Loofa Soap from Steven & Chris

 

How cute are these loofa soaps that were featured in a DIY segment on an episode of Steven & Chris. They have a couple of other crafting ideas for loofa, you can see all of them including the soap here.

 

They did a loofa soap years ago when they were the Designer Guys too. I used to love that show.

Thanks for stopping by!

Coffee Soap

 I'm trying to do a few more masculine soaps for Father's Day. This soap has a small amount of cold coffee used in the sodium hydroxide solution but most of the colour comes from the Coffee Essential Oil I used for fragrance. The soap was pretty beige before I added the Coffee Oil and then it turned a brown which was OK, I ended up adding some Titanium Dioxide to lighten it. I then split the soap in to three sections and coloured one a darker brown with a little coco powder, I threw in some coffee grounds too with the coco powder. I added Honey Beige mica to the other container of soap ( and got Orange??) Below is about  10 minutes after it was in the mold and above  after unmolding and cutting, you can see the orange has toned down a lot LOL.

 Side view in the mold was pretty scary. Once cut it wasn't so bad, and it smells really good. So the darkest brown has some coco powder and ground coffee, the lighter brown is coloured from the coffee oil and lightened with some titanium dioxide and the "orange"  is coloured with Honey Beige Mica. I've used that mica before and its usually a tan colour. We'll see if it changes after the soap is cured and cleaned up.

 

This Time I Remembered the Olive Oil

It took a few weeks  but I finally got to remake the Green Tea & Star Anise soap that I botched last month. I forgot the olive oil in my last batch and had to throw it all out :( I didn't hanger swirl this soap, all my soaps have been kind of busy lately) so the only swirling I did was a little on the top. Below are the bars freshly cut, I'll clean them up once they harden a little more. Here's a link to the other batch, it's (it was) a little more swirly. Thank for looking!

Magnesium Lotion from Devotional Family

 I have been wanting to make magnesium lotion for a few months now. I have heard of all the  benefits of magnesium for sleep, stress, pain and all sorts of other things and apparently lotion is more effective than supplements. This recipe from Devotional Family looked good because I had all of the ingredients except for the magnesium flakes. After searching our town for them (with no luck) , I used the Amazon link they had on their site and ordered the  flakes from the US. Pictured above are the flakes, they look like soy wax flakes but they are harder, like a salt. I had to made  a magnesium solution boiling 1/2 cup of water and them stirring in one cup of the flakes.

The next step was to melt the Coconut Oil, Shea Butter and Beeswax and then slowly pour in the magnesium solution while stick blending. I also added the optional borax and some Geranium essential oil, my Shea Butter is  organic and has an odor so I used a nice strong essential oil. I mixed it all on the pot that the oils were melted in. As you can see I set the pot in a bowl of ice water to help it cool faster.

I was able to pretty much pour the lotion into these three jars, there a two 4 oz cosmetic jars and 1/2 pint mason jar. I didn't put them in the fridge and they've firmed up nicely. I've made lots of butters and massage bars but this was my first time making an actual lotion. I'll see how beneficial it is, I've got a couple of people I'm giving some too, and then I can always make more. The magnesium flakes were about $27.00 Canadian and I think there is enough for 5 or 6 batches and they have an endorsement on the back from Dr. Norm Shealy, he's a big proponent of using magnesium in lotion form. This took maybe 1/2 hour from start to finish, once I had assembled the ingredients, that's my kind of project. Thanks for reading!