Earl Grey

Ready to go

I have been frantically making soap in preparation for a craft show. I wanted to make this one for part of a his and hers gift set along with Lady Grey.  Earl grey is a very nice fragrant tea and therefore will make a mildly fragrant soap all by itself.  I had decided to go with a black, cream and of course brown color scheme.

I started with making about 10 ounces of tea with 5 tea bags to add to the water for my lye.  I moved next to my usual preparation of measuring and mixing my oils and mixing my lye water.  I have sodium lactate to help make the bars harder, but I frequently forget to add it.  I mixed the lye water with my oils and brought it to a thin trace before separating into three containers for coloring. 

 I wanted equal amounts of the black and brown soap mixture.  I only needed a little bit of white for the design I wanted to do.  I started with the black.  I had premixed my activated charcoal with enough water to make sure that it was not clumping, I added this mixture to one of the larger containers of soap.  I didn't add anything to the brown because the tea had already colored that portion.  I added just a little bit of titanium dioxide to the small portion of soap to be white.  Each color was blended just a little bit to make sure that the colors wouldn't have clumps.

Nicely swirled

I had prepared the mold with two dividers down the length of the mold.  Since I get 2 bars from each slice this way I get the same pattern on both sides.  I started by filling my sample mold.  Next I poured the outside edges  in the brown while holding the dividers steady.  I did get a little leakage though.  Next I poured the black in the middle.  After I got the black into the mold I mixed everything in the center section since I had some leakage from the outside section.  At this point I pulled out the dividers carefully and scraped the soap off of them and back into the mold.  Next I poured the white down the line where the divider had been.  I was hoping that the white would go a little deeper than it did, but it worked.

After getting all of the soap in my mold I used a skewer to do the swirl.  I inserted the skewer all the way to the bottom of the mold and proceeded to do a tight figure eight pattern in each half of the mold.  This gave me the swirl in the soap.  This particular swirl is know among soapers as a Mantra swirl.

The scent of this soap is very mild.  It is fresh with just a hint of citrus.



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