Friday, January 30, 2015

Bees, Honey & Crazy Hearts

 
Two more new to us molds this month are the Filagree Bee, 4 cavity and the Guest Bee, 5 Cavity. I haven't added these to the website yet because I only got a few of each and they probably won't last long in the store. I'll put them on next week if I still have any.
These soaps are made with mostly Honey Glycerin soap base with a few squares of Goat Milk base added give the soap an opaque look. The are scented with Lavender, I love the combination of Lavender and Honey.

The guest bee soaps weigh 1.5 ounces each.

The Filagree Bee is 2.5 ounces.
 
Below is the Crazy Heart tray mold with some of the same soap. I prefer this caramel coloured soap over the pink from my last post for sure! Speaking of colour, the honey soap I used was a from a long time ago when the honey soap was darker, actually it tends to darken with age. Anyway I came across it when I was cleaning up after Christmas and I love the colour, especially when a little goat milk soap is melted with it. With our regular Honey Glycerin soap you can get this colour by adding a little bronze mica. Thanks for reading!


Thursday, January 29, 2015

New Tray Molds: Crazy Hearts & Guest Tree of Life

 Just in stock, the Milky Way Crazy Hearts Tray soap mold and the Guest Tree of Life Tray soap mold. As you can see from the photos the Crazy Heart Tray will give you nine soaps and the Tree of Life Tray will give sixteen. Both trays hold two pounds of soap. I tried the Heart mold out last night with some Cherry fragrance and the Tree of Life with a Spearmint & Lime blend. Sorry for the crummy pictures, its really cloudy here.
In the picture below I had to cut off the bottom row of soaps to get close enough to show some of the detail. These molds are both really great and I wish I had ordered more of this one in particular, I only have five.

The picture below is a little better, showing four of the sixteen really cute bars I got from this mold.
 
 The Crazy Hearts, I haven't cut yet, and I think the pink is a little bright. So I may remelt it with some other soap. We'll see:) Thanks for stopping by!

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Mason Jar Candles Part 2

 Superstore has some really cute coloured mason jars. I wish there were lots of colours to choose from but there were just two, the green one pictured here and a pink one that I wasn't smart enough to photograph before making it into a candle. The jars are the same size as the ones I used in my last candle post, 250ml or 1 cup, they're just a different shape.
 I bumped up the amount of soy wax flakes I used per candle a little, so instead of 6 ounces I melted 6.5ounces. I also melted with the wax these little squares pictured above. They are wax melts that come in a bar and can broken in to squares. For the pink jar I added three of the squares on the left. They are sort of a salmon colour and matched the colour of the jar really well. The four squares on the left were melted with the wax for the green jar. I didn't have any really green wax and the wax I used didn't really add a lot of colour.
This is not a great picture but I wanted you to see what happened with the first one I made. It was night time and the house was pretty cool. I poured this candle and went to bed, waking up to the cracks you see. I was glad I melted a little extra wax because even though I didn't have any of these cracks in my last candles, something told me to save some of the wax in case this happened. I remelted the saved wax and topped this up so the cracks were melted from the heat of the added wax and since the house was warmer ( I waited for it to warm up) there was no further cracking. The candle in the green jar was made during the day and did not require any first aid. I've read that a heat gun can also be used to smooth out cracks or little holes in the wax.

 And here they are finished, the one on the left is scented with Mango and the other candle is scented with Green Apple. The Green Apple is my favorite for sure.
 I've decided to start a bit of a gift cupboard this year. Its nice to have something to grab if you get a last minute invite for cake at a family member's birthday. I'll be able to easily tie a gift tag on to one of these if I don't have time to make a card. Thanks for stopping by!

Monday, January 5, 2015

Mason Jar Candles

 I've been wanting to try these Mason Jar Soy Wax Candles for about a month now. Over the holidays they were all over Pinterest and I sold a lot of soy wax flakes to folks who were making them as gifts. I didn't look up any specific instructions so you could say I was just winging it. The jars I used are 250ml (on cup) sizes and I  melted 12 ounces of soy wax. I thought I would be able to fill both jars with a little left over wax but after I filled the jars there wasn't any extra wax. Luckily I didn't need to top the candles up once the wax hardened :) As you can see above I used two wicks per jar, sticking the wicks down with a little melted wax. I had planned to keep the wicks from flopping around with pencils (without rubber bands) but the pencils kept rolling away so I had to secure them with rubber bands. Really could have used an extra pair of hands for that part.
 These candles are fragranced with French Vanilla fragrance oil, I did try to look up usage online and in the end went with 2 teaspoons. Its really a personal preference thing and I think I got it right.
I've made some little tags, the one above is secured with hemp twine.

 This tag is secured with bakers twine.
And I lit one, "just for you". Thanks for looking and Happy New Year!