Of turtles & Seashells

So, I do not know about you, but I've been thinking for months what soap should I give away at Christmas. Well, the consideration was over when the packet of Soap Stamps 4 You arrived with my new stamps. One or two of you probably have your own stamps at home and may facing some issues how to get crisp results. It seems that especially the 3d stamps not quite easy for some of you. I love stamping soaps so I thought that some of you would be happy about a few tips.

So Attention: really long blog article and first time in English (I’m not a native speaker, me and google tried best, but please excuse mistakes.)

Now that the stamps were there, all I needed was an idea of which soap to decorate. Since I already work on Ombre Layer and Gradient Ombre technique, I quickly got an idea how the soap should look like. The idea of a blue gradient ombre would not let me go. I love blue soap and so the 2d turtles were stamped on a blue gradient ombre soap - I think this was a quite successful colour gradient.

The result is this soap according to my Minidrops recipe, which worked perfectly. The recipe is now well tried out, ideal for swirls that need a long liquid soap batter, as is the case with a gradient ombre. The linked Minidops-Article is in german, so I wrote an english version of the Recipe (See the picture above). If Safflower oil high oleic is not available for you, it is possible to replace it by Olive Oil. I tested that for many times, and the properties of the soap batter are nearly the same, but the basic colour of the soap is a bit darker. For stamping I sprayed the stamps with alcohol very well (it need to be really wet), set it on the soap and gave one or two slight knocks with a rubber hammer. The soap were pretty soft at this timepoint but it worked absolutely fine. Even with the fragrance, I just went safely and decided on the FO " White Tea " from Manske (Germany). For the gradient I proceeded to Soap Sandra's tutorial (it's in german, but maybe the pictures could be helpful) and it worked great, as you can see. Since I had misjudged a bit about splitting up the soap batter for the colours, there was still too much dark blue left in the end. I did not want to throw away, so I put the rest of the bright blue into the dark blue soap batter as in the pot swirl to pour the strips.

After the soap was cut, my joy was huge, and since the soap was super easy to stamp I was really happy. The rimmed soap is again a Soap Dough Rim – you find the Recipe HERE. Rimmed soaps are always beautiful. I recently made some blue/white soap dough, so I was able to make this soap for the beautiful 3d turtle stamp. It is perfumed with the FO " Freesia " by Behawe, also a well behaving FO.

I also like the seashell soap very well. As I looked at the stamps, I thought of my collection of shells from Croatia and Sylt and, for some reason, the colour Caput Mortuum (Vita von Waldehoe) came to my mind. I think that was just the right choice for the beautiful 3d shells. I tested some of my recipes for stamping properties. The long seashell soap was easy to stamp, but the round shell was best. And so I decided to provide you my recipe "Lavendelherz" in english (see pictures below "Seasehll round"). It seems like this is THE recipe for 3d stamps. I noticed that the soap recipe was really amenable for stamping before, but I never expected such a fabulous result. After cutting, the pieces were allowed to dry for about one hour and then "stamping time". This soap is also scented with the particularly fresh and good behaving FO "White Tea" from Manske.

Well, I wouldn't be Bettie if I didn't have something to test for. Therefor this still simple but pretty Guest Soaps were made. A few month ago I made a "Lots of Pink Clay" soap - see HERE. This soap contains 50 g pink clay on a 500 g fat amount. This soap was amazingly well to stamp, with both a normal soap stamp and a rubberstamp. Because of that, I looked up all my notes from the last two years and have been searching for the the note: "Very good to stamp". The majority of recipes that I found with this note contained any form of clay. I have suspected for a long time that natural colourants like clay, support the stampabilities of the soap. To test my hypothesis I made some soaps with different natural colourants. In this article only the shells are shown. I will post more soaps with natural colourants from time to time, to show you the results - this is like a long-term experiment. I used my standard stamp test recipe "B.Stamped" because it is not only quick and easy to stamp, but makes also just wonderful foaming soap. It's important to note that this recipe produces much tougher soap than the Minidrops or Sea Shell recipe, and therefor you need some more power to stamp.

In addition, it has again been shown that when processing palm oil, a sufficient amount of water up to 30% should be used. Although I have made some test soaps via RTCP- Method and HTCP-Method and the soap batter with palm oil work better at high temperatures. The saponification occurred rapidly for some soaps since the FO I used thinkens the soap batter really quick and heat the soap also. Because of that some soaps were forced to gel phase. As a natural colorant I used Ghassoul and slate flour greenish-lightgrey (Vita von Waldehoe). These soaps were easy to stamp. Furthermore removing the stamp from the soap was uncomlicated, there were no broken edges or something like that. If Sunflower Oil High Oleic is not available for you, it can be replaced by Olive Oil. Sunflower HO contains the same or even more Oleic Acid than Olive Oil. In Germany it's available in almost every supermarket, since we use it also for cooking frequently.

... I can wholeheartedly recommend a rubberhammer, and not just for stamping a hard soap, but also in soft or fresh unmolded soap - yes – you read correctly. With soft soap, of course, you have to knock a little more cautiously, true, but the result, unlike hand stamped, is unbelievable. That probably has some physical reasons that I'm not going to worry about. It is crucial that the stamp penetrate the soap quickly. It is very important to spray the stamp with alcohol (I use Isopropanol) beforehand - it need to be really wet. That helps also to remove the stamp very easy and leave clean and nice edges in the soap. Anyone who does not dare to stamp on the newly formed beautiful soap, can practice with some dough. I have used the commercial Playdough for Kids that you can buy in any craft or stationery store. The consistency is almost similar to the minidrops soap when freshly cut. I took two pictures for that.

The stamp is well sprayed with alcohol, you can see on the wet dough, then set the stamp on the dough and tap with the hammer carefully one or two times. One notices well how the stamp penetrates in the dough, and gets an idea of what it will be like on the real soap.

In addition, I can only recommend to any ambitious stamper: Put an edge piece aside and test your stamp beforehand. You will know exactly if the soap is ready or not. If your test piece has ruptured or broken parts after stamping, leave the soap for a few more hours and possibly test again with another piece of this soap you don’t like as much. This is better than trying to stamp all the pieces at once which could ruin the most - it would be a pity about the beautiful soap.

In the Internet you will find an incredible number of tips for stamping: One puts a plastic foil on the soap, the next freezes it. For one, the hammer works better, for the other not. The really important thing is: Try it. Make a batch of test soaps in single molds maybe, and try to find your own strategy. In doing so you will avoid great disappointment if you have made a beautiful soap and then ruined it by stamping at the wrong time point or in the wrong manner.

Viktors stamps work best for me, if I spray them with isopropanol before and then using a rubber hammer. At least with my soaps, this method has now more than paid off. I have stamped all the soaps shown in this article in this way.

I think turtles are really cute and I also love seashells. In general I like everything that has to do with the sea and my mother too. Therefore, imy mother’s bathroom (and also mine) is decorated with lots of marine things like anchors and lighthouses - and everything else that goes with it. Now it will be these wonderful turtles and seashell soaps that will be given away for Christmas and I hope my mates and family will like the cute Turtle and Seashell collection.

So there is a lot to pack and therefore I say goodbye to this point and say, as always: Until the next soap.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment on the german version of this article.