Everyone is doing the rimmed soap! I’ve been a bit intimidated by the process so hadn’t even wanted to try it…until I saw it was part of Amy’s Soap Challenge Club. So I thought why not, signed up and gave it a try. Here is how it went.

This isn’t the most detailed of blog posts; I didn’t get pictures of everything that I had hoped too. To be honest with you, I didn’t think that try #1 would work, so I didn’t take many pictures at all. But it did work! And I am thrilled with the results!

Rimmed Soap Tutorial – 80’s Glam Edition

Rimmed soap is made in two steps. First you make the soap for the rim and then the next day you make the soap for the center.

I made my rim in a cookie sheet – poured to only 1/4″ high. Once the rim was complete, I put it into my round column silicone mold (you can also use PVC pipe) and then made a batch to fill it.

The most important thing about making the first batch for your rim, is that it has to gel. Gelled soap is more bendy and pliable than un-gelled soap. Un-gelled soap will just crumble and break when you try to curve it into the mold.

A cookie sheet works great for creating your rim. You only want your soap to be about 1/4″ in thickness. After making this batch, I think that it could even be a bit thinner. Mine still cracked a bit.

Take your cookie sheet and measure it. You can find out how much soap you’ll need by calculating length x width x height x .4. This will give you how many ounces of soapmaking oils that you will need. I converted my ounces to grams and ended up needing a 495 gram batch of soap. I used mostly olive oil and still did a water discount because of the high amount of olive. Here is what my recipe ended up being:

Rimmed Soap Tallow Recipe

Coconut Oil – 80 grams
Tallow – 50 grams
Olive Oil – 200 grams
Sodium Hydroxide – 45 grams
Water – 90 grams
Lavender Essential Oil – 20 grams

I used Mad Oils Mica for this soap! I LOVE the colors that I ended up with.

Peacock Mica
Brazen Hussy Mica
Wicked Mica
Yellow Raincoat Mica

I brought my soap to emulsion…very light trace.

emulsified soap

Then I divided it out and colored each cup.

mad-oils-mica

mad-oils-soap

If you are using a cookie sheet, make sure that you cover it as most cookie sheets are aluminum. I covered mine with plastic wrap. I poured the soap into the mold using a mock-funnel pour.

rimmed-soap

Then I did a spin swirl! A spin swirl is where you literally take your pan of soap, put it on a hard surface and spin it. The force of the spinning swirls the soap. How cool!

rim-soap

Beautiful! I let the soap set up for a few minutes and sprayed with alcohol to prevent ash. I then put it into my oven, on warm, turned the oven off and let it sit overnight. I honestly couldn’t tell if it gelled or not because of the colors. I assume it did.

The next day, I unmolded it and cut it to fit inside of my round column mold. This is the tricky part. It did crack a bit. I used a rolling pin to help curve the soap a little at a time. You have to be gentle and go slow.

IMG_0881

I then made another batch of soap using the same recipe; but made a total of 495 grams.

Coconut Oil – 120 grams
Tallow – 75 grams
Olive Oil – 300 grams
Sodium Hydroxide – 68 grams
Water – 136 grams
Lavender Essential Oil – 20 grams

Brazen Hussy Mica

I poured this into my mold and let it sit overnight to saponify. The next day I unmolded and cut the soap. I did have to rinse the soap to make it pretty and shinny! Beautiful!

soap rim