A new direction for my blog! I will be writing about my cold process soap-making here. Mainly as a way of recording soapy stuff for myself, but hopefully people will find it interesting too! For the last six years my blog has been filled with card-making and papercraft, specifically as a demonstrator for Stampin' Up, but lots of design team stuff too. However, last year I started my own soap business and have made the decision to leave SU at the end of this month, as I feel it's time to move on to new things. I'll still be blogging about papercrafting too, but that will just be the random stuff that I make for fun. I did think about starting a new blog, but I actually quite like this one!
I have a range of safety-assessed soaps that I sell, but this soap was made for a Facebook group challenge where we were asked to make egg soaps. You could use the egg yolk, the white or the whole egg. If you didn't want to use an egg, you could make an egg-shaped soap! :-)
There is a long tradition of egg soaps. Generations of Swedish women used egg whites as facial masks for their astringent effect on the skin. The Swedish soap maker Victoria made their egg white soap, 'Lanolin-Agg-Tval' (sorry I can't put the correct accents there!) from the early 1900s. Their soap combined egg white with lanolin and rosewater. The Belgian version 'Eiwit Zeep' from Kala does not contain lanolin, but has chamomile flower oil added. There are currently a number of Korean soaps available that also contain egg white.
I was very keen to devise my own egg white soap! I decided to combine lard with olive pomace, castor, argan and coconut oils with shea butter. At a light trace, I added a mixture of rose water, red French clay and an egg white. You have to be careful with two things. First, I made sure that the lye water and oils had cooled sufficiently because you can scramble the egg (not nice!). Secondly, I carefully weighed the egg white so I could decrease the amount of water accordingly. An average large egg white is apparently 40g, but mine was weighing in at 35g!
I added Rose Geranium fragrance oil which caused quite a bit of acceleration, so it turned out as more of a 'plop & drop' than I would have liked. However, there was just enough time to create a cocoa powder pencil line and I was really delighted with the final result. Only a small 500g batch using my small loaf mould, as it's for personal use. It will be really interesting to see how it feels after curing!
Happy soaping! April x
Interesting. I know nothing about soap making and certainly didn't know you can put egg in it. I expect you can add almost anything. I've just bought a rose geranium plant which I'm hoping I can propagate and will go well in bouquets. Did you get my email this week?
ReplyDeleteHi Alison
DeleteLovely to hear from you! Yes, you can put lots of things in. Some don't always survive the saponification process though! Your rose geranium sounds lovely! Sorry for very slow email reply!! A xx
Fascinating, I "sort of nearly" understand most of the technical stuff, I have read a lot about soap-making but never tried it. Found you last week through Kate's Photo Challenge and look forward to reading some of your previous blogs :-)
ReplyDeleteAh you should try it! Everyone is a quivery wreck the first couple of times. I am Lantern Lily Soaps on both Facebook and Instagram, so do feel free to message me if you ever need any help.
DeleteI will have lots of soap blog posts coming here, so I hope they prove to be useful! :-)
Thanks April. Afraid I am rather a Luddite and do not use FB or IG, but I am a blog-junkie so look forward to new reads on here :-)
DeleteI know what you mean, Jayne. I am inclined to be a Luddite myself! :-)
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