/ciaglia hybrid soaps and my first serious attempts at rebatch. They’re all ways to make less than perfect soap better!

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I think I will call this one “Blackberry Jumble.” I made it with a whopping amount of shreds (50% of total batch weight, TBW). It’s scented with BeScented’s BRV and the flower was made with leftover batter that had a texture approaching that of soap dough.

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Another one made by cramming soap shreds into the batter. The scent is a blend of NS Awaken, NS Champagne, and a little splash of orange and ginger eos. Tropical Mimosa, anyone?! It smells amazing!

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A hybrid, with confetti on top and Ciaglia method on the bottom. I intentionally left some speckles in the bottom layer for interest. This one has an eo-based citrus scent, with just a hint of basil.

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I used shreds at the rate of 30% of oil weight for this one and didn’t add them until after the lye was added. My lard and tallow recipe is really slow and it was almost effortless to make the layers for this soap even though I used a 40% lye concentration. I even managed to make a last minute ITP-ish type swirl for the sky with the confetti laden batter. This one is scented with BB Sea Salt blended with a little NS 8th & Ocean that amps up the melon and knocks down the seaweed in the Sea Salt FO. I wish I had thought to do a little skewer swirl between the two blue layers. I guess that’s for next time.

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My first ever whipped soap and it’s made from rebatched shreds. It whipped like a dream, smells like roses, and it floats! I usually take showers, but this one calls for testing in a bath.

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Believe it or not, this soap also floats! It’s another batch of rebatched shreds colored with AC and scented with tea tree eo. The underlying base was colored with alkanet, but it was quite pale and is not contributing to the color except in the few shreds you can see here and there. I pushed a plastic impression mat made for clay down on the top of the soap in the foreground before I stamped both soaps with rubber stamps.

OMG, despite two weeks of concerted effort, I still have shreds. On the upside, I also have perfectly fine soap to give away and have gotten past my dread of recycling.

These are beautiful !

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Thank you @Paulie and @Zing .

@Zing Making soap is my way of forgetting about everything that goes on at work. The more batches I make, the more I forget

 

[CLMP]

Wow I love your soaps Im about to make confetti soap too for Easter soon.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

Thank you @CLMP and good luck with the confetti soap

 

[Catscankim]

@Mobjack Bay …thank you for this stamp seller. I bought 4 stamps

 

[Ephemerella]

@Mobjack Bay STUNNING! Just gaw-gus!

 

[Mobjack Bay]

As I progressed along my rebatching journey I was coming across information about rebatching using the microwave. I had to give it a try! At this point, only the lower right soap was hard enough to polish up. I made that one last weekend. The others were made yesterday.

 

[Carly B]

I always use the microwave for rebatch. The last facial soap I made came out amazingly smooth. I used my soap shreds and added some aloe juice and emu oil. I sometimes add homemade oat milk, but I didn't l this time. The fragrances in the shreds blended quite nicely too.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

I always use the microwave for rebatch. The last facial soap I made came out amazingly smooth. I used my soap shreds and added some aloe juice and emu oil. I sometimes add homemade oat milk, but I didn't l this time. The fragrances in the shreds blended quite nicely too.

Sounds nice, especially with the emu oil. I remember reading in another thread that you use rebatch for special fragrances (or misbehaving ones?), which sounds like a great idea. Do you make the soap base especially for that purpose? I’m also curious if you need to use a stick blender or does the rebatch melt smoothly on its own? I could’ve made the soaps above much smoother if I had used more water and the stick blender, but I also like the more rustic look. I would also love to know the percentage of palmitic & stearic in the recipe that made very smooth soap if you’re willing to share. I’ve done enough melting now to have a suspicion that my various recipes behave a little differently depending the percentage of palmitic and stearic fatty acids and/or whether the recipe is based on tallow & lard, palm or soy wax. It’s still hard to sort out because of the varing ages of the shreds.

 

[Carly B]

@Mobjack Bay, I would tell you all those things if I knew them. I used to buy soap shreds (years ago when I didn't do lye) from a goat farmer in PA, and BB in a pinch, but now that I do my own CP soap, shreds are mainly just what I get from planing and beveling my soap. Since I don't have a set recipe, the shreds are an amalgam of colors and scents and ingredients. I only use shreds that have been cured. Most of these shreds were from the soaps I made at Christmas, and I used my tallow/lard blend for a majority of those, and below is what they are, if that helps. I never thought about the makeup of the shreds, I figured the smoothness depended upon how much liquid/oil/other additives, and how long or and how fast I melted it (again, in the microwave). Obviously not a scientist here.....

I do not stick blend my shreds (unless I am doing Ciaglia in CP). This smooth rebatched soap looks a lot like your turtle soap above, even the color, but the side that was not in the mold looks rustic. When I rebatch, it's usually only enough for two or three bars at a time. When my quart-sized shred container fills up, it's time to rebatch (unless I do CP with shreds), so consequently I use silicone single cavity molds. Most of the time the soap "batter" is too chunky to get a lot of detail from the mold, but sometimes they look much better than expected.

And yes, I use misbehaving oils for rebatch, M&P, and wax tarts. It's also a great way to use up sample sizes, like Scent Memory and BB have.

 

[Mobjack Bay]

@Carly B Thanks so much for sharing that information. The shreds that seem to be the most resistant to melting smoothly, even when I add what I think is a lot of water, have less oleic (40% vs. 45%), and slightly more palmitic (20% vs. 18%) and stearic (10% vs. 7%). I don’t know if those differences are enough to affect how the soap melts, but I think I know what my next experiment will be.

 

[lucycat]

@Carly B Thanks so much for sharing that information. The shreds that seem to be the most resistant to melting smoothly, even when I add what I think is a lot of water, have less oleic (40% vs. 45%), and slightly more palmitic (20% vs. 18%) and stearic (10% vs. 7%). I don’t know if those differences are enough to affect how the soap melts, but I think I know what my next experiment will be.

I used to sell at a fair where another soapmaker only sold rebatch soap. she purposely made plain soap to then rebatch, scent and color. She never told me her base recipe but said something thing about not all oils would work. She was doing so much extra work in her soap I always thought her choice of oils had caused her to make a melt and pour type product.

 

[BWt]

Thank you @dmcgee5034 @Carly B @Catscankim I’m really glad you like them.

catscankim - The stamp is from Viktor at SoapStamps4You on Etsy. His stamps are designed specifically for soap and he offers a good selection. They’re well made, and IMHO, worth the price and the wait for the shipping from Europe. He also provides good guidance. For example, this type of stamp has a lot of surface area and works best when the soap is still a bit malleable, e.g. I wouldn’t try to stamp a bar of ZNSC with it. I have another small turtle stamp from MKM pottery that works fine even when the soap is firmer. Using a piece of plastic wrap between the stamp and the soap makes it easy to keep the stamp clean and doesn’t affect the impression.

Your soap is magnificent!

Thank you @dmcgee5034 @Carly B @Catscankim I’m really glad you like them.

catscankim - The stamp is from Viktor at SoapStamps4You on Etsy. His stamps are designed specifically for soap and he offers a good selection. They’re well made, and IMHO, worth the price and the wait for the shipping from Europe. He also provides good guidance. For example, this type of stamp has a lot of surface area and works best when the soap is still a bit malleable, e.g. I wouldn’t try to stamp a bar of ZNSC with it. I have another small turtle stamp from MKM pottery that works fine even when the soap is firmer. Using a piece of plastic wrap between the stamp and the soap makes it easy to keep the stamp clean and doesn’t affect the impression.

@Mobjack Bay a HUGE thank you for sharing your Etsy source for soap stamps. Have been looking everywhere for the letters stamps. Ordered from Viktor and told him you had recommended him. Excited to have soap stamp letters!

 

[McKherring Farm]

@Mobjack Bay …thank you for this stamp seller. I bought 4 stamps

Me too!

 

[BWt]

@Mobjack Bay Wanted to say thank you again for the soap stamp seller recommendation. Bought the alphabet stamps and an egg shaped bath bomb mold. I LOVE LOVE everything. Super service and excellent quality.