Marching for Paws Fundraiser

I saw a post on Facebook from a local pet rescue group looking for donations for an upcoming fundraiser to help with medical expenses and I thought I should donate some pet shampoo bars.  I've made these before and use them on my dog Marty. When I first started making pet shampoo I wanted ingredients that I knew where safe for our pets.  So I researched ingredients that would make these pet friendly as well as provide a skin and coat benefit.  One was tomato juice to help with odours.  Red palm oil I found that it's been recognized with veterinary groups.  Providing healing for  itchy skin and for shiny coats. Olive,castor and shea butter are moisturizing as well for doggy. I add purée tomato to the final soap to give extra anti oxidant properties.  And to clean our dogs of dirt and dander.  I love this soap. When I bath Marty his bath water is always brown, it lathers really well and rinses off leaving no soap residue.  Squeaky clean! Marty, I just love him! Here he is I the tub. Lol

After seeing the facebook post I contacted the girl organizing it and told her I'd like to donate a batch of this soap.  She was like.. Thank you.  And I figure as well as helping our furry friends, it's also a marketing tool for me! And a write off. Win, win. I made them today and added an extra design element to them to make them pop, as my reputation as a soap maker needs to be spot on.  I had ordered from Wish, three silicone paw molds that I knew I would use in the future.  With melt and pour organic soap base I made the paws. Using yellow gel colours for the paw pad and then brown oxide for the rest of the paw.  No fragrance. Plain. 

These were so perfect. Then we made the soap. I save my Little Ceasars dog food containers and sanitize them to make this soap. They are perfect soap molds. Especially for a pet shampoo. 

We use organic ingredients too! Found this at the Bulk Zone. Love that store. We freeze it before hand for this soap. Because of the acid in the tomato, if you freeze it when you add your lye to it, and do this slowly, it keeps the lye from burning the tomato and keeps it a beautiful red. Here's my frozen tomato.  

I measure before freezing the amount needed for this recipe so I don't have to worry later. This is 16.75 ounces pre measured.  Pour the lye little at a time let it sit and let it begin melting.  Stir. While it's melting you have time to do other things like purée your tomatoes 

Fresh tomatoes.  I freeze these too. Perfect for when you have tomatoes left over, I freeze for spaghetti sauces too. So after tending slowly to your freezer tomato and lye, and getting your oils ready.  You can mix and make your soap. Here's my oils that I prepared earlier that have been cooling down. The red palm oil is beautiful this will give your soap a beautiful yellow colour. So natural for doggy! Love it!

Gorgeous, just gorgeous.!!! I love making this soap. 

Mix your tomato lye and your oils add the purée tomatoes and stick blend to emulsify.  Pour into your mold.  Little Ceasars:). Spray with rubbing alcohol and place the embeds on top.  Let it saponify overnight. Mix you don't have the embeds just make the soap.  For this fundraiser, I'm pretty darned stoked at the final result. Love love love these.  I'm sure these will be a huge successful donation. And this may put me on the map! They had to be perfect.  Ill post the unmolding.  Oh and before I poured, I sprayed these with cooking spray so they will easily pop out. If you forget you can pop them in the freezer, I've done that before just freeze enough so you can push them out.  I hope you enjoyed reading my post, and that I have inspired you to maybe try your hand at these. Thanks for looking. Bye now 

Lotion bars

I've been wanting to do these for awhile now.  I've made a lotion bar before but found the recipe melted too quick.  I found one that I liked and thought I'd give it a go once again. Shea butter, coconut oil, beeswax.  The recipe also called for a teaspoon or so of oil but I left that out. I thought with extra bit of oil these would be quick to melt. So I omitted it. 

I've been working on this brick of natural beeswax it's looking like a dog bone.  I found the best way to use it is to grate with a vegetable peeler. Way to hard to cut with a knife. I found this perfect silicone mold at my local thrift shop.  Love that people give to these places for me to find. Yay!

So simple this recipe, you melt everything and pour it in. Let them cool, pop them out. That's it.  

I put them into a small mini cupcake and then wrapped them with a tinfoil so when you go to use them you can wrap the lotion bar into the tinfoil to protect it in your makeup bag or wherever. And then I shrink wrapped them to look like a candy. 

Fun!  I gave some away at Christmas and so far I've heard that it's holding up and working great! Love that they are natural too. As always thanks for stopping by.  Bye now. 

Pineapple Soaps

We have been busy In our soap kitchen these past few weeks. There been no time to really sit and blog.  So it's time to catch up.  We wanted to use up a fragrance that our shop just loves.  So pondering what to do with the rest of our Jungle Love fragrance from Natures Garden we decided on a Pineapple soap. Nodding some research on pineapple it has a lot of great skin and health benefits.  It's a natural anti inflammatory fruit and can act similar to ibuprofen.  Wow, who knew! It removes dead skin cells and brightens your skin. Great for the winter.  It's aids with bruises and sprains.  So drink it up and use it on your skin. 

Fresh purée pineapple 

after emulsion we added the pineapple to the soap. It's sparkling in here. Beautiful. 

we used a white TD for half the batch of soap. Green and yellow for the other half. 

Love the colours 

We poured the white first then poured high to get a deep pour into the mold with the yellow and green. 

Used the rest of the colours to decorate the top and used a skewer to swirl design.  We dropped the left over micas to add extra detail. 

Beautiful!

After we cut it open here is the result.  Gorgeous I think! Our standard recipe of olive, coconut, palm, castor,distill water, sodium hydroxide. Micas from TKB trading.  Their colours stay true in cp soap.  

Valentines Soaps

We are calling these Chocolate Explosion! A soap seize that we had to quickly work on to get it into the mole.  Chocolate and Strawberry Fragranced.  They smell delish! What we originally wanted to do was to pour the brown soap into the molds and then pour red and black melt and pour into the cp.  that didn't happen.  So after the seize, we poured it over the tops of each of the two molds we had ready. Hoping that the mp would fill any gaps inside.  To our surprise they turned out pretty Kool.  Although we couldn't get our brown oxide to thoughly mix, it still looks OK! We think it kind of looks like a fudge with almonds or walnuts in it.  I've had some say it looks like meatloaf.  Either way it's still soap! 

These ones look like granite a bit.  I'm liking them more and more as I keep looking and smelling them.  For Valentine's Day a neat little gift for a guy perhaps.  

These ones have both red and black melt and pour and look like a Big Turk chocolate bar.  Our recipe is olive, coconut, palm, castor, sweet almond oil.  After cleaning them up and packaging they turned a soaping disaster into a good thing! Thanks for always stopping in. 

Midnight Blue

Well Christmas is over and time to think about the next holiday, Valentines Day.  Listening to some classic music I became inspired by Melissa Manchesters Midnight Blue.  I used to play this song long ago on the piano and still love it today. 

TKB trading midnight blue mica. Nuture's Soap supply, blue vibrance. Saffire Blue neon pink mica. Oils of olive, coconut, shea butter. Black cherry bomb fragrance from Natures Garden. Pink hearts embedded made from melt and pour. Thanks for stopping by the Soap Kitchen. http://youtu.be/WweQJCqOFyI enjoy