Musical Lemon Lavender Soap

Musical Lemon Lavender

This soap was inspired by a candle from Yankee Candle.  I stopped in this summer and fell in love with the Lavender and Lemon candle.  However I wanted to keep the soap all natural.  I also have friends that are musicians and so they are the inspiration for the top of the soap.

Music Notes cut out of soap

Placing the music notes

I started out by making a 1 pound batch of cold process soap colored with activated charcoal.  This soap I left unscented.  It took more charcoal than I thought it would to color this soap.  I then poured it is a silicone 9 X 9  cake pan that I got for soap.  I put  it in the oven for just a minute to make sure that it gelled because I knew I was going to use it the same day.  After about 5 minutes in an oven pre-heating to 170* I put the mold in the freezer to speed cooling.  After about 2 hours in the freezer I pulled it out of the mold.  I cut the soap into three strips of 9 in X 3 in X 1/2 in.  From there I cut the strips into smaller strips about 3/4 in X 3 in.  Next I cut out little music notes out of the strips.  I set these aside until the base soap was done.

Top is all full

 For the base soap I started by measuring out my water and lye and making my lye water.  Next I measured out all of my oils.  I have found that when I am not working with milk I prefer to not melt my oils, but to let the lye do it for me.  In my personal opinion this leads to the soap being a little more silky.  Of course, this is just my personal opinion.  The oils I used meant that my base soap was fairly light in color.  I poured off equal amounts of soap, about 2 1/2 cups in 2 different containers.  I colored one with turmeric oil for yellow (although in hind sight I should have gone darker) and the other I colored with alkanet oil for a purple.  Next I added zinc oxide mixed with a little oil to the remainder of the soap for white.  Zinc oxide has the added advantage of being very good for your skin.

As you can see placement of the
notes is random

After I got all of my soap ready, I started by filling my sample mold using just a little yellow and purple in with the white.  After I had the mold filled, I took a wooden skewer and did a figure 8 swirl through each cavity.  This give a hint of swirl to even my samples which I like.  I am a very detail oriented person.  You can ask anyone in my family and they would gladly confirm that fact.  ;)

Unfortunately the yellow doesn't show 

The music note are level with the
top of the soap bar

I frequently start with my samples so that I don't run out of colors for the samples or have too much of a color for my design.  After my samples were finished I started filling my mold.  I started with a nice layer of white soap, followed by a layer of the remainder of the yellow.  Next I added another layer of white followed by the remainder of my purple.  I stopped at this point and used a spoon to swirl the soap from the top to the bottom of the mold.  This gave me a nice swirl throughout.  Next I layered the remainder of the white on the top, smoothing it out for a nice canvas for all of the music notes.


Once I got all of the little music note placed I used a wooden skewer to nudge each of the embeds down into the soap.  I did not insulate this soap and it does not appear to have gelled.

I sliced the soap after 24 hours.  It behaved very nicely.  The embeds did not splinter or fall out when I cut the bars.  Although inside the bars the purple is more purple, in the samples it is still almost blue.  We'll see what happens after it has had some time to cure.  Well, have a wonderful thanksgiving everyone!




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