In order to do something different each week of the year, I have a list of challenges to undertake...

Sunday 3 March 2013

Week 9 - Make Bathroom Toiletries

The original plan had been to make soap. I researched the ingredients and method and decided that the 'melt down bits of old soap and squash into a new bar' was a bit of a cop out; however the 'make it from scratch with a number of quite potent ingredients' was a bit unnerving.

Another strike against making soap is that there doesn't seem to be a way of sensibly scaling down the proportions (without having loads of bits of ingredients left over) such that you are not producing soap on an industrial scale. Fine if you find it's terrific fun and a great success, but I tend to be a bit more cautious than that and want to start small.

The alternative to soap making, was to make BATH BOMBS - those fragrant cricket ball sized powdery balls that you drop into your bath and they go mad fizzin' round the place and making the bathwater all soft and lovely.

I found the method at the soap kitchen website, and was delighted to see the I already had most of what I needed. Although I bake and sew, I'm not much of a one for 'home made gifts', but thought that I might be onto something here for Christmas presents, and so I was keen to get stuck in.

I mixed bicarb of soda and citric acid, then added red and yellow food colouring (hoping to make orange) and then blended in some orange extract; spritzed with a little water and pushed the mixture into a couple of little dipping pot moulds before leaving them to 'cure'.

The first one collapsed a bit when I got it out of the mould later, and so I squashed it into a ball shape instead, and that's the one I had in the bath this evening - oodles of fizzing and a wonderful orange aroma; really lovely!



Er - a downside, however, was the colour. Now I do not know why this is, but the bath bombs ended up a sort of green, with yellow/orange patches. In fact, if you bring to mind the image of a really mouldy orange, you've just about got it.

If I were to make these as presents - and there is certainly mileage in this idea - I would have to seriously sort the colour thing out!


So week 9 challenge: done!

8 comments:

  1. I applaud your efforts, I really do, but Mrs Still In The Last Century wants to ask a (sort of) serious question.

    As I cannot walk past the open door of 'Lush' without feeling physically sick from the smell and I am probably the only person in the current universe who has never bought/received/used a bath bomb (and I'm more than happy for that state to continue) I'd like to know what on earth is bicarb, citric acid and food colouring doing to your skin?

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    1. Although I suspect that the concentration of bath ball stuff to the up-to-the-overflow amount of water in the bath is pretty low in any case, that is a very good question, and I will check this out further.

      I think that the bicarb is a water softener, though - we have hard as nails water here, and bath salts have always made the water feel 'slippy'. Not sure about the citric acid. I used orange extract (for food) and food colourings, so those should be up to snuff at least!

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  2. we have hard as nails water here
    {sniggering} and we have lovely soft stuff direct from Crummock Water. Of course, there's probably more sheep pee in ours than you have to contend with :}

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    1. ...or would want to contend with!! ;-)

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  3. Something I've thought about too. My only problem is I buy a book on the subject and don't get to use it till later. The book I have is "The Handmade Soap Book" by Melinda Cross and she is based in Carmarthenshire so ingredients should be available in UK. Good luck with experimenting.

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    1. You're right, Sue, the ingredients are pretty much High St items, albeit in small quantities (which makes them expensive). The catch 22 is that they are also readily available on the internet in larger quantites, but bicarb & citric acid are both quite heavy so postage & packing costs push the cost up...

      Further research needed!

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  4. I was scared off by the ingredients in soap, too, and decided I'd need industrial quantities of bicarb to make bath bombs, so Lush are still on my wishlist for any birthday/Christmas - so please, please keep up the experiments!

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    1. Still working on it, Sis.... :-)

      And the good news is that I have found some sandalwood essence tucked away to use next time, so the next lot won't make you smell like an orange sponge cake.

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