Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I am so thrilled with what I created today. This is my second experiment in soap making, a peppermint goatsmilk bar soap with a sculpted eyeball effect. Check it out, and if you’d like to see the whole process of making it, click through and view the whole entry.

I started by making a plug. I cut an ovalized-rectangle out of a 3/4″ thick plywood board and covered it with a thin layer of Sculpey and baked it (just to save on clay, since it’s more expensive than scrap wood). Then I built up the eyeball and other details as a second stage, roughed out and essentially done, but not completely cleaned up.

After baking that I used my Dremel to touch it up a little, smoothing out tooling marks and seams between pieces of Sculpey that I’d added and not perfectly blended into the foundation. I also painted it just to give it one more level of smoothness. I then built a little cardboard box to create the mold inside. I used a bit more Sculpey to join the soap plug to the bottom of the box and I also made a little signature just for fun. The box and plug were then both oiled with release agent (essentially a food safe Vaseline).

The two halves of liquid silicone are mixed 50-50, which I did in a plastic container using Caitlin’s kitchen scale so as to be precise. I thoroughly mixed it (last time I didn’t do that enough and I ended up with some uncured sections) and slowly poured it into the box from a good height so as to reduce air bubbles. That was then left to sit overnight as this formulation of silicone takes a good five hours to fully cure.

The next day I peeled off the box (I was worried that the cardboard might stick — not that it would have really mattered) and then popped out the plug. It came out easily, but the uncured clay stuck a bit so I washed it out uneventfully. There were some air bubbles around the signature, but none on the bar of soap (I’m not really sure why). This is one of the cleanest molds I’ve made, and the brick-like shape makes it really easy to work with.

I didn’t take any pictures of making the soap base, but because I’m using a melt-and-pour base rather than messing with lye and all that to make soap from scratch, the process is really simple. I cut up a bunch of 1″ cubes of goat milk soap base and melted it in a glass measuring pitcher in the microwave. I then added some blue-back mica (powdered clay I think), some peppermint essential oil, and a bunch of raspberry seeds as an exfoliant and used a whisk to mix it all up. This had the consistency of a thick fruit smoothy, so it was a simple matter to pour it into the mold. I ended up having made more than I needed, so I poured the excess into a silicone ice cube tray.

About an hour later I popped the stars out of the ice cube tray and the detail was absolutely perfect, although the bottom 3/16″ or so was foamy, almost like an Aero chocolate bar in consistency, because of the air bubbles. This part of the soap was very soap and could be compressed easily by hand, which is what I did. The definition and sharpness was perfect.

Then I bent the silicone mold for the bar so as to separate the edges, and then turned it over to let the soap drop out as I flexed it a bit. I was extremely pleased with how much detail had been captured. It also had the same issues with the layer of foam, but it compressed easily and since I’d given myself plenty of thickness to work with it ended up being a good thing because it let me compress and smooth out the flat side of the soap into something with a more organic form that matched the face better.

Finally, here are three more close-up pictures of the eyeball soap:

There are currently a set of candies curing in our kitchen — pink-tinted white chocolate lollipops with a marshmallow and cotton candy flavoring — that I’ll post about in the next day or two, and I’ve also got a couple of nice molds on the go for candles.