I knew going into this challenge that I wanted to make soap, it’s my main craft. I just had to figure out the execution. Since dollar stores now sell all kinds of food, I figured I could find some oil. After wandering around I found a kitschy theme too (after all, you can’t do a dollar store challenge without some kitsch, right? If only I could have incorporated the tiki torch, but I was at the $10 limit!).
Supplies:
6-pk of Blue Squeezy Juice
(2) Bottles of Vegetable Oil
Cinnamon Sugar
Kosher Salt
Gladware type containers
Hawaiian style plastic platter
Blue soap dish
Umbrella drink sticks
Plastic Craft sticks
From my stash:
Lye
Blue pigment (you’ll see why)
Glue gun/glue
The "idea"~
The juice acts as both colorant and fragrance, acting as the water portion of my soap recipe. The sugar in the juice makes a harder bar, and the Kosher salt adds lots of creamy lather. I usually use sea salt in my salt bars, but hey, gotta go with what you can get at the dollar store, right? Same with the oil, it is a soybean/sunflower blend, and I don’t use soybean oil usually to soap but ya gotta make some sacrifices!
The wanna-be gladware containers are the soap molds. The salt is actually going to be important to this recipe since I’m not using coconut or palm or another oil that is traditionally used for getting a nice hard bar.
Recipe:
32 ounces Soybean/Sunflower Oil
12 ounces Squeezy Juice
4 ounces lye
2/3 cup Kosher Salt, added at trace
Measured Juice, Lye, and Oil in their respective containers.
Added lye to juice...oops, it turned orange! Miscalculation, I guess it's not going to work as blue colorant now! Blue pigment from my stash to the rescue. Will add that after trace.
Added lye and juice mixture to oil and began to blend.
Molded and topped with cinnamon/sugar "sand" once it had set up a little
Now for decorations! The craft sticks, with some hot glue, got turned into a little Adirondack chair. Everything arranged with Hawaiian kitchiness and little umbrellas. Now if only I could craft a mini Corona…
*Note—it’s usually not considered wise to use a bottle of blended oils to make soap since you don’t know the exact proportion to figure out the correct amount of lye to use (each oil has a different sapoification value, the amount of lye it takes to turn it into soap). This can be dangerous in case your soap is lye heavy. However, I did different calculations on what the proportions of oil were, including an all soybean or all sunflower soap just to compare. The range of values, at 7% lye discount were 4.0 ounces to 4.06 ounces. Really not a significant amount at all for this particular batch! In a really large batch it might make more of a difference.
