Mochacchino Butter Sugar Scrub Tutorial

Need an extra boost to wake you up in the morning? This Mochacchino sugar scrub should do the trick. I like to scent mine with a mix of coffee, vanilla, and chocolate fragrance, but the butter already has a delicious scent so you could really just eliminate the added fragrance.

Ingredients:

2 oz Mochacchino butter

2 oz sweet almond oil

1 cup Demerara sugar

1/8 cup ground coffee

25-30 drops of fragrance or essential oil 

Procedure:

1. Weigh out the Mochacchino butter and melt in the microwave.

2. Weigh out the sweet almond oil and add it to the melted butter.

Melted butter and oil

3. Add the sugar and coffee grounds to the melted oils and stir.
4. Add fragrance to the mixture and stir.

Mixing up the sugar and oils

 5. Package it in a pretty container and then rush off to the shower for a nice scrub down!

Pretty and packaged

You may find that this needs more or less liquid oil depending on your taste. I would let the mixture cool to room temp and then modify it if needed.

Let me know if you try it and how it turns out!

Geranium rose bath (oil) melts tutorial

Bath melts are a wonderful way to to add scent and skin nourishing oils to your bath. They are essentially bath oils made up in a solid form. All you have to do is drop 1 or 2 of them into a nice, warm bath and they will melt dispersing the oils and scent into the bath water. The melts pictured below are made from a combination of cocoa butter, shea butter, and sweet almond oil. The are scented with a Geranium Rose essential oil and topped off with some red and iridescent glitter, because sparkles make everything better!

Geranium Rose Bath Melts

A simple recipe to make your own bath melts is given below.

1. Melt 1 part cocoa butter and 1 part shea butter in the microwave.
2. Add to the melted butters 1 part liquid oil.
3. If needed, let the oils cool to below 120 degrees F and then add your fragrance (1-3% for fragrance oils and 1-2% for essential oils).
4. Mix and pour into small molds (about 1 oz mold size is good)
5. Allow to cool and harden either at room temperature or for a faster cooling place in your fridge until solid.

If all these "parts" are confusing, here is an example using oz.
1 oz cocoa butter
1 oz shea butter
1 oz liquid oil (sweet almond, hazelnut, hemp oil, or pretty much any other liquid oil would be fine).
17 (1%)-50 (3%) drops of fragrance

You may want to play with the ratio of hard oils (butters) to liquid oil to find what looks and feels best to you.

Tutorial: Calendula Salve

Calendula (Calendula officinalis) commonly known as pot marigold has antiseptic and anti-inflammatory properties. It has traditionally been used for treating sunburn, cuts, insect bites and stings, acne, soothing sore or inflamed muscles, diaper rashes, and other skin irritations.

Using one of the methods I explained in this previous blog post, prepare some Calendula flower infused oil. I prefer to use Olive oil for this recipe. You may also add Lavender essential oil to this salve to give it a soothing, sedative effect. Lavender is known to relax muscles, calm anxiety and promote sleep. It is also antiseptic and can be used on cleaned cuts and bruises to minimize scarring and relieve skin irritation. Lavender and Calendula really complement each other in a healing salve.

Calendula Flower

© Lessadar | Stock Free Images & Dreamstime Stock Photos

Ingredients:

3.5 oz Calendula flower infused herbal oil
½ oz Beeswax (small pellets will be easiest to work with)
20 drops Lavender essential oil (optional)

Directions:

Melt beeswax in the Calendula infused oil over a double boiler until melted. Beeswax melts at 144 to 147 °F (62 to 64 °C). Remove from the stove. Once the temperature has reached 120 °F, stir in the Lavender essential oil. Pour into clean (sterile preferred) tins or glass jars. Allow to cool thoroughly before using or placing caps on the jars. This salve should last 1-2 years if kept free of water.

Tutorial: How to make infused oils.

Infusing botanicals into vegetable oil is a great way to transfer the properties of flowers, roots, seeds, or leaves into an oil. This oil can then be used directly on the skin as a medicinal oil or to make soap, lotions, salves, balms, or many other bath and body products. Some herbs are great for imparting a color to the oil which can be used to color soap, lotion, etc. There are two methods that are most commonly used to infuse or macerate herbs into vegetable oils. Both methods are quite simple and can be done with items common to most kitchens.

The first method: Traditional Cold Brewing

Step 1: Clean a glass jar  with soap and hot water (I like to spray it with 70% ethanol to sanitize after washing). Allow jar to completely dry.

Cleaning and drying my jar.

Step 2: Fill the jar with loosely packed dry herb. You can use many type of herbs and flowers such as calendula, jewelweed, chamomile, comfrey, arnica, etc.

Jar filled with Calendula petals

Step 3: Pour in a liquid vegetable oil to cover the plant material. I like to use olive oil, but you can use sweet almond oil and many other types. You may want to choose your oil depending on what you plan to make with the infused oil. For a lip balm, sweet almond oil would probably be better than olive oil and for a massage oil you may prefer to infuse into fractionated coconut oil.

Olive oil added to jar so that it is just above the plant material

Step 4: Close the jar, shake, and place in a warm sunny window for at least 3 weeks but you could continue infusing for up to 6 weeks. During the first two weeks, try to shake the jar daily.

Soaking up the sun's rays!

Step 5: Strain out the plant material using either a metal mesh strainer and/or a cheese cloth.

Step 6: Bottle the infused oil and store in a cool dark place. The oils should be good for at least 1 year.

The second method: Quick Hot Brewing

Step 1: Place dry plant material into a crock pot, bain-marie, or a double-boiler. I prefer to use a crock pot as I can set it up and just come back occasionally to check on it. If you are doing this on the stove, you should be sure to stay nearby for safety.

Step 2: Cover plant material with oil of your choice. For this method, since you are adding heat you can even infuse into oils that are solid at room temperature (such as shea butter, coconut oil, mango butter, etc).

Step 3: Heat oils and plant material at about 100-125 degrees Fahrenheit for 1-3 hours. You want to gently heat the oil and not boil it as that could destroy the properties of both the oil and plant material.

Step 4: Strain away plant material as explained above.

Step 5: Store infused oil in a clean jar in a cool, dark place and it should be good to use for about 1 year.

This picture shows some of the other infusions I have made. The Ayurvedic olive oil is an infusion of 4 Indian herbs, the jewelweed infusion was made from the leaves of the plant, and the reddish-pink oil is alkanet root-infused olive oil. I can't wait to try the last one in soap to see how the color comes out!

Other herbal infusions

I look forward to hearing if you try either of these methods and how the oils turn out.

Adding Social Media Icons to your Blog

As you have probably noticed, I am making a lot of upgrades to both my blog and online store. My newest additions are the pretty social media icons you can see to the right. Adding these icons to my blog took a lot of trial and error, looking at the source code for other sites and trying to figure out how to modify it for my site. Well in the end Dylan helped me and I FINALLY got it to work.  Since I found this process so difficult, I thought others might be going through the same struggles as me and perhaps I could save them some time and hassle. These directions are only for Blogger (Blogspot) blogs. So here we go:

Step 1:
Find some social media icons that you like. A simple Google image search for "social media icon png" will bring up a ton of options. Download the ones you decide to use. For my site, I am using a set called "Minimalist" that was designed by Zee Que at designbolts.com. You can get them here for free.

Step 2:
If you have your own website upload your images to your Public_HTML folder. This will allow you to access the icon at www.YOUR_WEBSITE.com/IMAGE_NAME.png. Obviously, you need to change YOUR_WEBSITE to the name of your site and IMAGE_NAME to the name of the image (likely something like Twitter.png or Pinterest.png).

If you do not have your own site to upload the images you can upload them to a place like Flickr where you can get a link the the specific icon image.

Step 3:
Go to your blog and select the layout tab. Then click on the 'Add a Gadget' in the area of the blog that you would like to place your icons. In the popup, select the "HTML/JavaScript add third-party functionality or other code to your blog" gadget.

Step 4:
Give this gadget a title if desired. Then you will have to type in a modification of the code given  below. You will need to add the text highlighted in gray between <a and </a> into the content box. The first example is for Facebook. In the text below, where it says YOUR_USERNAME you will need to change to text to reflect your Facebook name. You will also have to change/modify the link to access your icon image; replacing YOUR_WEBSITE with the name of the site where the image is stored and ICON_NAME to the exact name of the icon.

<a href="http://www.facebook.com/YOUR_USERNAME">
<img width="60/" title="Follow YOUR_USERNAME on Facebook" alt="Follow  YOUR_USERNAME on Facebook" src="http://www.YOUR_WEBSITE.com/ICON_NAME.png"/>
</a>

Here are the examples for Twitter and Pinterest for my site. Now following the directions above, just change where I have Ladybug Soapworks and my website and image name to the appropriate names for your site.

<a href="http://www.twitter.com/#!/LadybugSoapwork">
<img width="60/" title="Follow Ladybug Soapworks on Twitter" alt="Follow Ladybug Soapworks on Twitter" src="http://www.ladybugsoapworks.net/Twitter2.png" />
</a>

<a href="http://pinterest.com/LadybugSoapwork/">
<img width="60/" title="Follow Ladybug Soapworks Pinterest" alt="Follow Ladybug Soapworks Pinterest" src="http://www.ladybugsoapworks.net/Pinterest.png"/>
</a>

 

I hope this tutorial will help you to get your blog looking a little more professional, too!

Cubes of sugary goodness...

I have a bunch of melt and pour soap that has been sitting in my soap lab for quite a while. I had grand plans to make some pretty detailed soap, but alas I much prefer to make cold-process soap.  So this soap has just been waiting for me to get some motivation and make something with it. Finally, today was the day! I was browsing some of the Soap Queen's old blog posts and came across the sugar scrub cube tutorial from Naiad soap arts.  Since I have a ton of fragrance oils that are not used in my soap line, but I just NEEDED to have, I put some of them to use.

The pink cubes are watermelon scented, the yellow is coconut lemongrass, and the green is succulent pear. Dylan came into my soap lab after I was done and wanted to eat them...they do smell and look pretty tasty!


These cubes are quite easy to make. For each color I simply melted 2 oz of clear melt and pour soap. I then added 2 oz of jojoba oil and mixed well. Next I added between 2-4 drops of liquid colorant and about 20 drops of fragrance. The final step is to add 6 oz of regular refined sugar and mix really well and then pour into a mold. I used the square silicone mold from Brambleberry and it worked great. For more detailed instructions check out the blog post I mentioned above.

Check out my salt bar tutorial

Wholesale Supplies Plus recently blogged about Ladybug Soapworks. I provided a salt bar tutorial for them to use on their website. Check it out here. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Salt Bar Tutorial

I was recently asked by Joanna at Product body and The Soap Bar to write up a salt bar tutorial. For the pictures I made a Frankincense and Myrrh scented soap with French green clay. I am really loving how it came out. If you want to check out the tutorial it is now on The Soap Bar blog.

I also came across a blog about my Jasmine salt bars on E-tailer's Mall...thanks for checking out my store! :)

Cut Salt Bars and Tutorial

Here are the long awaited pictures of the cut jasmine salt bars. The salts were dyed with FD&C red # 33, which turned the whole bar a pink color.


The recipe:
82.5% Coconut oil
12.5% Avocado oil
5% Castor oil
Medium Size Sea Salt equal to the weight of oils
15% Super Fat
20% water discount

1. Preheated the oven to 170*F.
2. Mix in the salt at soap trace and add any color or fragrance.
3. Either pour the soap into a wooden loaf mold or (better) into 4-5 oz sized individual molds.
4. Put into the oven and turned the oven off.
5. Soap that will need to be sliced should be removed from the oven after 1.5 hours and cut (otherwise they will be too hard to cut and will just crumble). If you make your soap in a divided or individual mold, then you can leave it in the oven overnight..

Chocolate Truffle Sugar Scrub Tutorial

I made a wonderful scrub last weekend using the recipe below that was posted on the natural beauty workshop blog. I added a brown sugar fragrance oil instead of what the recipe recommends. This scrub is to die for. I made it on Saturday and it is just about used up. I think I will need to make more this weekend. I will probably modify the recipe a bit so there is not as much separation between the oils and sugar. I think I will either increase the sugar amount or decrease the amount of oils. I have some bad red marks on my body from eczema and this scrub has done wonders for them in a week. I found it best to shower and then scrub my body with this and then just quickly rinse off the sugar to leave behind the oils on my skin. It was really nice and I had no need for lotion. Plus the oils don't seem to make my pants too tight like lotion does. ;)

Scrub a dub dub

The Chocolate Truffle Sugar Scrub
This scrub makes about two 4 ounce jars.

Ingredients:
3/4 cup Demerara Sugar
2 ounces Hazelnut Oil
1 ounce Castor Oil
1/2 ounce Cocoa Butter
1/2 teaspoon Cocoa Powder (unsweetened)
1 teaspoon Vitamin E (T-50)
1/4 teaspoon Grapefruit Seed Extract

Directions
Gently melt the Cocoa Butter in a double boiler or in very short bursts in the microwave. Be careful not to overheat your butter. Meanwhile, pour the Demerara Sugar into a mixing bowl. Stir in Hazelnut Oil, Castor Oil, Vitamin E, and Grapefruit Seed Extract. Add Cocoa Powder and mix well. Now add you final ingredient, the melted Cocoa Butter. Stir the mixture well to make sure that the butter is distributed evenly.

Fragrance
This scrub will have a slight natural aroma of Cocoa Butter while you are preparing it. However, this aroma will dissipate once the mixture has cooled. If you prefer a scented scrub you may add a 1 teaspoon of synthetic Fragrance Oil such as Dark Chocolate Supreme or Raspberry Truffles. Another option is to add several drops of Bourbon Vanilla Absolute or Vanilla Oleoresin. Although they are not chocolate, these natural Vanilla aromas would compliment this scrub nicely.


The recipe in the post was taken from http://www.naturalbeautyworkshop.com.
Thanks