Saturday, March 5, 2011

Parsley for the fresh green of spring.

The clay plaque is by my little one and it hangs in the
kitchen. I completely fell for the measuring cups I saw
in the MOMA store, especially the colours. I like green.
My body is screaming for spring but unfortunately it is a long way off.  The true season to start to be in the garden isn't really till late May up here in the north.  But I have started to plan my vegetable allotment garden and this weekend I will sow the first plant.  I have been making pots from newspaper.  I did that last year as well and it worked pretty well.  I have to admit that I also just like the way it looks all green, sustainable and kinda cool.

I finally made my green soap.  I have been meaning to use Parsley for ages.  The reason is that Parsley has a lot of Chlorophyll and therefore it should give a good green colour.  Chlorophyll, of course, is what makes Parsley such a good breath freshener after eating garlic.  It's also a great antiseptic, by the way, as well as chock full of vitamins and minerals.  Apparently chlorophyl is available as a colouring substance, but I haven't seen it anywhere myself.  I just dried some parsley that I've had growing in a pot.  I use it in cooking too, not just as garnish, I like it and actually eat it.  Dried Parsley is not oil soluble.  I tried to put some fresh Parsley into oil and even used a stick blender to try to disperse it into the oil.  That did not work at all.  So this I time I crumbled dried Parsley and used 2 tsp which I blended with the EO's into a recipe of 500 g. (about a pound) of oil.  I could have made tea and probably should have, but I wanted to have a part of the soap without colour to play with it.  I'm getting a bit bored with one colour soaps.  But the white part got pretty stiff so I ended up with white lumps in the soap rather than swirls of any kind.  Oh, well!

The recipe I used is a little bit different than last time, but that is only because I ran out of some ingredients.

36% Olive oil
30% Coconut oil
25% Rape seed oil
5% Castor oil
4% Cocoa butter

Water 33%
5% superfat.

I  used a combination of Rosemary, Peppermint and Ginger essential oils for fragrance and the result is a fresh and green scent that almost clears the sinuses.

The soap is very, very soft.  I cut it after a week, but that was difficult.  I don't know if that is the rapeseed oil or not.  I probably should only use 15% of that.  It produces soft soap.  But the colour is still a pretty green although it doesn't really look very green in the photo.  But I have a feeling that it may turn to olive with time.  I'll add that info to this post at a later stage.

4 comments:

  1. Hi Ambra,

    very pretty soap :)

    I know of one company in Europe (I figure you prefer buying in Europe) who sells liquid Chlorophyll http://www.newdirectionsuk.com/shop/search.php?k=chlorophyll&s.x=33&s.y=6

    Other companies located in Europe as well sell Chlorophyll in tablet form.

    Warm regards,
    Regina

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  2. Hi Ambra, Gorgeous green!! I continue to experiment with green and so far the only one I really like in my soaps is green clay... but i have more experiments to try! Let us know how the parsley soap holds the colour! About cutting - I find that any bar with Cocoa Butter needs to be cut same day out of the mould or it gets too hard for me! xo Jen

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  3. Hi Ambra - I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I'm hosting the Best Handmade Soap Blog Awards and your blog has been nominated in two categories: Best Information about CP/HP Soap and Best Overall Content. Voting can be found here: http://bit.ly/bestsoapblogpoll Best wishes!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thank you Regina for that link.
    jen, I see already that it is starting go go a bit more olive, but it's still green. The tiny flecks of parsley have turned brown. I thi-nk I'll have to try chlorophyll.
    Amy, how fun! I look forward to seing the results.

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